Are You Lost In The World Like Me?

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 the 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 one couple I spied waiting outside a Brownstone for their Uber, obviously young and in love. Everyone else was dour, their faces fixed in perpetual grimaces as if they were headed to their own execution. There was an industry all about us; the men unloading trucks filled with produce to restaurants just opening for the day, construction workers setting up scaffolding or carrying bags of tools, the street vendors with their steaming carts loaded with hotdogs or falafels, people in suits rushing to their jobs in the maze of high rises that define midtown Manhattan, homeless men begging for change. Every once in a while I’d notice a patch of ornamental soil where some brave buds emerged in the moist air or a tree just starting to push out the first leaves of the year in the grey and shadowy canyons of the city.

The ride home on the train featured a never ending sprawl of buildings either rising in new construction or returning to the earth in their decrepitude and decay, all of it covered in endless streams of unintelligible graffiti, surrounding by the corpses of abandoned shopping carts with sapling growing up through their frames. Trash was as ubiquitous as fallen leave in the Autumn back home and I thought that this was the detritus of a world entering it’s own Winter, no matter what the calendar indicated.

I chose to sleep in after that whirlwind adventure, to rest in what I consider the most comfortable bed imaginable, not because it is, but because it is my own, and not the cold floor of an inner city hospital. I know that my daughter, resilient and strong, is already well on her way to recovery with a little rest and some good food. I also know that the rest of my Spring will be spent right here in the pastures and fields, in the garden and sheepfold, in the barns and the greenhouse, up in the forest and all along the rock walled borders of our homestead, where there is a certain happiness I cannot fully explain on the countenance of every cow and lamb, every pig and every neighbor I pass who see me in the same way when I look back on them.

I went to the city for a purpose and while I was outwardly resolute, the entire time I felt out of place inside, atomized and apart from the environment even though it was so densely populated with my own kind. There was never any fellow-feeling in the time while I was there and even though my daughter received adequate care it felt perfunctory rather than glad in its dispensation. We weren’t so much human as we were economic units, our personalities submersed into our utility as payers and consumers in everything we did and wherever we were; a train ticket, a menu item, a billing cycle, a tab and a receipt. For lack of a better word we were lost in something so large that we could not transcend it, nor escape it, that is until we finally made our way home, the place we belonged, found at last.