Most families, when lucky enough to get a place to escape to on weekends, choose something by the water, or in the mountains.

My parents bought a farm.

We grew up in Chicago, on the south side of the city, and it was an urban life. A farm, they felt, would be a true escape from that.

They found the right piece of land 160 miles west of the city, not far from the Mississippi. It was in the northwestern corner of the state, which the glaciers bypassed. The terrain rolls as it does in the gentle hills of New England.

The farm they bought was 204 acres shaped like a bowl. The homesite was at the bottom of it, where it felt protected from the world. On some days, your only contact with the outside was to walk 15 minutes up the winding driveway to the mailbox that sat on the dirt road bordering the outer fields.

Although my parents have owned the farm now for 37 years, not everyone refers to it as the Patinkin place. Many still call it the old Flack place, since the Flacks owned it last, and a few even call it the old Parker place, because that’s who owned it before the Flacks.

Over the last decades, the sprawl of Chicago has continued west, but the farm remains well beyond it, far removed from anything urban. It’s still a true escape.

Which is why it came as such a surprise to hear that the world had intruded here, too.

I’ll talk about why in a moment, but first:

The drive from O’Hare airport is three hours. I still like the way you leave both the city and its stress behind. For the first hour, Chicago’s outskirts continue along Route 90. By the second hour, you’re in true farm country. The crops are mostly feed-corn and alfalfa. The cows are a mix of beef and dairy.

When you hit the town of Elizabeth, population 900 or so, you’re close.

I was about 12 when my parents got the place, and often resisted going there on weekends. I didn’t want to be in the middle of nowhere.

But in time, I found that the middle of nowhere can be a pretty nice place. It’s where people raise families, and livestock, and help each other do both. It was, and is, a true community.

My father was in the scrap-metal business in the city, but ran the place as a working beef farm, and now, in his mid-70s, still does. Early on, the farmer across the way did much of the work. Now, it’s done by the farmer’s son.

My brothers and I worked on the farm as well. It was my first job after college. I spent that summer making square bales of hay and stacking them in the barn.

On summer nights, I’d sometimes go into town to “buzz the gut.” That meant driving up and down Main Street. It was like the movie “American Graffiti,” only on a far smaller level. The town, Hanover, had a population of 1,400. Its Main Street had a cafe and a few shops. That pretty much describes Elizabeth, too.

After Sept. 11, we talked about where the safest retreat might be if it ever came to that. Of course, it was just conversation, but the answer was easy. The farm.

Two weeks ago, I picked up the paper to read that a half-dozen pipe bombs had been placed in mailboxes in the Midwest. I was taken aback to see that one of them was in a mailbox outside the tiny town of Elizabeth, a few miles from the farm.

It was called domestic terrorism, and for two weeks, it led the nation’s news, and mail was stopped, and my parents wondered if other bombs were nearby.

Now that there has been an arrest, perhaps this episode will fade.

But it got me thinking about places in America considered escapes from the world.

And how, in these times, there is perhaps no such place.