EACH OF THE PAST FOUR years we have spent a weeklong summer vacation in New Hampshire’s Lakes Region, drawing strength from bald eagles; inspiration from towering hemlocks, and serenity from clear waters.

There this summer I saw a poster for the Fresh Air Fund, which mentioned hosting young people from my childhood neck of the woods, the Bronx.

With all I’ve read recently about the summer of 1968, I can tell you that 40 years ago I could have used a Fresh Air Fund experience.

In 1968 my parents had no money to send me anywhere but to the streets, and in that Bronx summer, what you witnessed you never forgot.

Forty years ago, for example, I watched a drunken teenager, a kid with whom I had once sat on the corner and traded comics, pull a gun and shoot a hunk of shoulder out of a man, standing next to me, after the two of them argued over a fair-foul call during a stickball game.

Later, while awaiting trial, the teenager said he would kill me if I testified against him. Then he asked if I wanted to sit and read comic books again. I was 10.

That summer of 1968, if I had been among the New Hampshire lakes, I would have done something similar to what my family has enjoyed over the last four years: floated together on purple tubes in clear coves, watched white puffs of clouds swell above distant mountains and roasted marshmallows over glowing campfire coals.

But instead of enjoying the calls of loons out among the islands, I listened to the final words of a blond boy, whose face all the girls loved, dying on the sidewalk under my bedroom window one night from a wound ripped open by a rival gang member.

I also heard a sound that any parent fears — the dull thump of a speeding car hitting a tiny girl who had dashed out from between parked cars during a downpour. I watched her broken body slide more than 100 feet down the rain-slick road.

In my young life, urban nurture too often meant death. Nature, meanwhile, has symbolized healing, renewal and life.

Our New Hampshire vacations began in 2005 based on the generosity of a family that allowed us to rent a lakefront cabin at the last minute so my daughter could begin her recovery from heart surgery. (Today she is mended and healthy.) What we received would become a version of our own Fresh Air Fund experience.

To us, the two-room cabin, with its small bathroom and kitchen alcove, felt like the Vanderbilt mansion. From a nearby pier of stones, my two youngsters learned to fish for bluegills, sunfish and smallmouth bass. They also taught themselves tennis on the property’s court; their accompanying giggles and howls causing a family of foxes in the surrounding woods to yip in response.

On the cabin’s wooden deck, a place with more daddy long legs than timbers, we watched openings, created by fallen trees, fill in with ferns, hemlock, oak and pine. From granite steps leading down to the lake, we followed meteors slicing through a sky of 10,000 stars.

This past summer, we witnessed the first powerful cold front of the season sweep across the lake with forking bolts of lightning worthy of Zeus, leaving in its wake crisp air and a moonbeam across the water.

The rain that hammered the roof drowned out sound in the cabin and reminded us that most of the world lived in similar thin-roofed structures and how lucky we were to know that we could return to a home in Providence, which was insulated and warm.

The flute-like song of a Swainson’s thrush serenaded us during walks in the forest this summer. The musical notes suggested that land would sometimes call out for people to be worthy of it. The family that has owned this property for generations has guided its management with a plan that has resulted in a sanctuary for plants and animals, as well as a sanctified place for folks passing through it. This is the opposite of the split-second street violence, in the form of the Saturday night special and switchblade, which took away life around me in 1968.

From the clear air and rich shade of the forest, I thought of Deganawidah, who led the formation of the Six Nations Confederacy. Of the future, he said, “Think not forever of yourselves, O chiefs, nor of your own generation. Think of the continuing generations of our families, think of the grandchildren and those yet unborn, whose faces are coming from beneath the ground.”

Faces cannot come up through bloodstained asphalt and concrete. I saw a lifetime of such pavement in the summer of 1968.

Scott Turner is a Providence-based nature writer. His columns appear here each Saturday ( scottturnerster@gmail.com).