David Sedaris' Safe Place and the most dangerous place on earth

Last night in an npr interview with David Sedaris, he was asked what was his memory of a safe place he would like to return to and linger. He mentioned being 17 and raking leaves on a golden October day. The next program I watched was the newest documentary on Pompei.

Archaeological excavations and discoveries at Pompei are ongoing and will continue far into the future because only 1/3 of the area has been excavated so far. In each new archaeological exploration of this place, new technologies reveal things about the people, the place, the time and the volcano. Only hundreds of the bodies of the several thousand inhabitants have been found. Presumably a great many took the hint from the preceding several days of earthquakes and got out of there before the fateful day when the volcano blew its top and sent unimagineably hot and poisonous clouds of pyroclastic flow down upon the cities Pompei and Herculaneum, killing every living thing and buring all of it in two stories of ash.

When I was about 8 or 10, venturing down into the dark, damp, mysterious cellar of my Grandmother's house on 10th Street in Philadelphia to pluck from the dusty and abandoned book case another of the hardbound European Classics, one of the ones I discovered was The Last DAys of Pompei which transfixed me. For years in idle fantasy or in nightmares, I imagined the screaming people fleeing towards the harbor with the scorching heat and suffocating poisonous gas falling on them and knocking them to ground and burying them in ash.

Once, I remember watching my mother pour a kettle of boiling water on an ant colony on our sidewalk in New Jersey, and I felt as though I could hear them screaming from this unimagined catastrophe like the people in Pompei had.

Over the years from my childhood to the present, National Geographic magazine as well as other magazines and television shows dipped back into this popular tragedy as new discoveries were made both about Pompei itsself, or Herculaneum, or about the behavior of volcanoes.

In my 20's, a time so far far away, with my then husband, I walked the streets of Pompei, the same cobbles that those terrified sandal clad feet had trod in their futile attempt to outrun the black scorching breath of Vesuvius.

Volcanoes, these mysterious mountains rooted in the boiling bowels of the earth which periodically like some insane god, explode in rage and kill every living thing and even send hurtling towards the unexpecting in far away places, giant drowning waves to wash away their civilizations.

When Sedaris described his "Safe Place" I instantly thought of mine and it was In A Book! Books were my safest places througout my childhood. They were my boats and my harbors, my tropical weathers and my fragrant spice islands, they were also my Pandora's box, because in them I discovered so many horrible dangers from volcanoes to pirates, to the dark side of human nature. Back in those days, I discoverd that people could be boiled alive by evil rulers, betrayed by their closest loved ones, lost at sea, murdered, injustly improisoned, burned alive at the stake, enslaved, DISEMBOILED BY THE KING!

Everything is in books, including the ever unfolding answers to the mysteries of the world. And even to the mysteries of the mind - the most mysterious place of all.

One of the things I worry about now that I am old - 80, is my mind. I hope I don't lose it the way my eye sight has faded away, and my hearing dimmed; but, while I was sitting on the sofa after I had turned off my laptop with the shows I had been watching, I tried to remember who the author was of the midnight blue hardbound book that was part of the set of Europeqn classics in Grandmom's basement, and was titled The Last Days of Pompei. To my delight, it came to me - out of nowhere, the foggy bottom of my ancient memory - Bulwer-Lytton!

So, what is a memory of your "safe place?"

Happy Trails, wrightj45@yahoo.com