By Hardscrabble Farmer - April 14, 2024

On Tuesday night I got a call that my daughter was in the ER at a hospital in NYC. She’s in her final semester at college there and had been transported by ambulance after fainting in her dorm. I immediately packed a few things and headed out on the next train due to arrive at midnight.

When I arrived and finally found her she’d already been given an IV and several bags of Ringer’s solution for her dehydration- turns out she’d come down with pneumonia- and was waiting for me to arrive in pretty good spirits, all things considered. I sat with her and while she rested I read to her- Charlotte’s Web because it was always her favorite as a child and I thought it might put her in a good place.

I described the ER to my friend on the phone the next day as akin to the waiting room in the movie Beetlejuice. Every hallway was lined with gurneys, each one with someone sleeping or waiting for their turn, a few of them looking much closer to death than recovery, a pervasive hopelessness permeated the air as we waited for her to be assigned to a room. That finally happened at 2:30- she’d been in the hospital for about 10 hours at that point- and when they moved her I went along and saw her safely to a real bed where we waited for the doctor to make rounds a few hours later. At some point I hunkered down on the floor with my head resting on my overnight bag and caught an hour or two of sleep.

The doctor finally came in around 9am and arranged to have her discharged to my care since she had stabilized enough to travel and after going over the treatment and prognosis we finally exited this particular purgatory around noon and made it home by 9:30 that night, again by train.

I thought a great deal about the stark contrasts between NYC and where we live now, the smells, the sounds, the visuals of an urban landscape in early spring and what the farm was like this morning when I woke up in my own bed, having gone to sleep the night before to the sounds of the peepers just recently emerged from their Winter’s sleep.

There, in the city, I was a stranger in my own country. Except for her doctor and the nurses I didn’t hear much English spoken during my visit but rather a never ending mélange of tongues that never stopped their endless babble. The cost of everything was shocking to me even though I spent very little and ate only once while waiting for the train to depart. What struck me more than the pervasive presence of alien peoples was the overwhelming sadness in the faces, not only of those in the hospital, but on the street.

No one seemed happy except for . . .

[SNIP]

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