Prospect and Refuge

 "But look at your view!”

That’s what most of our friends and neighbors exclaimed a few years ago, after a microburst uprooted five large spruce trees just beyond our deck. Looking out from our house, they saw a newly unobstructed westerly view of the Bay pocked with small islands and the distant Camden Hills tacking down the horizon. In the prospect those spruce trees once framed, I saw only absence. Of rustle and dapple, of enclosure and embrace. Of birds and squirrels, the seep of sap. Gone, too, the hammock that once swung there, long the ideal place to read, nap or dream. A place with a view but also with a screening canopy of protective branches that created the kind of shelter philosopher Gaston Bachelard claimed was a requisite for reverie.

“Oh, look at your view!” That’s what friends are saying now as they come to visit us for the first time in our Chicago apartment, in what, after 17 years in a house in nearby Evanston, has recently become our new home. Perched on the 21st floor with, interestingly, another due west and largely unobstructed view, though of a different stripe altogether, it is, admittedly, pretty eye-catching. Indeed, from where I write this, I’m looking out to one part of a city just waking up – the near and far buildings, rooftops and steeples of myriad neighborhoods beginning to brighten, cars and buses and yellow taxis starting to stir on the streets below.

Of our friends that come to visit, it's mostly the men, I've noticed, who seem attracted first to our view. No sooner in the door, they’re drawn through and across to the windows like iron shavings to a magnet. Only after getting their bearings – is that the Kennedy Expressway in the distance, the Latin School at the corner? – do they turn their focus on what more intimately surrounds them. Women, on the other hand, generally seem more immediately appreciative of my ongoing efforts to settle in, are more apt to linger, admire a framed print in the foyer or how light generously bathes a nearby wall or how, through an open doorway, a bright kitchen beckons.

Certainly it was no surprise to me that Bob found the view one of the apartment’s most appealing features. I still wonder if it alone might’ve been enough to seal the deal.

Nine years ago, “Just look at this view!” was his initial reaction to our island summer house. Never mind that the yellow and lime green Formica kitchen with Mylar wallpaper was badly in need of renovation. Or that shag carpeting extended into – what were the previous owners thinking? – the bathrooms. Entering a house of shed-roofed contemporary design, he didn’t question the sudden disappearance of our long-held dream of a classic cedar-shingle cottage or snug New England Cape or rambling saltwater farmhouse.

Back then, I didn’t know that what has long attracted me to particular rooms and houses is due in part to what geographer Jay Appleton calls the inherent, ancestrally-linked need we hunter-gatherers still possess for outlook and shelter, prospect and refuge. Our species seems to have evolved by having long ago bunked down in savannah landscapes, home to open vistas and sheltering trees, where, from a safe refuge – a “womb with a view” – our predecessor hominids could spot peril or tonight’s dinner. Ever since, we’ve been genetically and behaviorally scripted.

Somewhat predictably, studies show men are drawn to the domain of hunter while we women put effort into refuge, those spaces too often disparagingly labeled as “domestic.” Or to paraphrase writer John Fowles: the “getting” versus the “got.” Certainly, when considering our potential island house and property, Bob was drawn to its broad expansive prospect and not the snug-and-protective-haven aspects where I initially set my sights. On, for example, the challenges of multiple-windowed walls unlikely to offer alcoves and nooks in which to shelf books or hang art. Or a narrow room’s hostility toward easy furniture placement including a comfortable chair from which to enjoy the enviable prospect that, following one brief circuit of the house’s interior, Bob retreated to the outside deck to more properly and at length ponder.

I, too, loved the view. Many years later, I still do. I’m drawn to the nearly ceaseless changes it daily offers, pulled from my desk or stopped in my tracks as I cross a room. But I also loved the privacy of our house’s location near the end of a quiet road, among the sheltering woods juxtaposed against the expanse of open sea and sky. Where I felt a linkage to my ancestral gatherers, women who, I liked to imagine, returned to their cave homes after squatting beside a stream bed harvesting greens and, tasks done, couldn’t resist picking up whatever was the equivalent of paintbrush or chisel or, as evidenced in certain prehistoric cave paintings, were more simply drawn to pressing their splayed red-ochred palms against cool rock. A claim of ownership or identity maybe. Or, perhaps, our ancient, persistent-through-the-ages urge to create, make of a refuge home.

I also felt a linkage to the backyard tree house of my adolescence. Little more than a cobbled together platform of scrap lumber nailed up among the branches of a scrawny crabapple tree, its view extended the length of the alley into a part of the road and, on the other side, closer in, to the nearby woods bordering a river. But less about vantage point than refuge, the treehouse was where I escaped chores and a crowded house. I hauled up into protected enclosure my inexplicable ache and loneliness on a boring summer afternoon and began to explore the yin and yang of safety and freedom. A refuge that perhaps grew out of the more familiar “huts” along the river’s edge my girlfriends and I made with dried leaf beds, moss pillows, floors of stacked sticks, increasingly mindful, with nascent adolescent stirrings like sap awakened in trees, of the sweaty boys who noisily clattered among the river edge’s reeds in boisterous renditions of “Swamp Fox,” ll requiring, apparently, the loud large-stick smacking of those reeds and young cottonweed saplings trying to grow there.

Okay, okay. I know there’s danger in stereotyping. In over simplifying and painting with so broad a brush. In attributing prospect to men, refuge to women. So many exceptions among the hunter-gatherers I know abound. And certainly among those hut-building girls are now grown women drawn to windows before which they’re content merely to sit and look out or, however they’re armed, are eager to enter the fray. Among swash-buckling boys hacking at trees and flattening reeds with sticks are men who now work to make wherever they live, whatever its prospect, a comfortable and attractive refuge.

Here in our apartment, my focus the past few weeks has been on settling in, making a 21st floor aerie a snug refuge. Surely a place unlikely to prompt a response similar to that of a local lobsterman on his first visit to our island house: “So this is where you drop anchor.” Up here, we’re perhaps more in the terrain of: “where we feather our nest.” And just as Bob has grown more appreciative of and lent a hand in what is where in these rooms, I am increasingly drawn to our new views. In which, just now, a man runs to catch his bus, and a woman, at the light change, leads her young day care charges across the street. Further out, the flow of truck traffic is picking up on the expressway. And further out still, more planes taking off from O’Hare dot the horizon. A view in which, just yesterday, three raucous crows clearly linked to my boisterous, eagle-and-fox rousting buddies back on the island went after one of the peregrine falcons that, less nobly perhaps than ospreys plucking fish from the Bay, soar through a cityscape’s highrise canyons, nabbing pigeons from ledges and sills.

A prospect in which, though secure at my desk, flanked by familiar photo-and-book lined shelves, I will not always be able to spot where peril lies but have begun to recognize as home.