Tag: Wilmette

Driven to Risks

Driven to Risks

In 1950s Wilmette, Illinois, children followed rules. Not many ten year olds would steal onto the public works property and play around on the Water Plant roof. The first taboo my sister and I broke was to gather stones and toss them from the roof into the sand below. Next, we dared each other to jump off the 1930s one-story building. The sand provided a warm soft landing and extracted plenty of triumphant giggles from two adventurous little girls.

The Wilmette Water Plant, built into a low cliff on the shores of Lake Michigan, is walled off by an eight-foot cast iron spiked fence. The street level roof sits back far enough from the shore road to avert curiosity. A 1956 building expansion required a construction entrance in the fence leaving the Water Works temporarily defenseless.

We waited until the workers left for the day and again and again sneaked onto the roof to throw ourselves off. Eventually my sister slacked off and I jumped alone. Each leap to the unknown helped transcend the uncertainty of our volatile home life. For years afterwards I dreamed I was flying. Indeed, when I took a lot of psychedelic drugs in my 20s, I relived those jumps. 

In winter, down the street from the Water Works on the same cliff system, the fire department hosed down a steep hill for sledding. Devil-may-care pre-snowboarders sailed down the icy slope standing on cardboard slabs. Eventually I tossed the cardboard and flew downhill toward Lake Michigan standing only on my brown rubber boots. Ambulances, always at the ready, carted off sledders everyday to Evanston Hospital. Never me.

I see no reason to examine why I’m driven to dangerous adventures. Risky jumps and high-flying sledding sparked a fire in me that can’t be extinguished. Perhaps those early escapades instilled self-confidence, or more likely, false invincibility. 

For a few years I spent all my expendable income on scuba diving in the Bahamas. After a short course in diving, and a few failed attempts, I jumped to the unknown once again and flippered around with the fish. I never once thought of the risks. And there are plenty. 

Scuba Diving in the Bahamas

One morning before I left the islands, I suited up and waited for the divemaster to outfit the boat. I casually mentioned to a fellow diver I was leaving that afternoon.

“Are you flying?” asked the divemaster.

Yes I was. 

“Hang up your wetsuit and get out of here! Don’t you know you’ll get the bends if you dive and fly the same day? Your insides could explode in the plane!”

On social media last week, many posts begrudged the efforts to rescue five wealthy souls lost in the Titan submarine. My risky adventures are over now, and were never so grand. But I join adventurers everywhere who cherish the U.S. Coast Guard’s salvation message:

“We don’t put a price on human life. Every person who is missing deserves to be found. That’s the mission, regardless of who you are.”

Heaven or Hell on Suicide Hill

Heaven or Hell on Suicide Hill

Willmette, Illinois 1950sth-4

The only non-Catholics I knew as a child were our babysitters. I always felt sorry for them knowing they were headed straight to hell when they died. In 1956 we rented a four bedroom tudor built into the cliff on Lake Michigan in Wilmette, Illinois, having moved from a month-long stay in a downtown Chicago hotel where we landed after our eviction from Clayton, Missouri. To the east, the view of the lake was obscured by an over-propagated evergreen garden leading a quarter mile down to a rusty wire gate that opened to the beach. My mother hired seventeen-year old twins to watch my sisters and me on the beach so she’d not have to dress for the day and be our lifeguard. And those twins came with boyfriends—who had boats. The teenagers taught me to waterski and by the end of the summer I had my feet sloshing around in the rubber boots of a slalom, skiing far out into the lake, so unmoored at the edge of the world that I often forgot to let go of the tow rope when we we came back to shore for the drop-off. None of them were Catholic and I silently mourned for their souls, asking God why He’d be sending them to hell when they obviously didn’t deserve it. After all, they had shown me where heaven is.

Sitting at the foot of my parents bed one day, I saw a television commercial for the opening of Old Orchard Shopping Center in the next town over.

“Where’s Skokie?” I asked my mother.

“That’s where all the Jews live,” she answered.

At 10 years old, I didn’t know there were Jews alive in the world. I wanted to ask my mother how Jews were living near us and not in Jerusalem where they lived at the time of Jesus. She detested answering my questions and would have accused me of stupidity, a criticism I already couldn’t stand, so I sat back and wondered if Skokie was, in fact, hell.

When winter arrived in Wilmette I could hardly contain myself. The only thing separating me from the sledding hill next door was a mammoth pile of snow huddled around evergreen growth and a chain link fence next to our house. All the girls and all the boys, all ages and all sizes came to slide down Suicide Hill. Firemen hosed it at least once a day turning soft snow into cold hard ice. Traditional sleds, too dangerous for the slippery terrain were cast off—piled up in a Flexible Flyer junkyard off to the side at the top of the mountain. Flat cardboard slabs were the most valuable commodity. I shredded straight down on the cardboard, sitting down at first, then up on my feet. Eventually we, the first snowboarders, traded our cardboard for our boots and slid downhill on our feet.

Girls and boys had equal status on Suicide Hill. There were no rules, no lifeguards, no snowguards no unofficial guards. We all raced down the slope expecting no prize, bumping each other off into snowpiles like soccer balls, soaring like heavenly rockets.  Winter stuck in our noses, but our fevered bodies rollicked in unfastened coats flapping in the wind. Medics and parents came to bandage limbs and scrapes. Ambulances carted broken bones off to Evanston Hospital. Exhaust smoke obscured our vision of cars double parked on Michigan Street where parents yelled Let’s Go!

And when the stars came out we went to No Man’s Land for hot chocolate where I eyed my non-competing competitors. We belonged together, heaven or hell.