Guest Post by Hardscrabble Farmer
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 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, surrounded by the corpses of abandoned shopping carts with sapling growing up through their frames. Trash was as ubiquitous as fallen leaves 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.
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Best wishes for the recovery of the both of you.
Glad she’s OK.
Happy your daughter’s fine, HsF. Must’ve been a long train trip into the city worrying about her.
Very well written and thought-provoking piece, as always.
Glad she’s ok.
Why is she in NYC again?
All the excitement of big city living?
First off,glad to hear your daughter is doing well and out of the city.
As for the city,only one I really hit is Boston,as I grew up in that region and tis a cow town as far as a city is concerned feel OK in it.I also am just going to a concert and thus am with many like minded/at moment happy people so works out OK.
I felt though the same way you describe in NYC among the canyons of buildings ect.,was a strange experience and was in town for two nights of the WHO at Madison Square.
This was when I was 17 and the year was 1979,seems not much has changed!
HSF…glad everyone is ok, for sure. Your sentiments grabbed me down deep..being in and out of those “other worlds” over the last few decades while trucking…now safe at home with the cows, grass, and timber…and family, in these Ozark Hills….
Shared a conversation with a real quiet guy named AJ at a fish fry in the Ozarks yesterday. That wasn’t YOU was it? Regardless, you picked a great place to set down.
Sorry I was not there! Nothing beats a good fish fry! Been here nearly 68 years.
I would maybe be exaggerating if I said God’s permanent address was in the Ozarks, but I am pretty sure this is where He comes on vacation.
🙂
Yo, James-
I’m glad you didn’t decide to see The WHO in Cincinnati instead;
a dozen people were stampeded & crushed to death when they finally opened the doors to the concert venue.
Yup,was a sad day in music history,band was not told till after the show.
I at last minute missed Great White at the Station,very bad day in rock history.
Naomi Wolf could have written this.
Glad your kid survived allopathy and NYC.
I’m glad your daughter will be fine. Only one word fits the cities anymore: despair. Thankfully, your farm has its own word: hope. The best to you and yours.
Best wishes for your daughter. Cities are a profoundly unnatural environment. People need a minimum amount of space, and some connection with nature in order to have harmony. The big problem with our culture is that it is based on materialism, and not on living in harmony with our world and each other.
People become like pigs in a confinement. It is disgusting.
Glad she is OK….that is a great image of you reading Charlotte’s Web….that would make me feel better! If you moved to the country 5 or more years ago and now go into a big city….NYC is terrible but any big city is bad now…….it shocks the mind to see the changes. I used to work in NYC, take the subway daily for my commute, go through Grand Central etc…..It was great…..now its worse than the old NYC of the late 1970’s and early 1980s……a total shithole filled with foreigners who just want what you have…..your money, your property, your homes and your life. No thanks……Get out now while you can, though I think its far too late……collapse this summer most likely so they don’t have to have an election they lose in Nov.
Happy to here. Things are going well. It’s why I left the shit hole of Chicago in 1979 and never looked back. Here is an awesome interview of Naomi Wolf by Tucker.
I am very glad your daughter is back home and on the mend. She is fortunate to have you as a Dad
On another note, I’ve never seen the Beetlejuice movie, but I’ve been in that waiting room before, too.
My thoughts and prayers go out to your daughter, you, and your family.
Thank you for the post.
Glad she is recovering. Yours is the story of a real man doing what real men do, which is sorely lacking all too often today. Yesterday I was in Shitcago and there were two news stories I heard several times of parents leaving little children alone while they went on vacations. Selfishness raising to levels of pure evil.
Construction and destruction everywhere the same as you note from NYC. Crowds of idiots waiting to charge their electric stupidmobiles in several parking lots we passed. Probably a fourth of the cars doing 90 mph in 60 mph zones cutting each other off and making insane maneuvers just to be first to the exit where everyone catches up to them as all they did was get to a red light first.
It began to thin out a bit passing Oakbrook, more after Naperville and Aurora, Batavia, and finally IL 47 and Sugar Grove where it all becomes farmland pretty much to Iowa. A guy told me years ago, “there is no life east of 47.”
Happy to hear everything turned out ok.
What you describe as the city, is very common in cities everywhere. These 15 minute Cities, are an endless poverty row crisscrossed by out of reach opulence. Soulless and dilapidated while being peppered by “Gentrified” locales with indifference and no reason at all. Perfunctory zombies shuffle about their pre-ordained day, with an invisible path that while making no sense to an outsider, is completely predictable to the other walking dead. The only excitement is the wondering of where the sirens of first responders will go. Anger and a me first attitude, hangs in the air like putrid BO. Cities are being advertised as being a beacon of hope, a place to find help and refuge and even understanding with the occasional “safe” injection site. These “safe fifteen minute” cities…. are just never ending misery factories.
https://lawandcrime.com/crime/to-do-this-to-an-elderly-woman-boy-16-shoves-grandmother-about-to-attend-sunday-service-down-church-steps-before-grabbing-her-purse-stealing-her-car-cops-say/
.
Only for the astute, FEDS need not to reply.
What do you really hear?
It’s in your fucking face.
Sounds like he mumbles at the end, very suspicious.
Nixon says “I’m not a crook”
Sounds like Donald Trump to me, think about the scene, ex presidents, don’t forget to vote and what’s with the dye pack?
I commented something about people needing to buy baseball bats and stop putting up with stores being robbed and people being assaulted and YouTube put me in time-out.
Pro tip: Get you daughter out of the city. Is is a place of debauchery, despair and ruination. That’s all.
We raised good children. Honorable, responsible, hardworking, fearless. We trust her and the kind of decisions she makes and understands situational awareness better than most grown men. I think back to when I had enlisted and how neither of my parents ever let on how much of a mistake they thought I’d made. One of the best things they ever did for me, was to let me make my own decisions and live with the consequences, good and bad.
When our daughter decided after two years of working in childcare to pursue a degree in education so she might find opportunities not afforded to someone with only a homeschool experience, I fell in line, 100%. Her experience will dictate where she lands, not mine. If I hadn’t spent time in cities I would probably not be where I am today.
That said, she is never out of our thoughts no matter where she is.
And many thanks for all the good wishes.
Glad she is fairing well.
More glad to read your prose again.
TBP suffers in the absence of your essays.
Hope your book is progressing well.
Please write us all again when you can…
Sincerely, RatC
“let me make my own decisions and live with the consequences”
I respect your trust and faith in your daughter and don’t doubt your wisdom in raising her, but she is not a man and cities are very dangerous places.. jus’ sayin’ and this is all I’ll say.
Well said. Education is an honorable field that has been taken over by the Marxists in order to destroy the country. It needs good decent people to return it to being about educating and not indoctrination.
Glad for good outcome. Her Pop is good thinker and we will need children of good thinkers in the years to come. This line has some Walden Pond vibes to it. Great. ” 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”. In school long age we were read a post collapse story. The man walked along ” the God Roads ” and tried to understand who had built the ruins. That visual stuck with me all these years.
Wiki.
By the Waters of Babylon” is a post-apocalyptic short story by American writer Stephen Vincent Benét, first published July 31, 1937.
Set in a future following the destruction of industrial civilization, the story is narrated by a young man named John[4] who is the son of a priest. The priests of John’s people (the Hill People) are inquisitive people associated with the divine. They are the only ones who can handle metal collected from the homes (called the “Dead Places”) of long-dead people whom they believe to be gods. The plot follows John’s self-assigned mission to get to the Place of the Gods. His father allows him to go on a spiritual journey, not realizing John is going to this forbidden place.
As Morphius says to Neo in The Matrix about pre-collapse 21st century , ” We marveled at our own magnificence .”
Keep writing for posterity.
I enjoyed this fine piece, Hardscrabble! Your stuff is always interesting, insightful and a reminder of a better way of life, that was once the rule in America rather than the exception.
It brought to mind the words written by Chris Hedges:
“It’s better to be an outcast, a stranger in one’s own country, than an outcast from one’s self. It is better to see what is about to befall us and to resist, than to retreat into the fantasies embraced by a nation of the blind.”
Most of all, I’m glad Your daughter is doing well and good and You were able to get her back quickly to the familiar safety and comfort of home.
That CH quote is the essence of Huxley’s protagonist John The Savage , in Brave New World, as he challenges the bland utopian ” order ” maintained by Grand Inquisitor.
Great column! Loved the Charlotte’s web part. Also “mélange”. I can’t hear that word without thinking of “goop mélange” – a 70’s reference to the Odd Couple. You’ve done a great job of establishing a perfect place to raise your undoubtedly fine family. I don’t know if I’ve ever said I’m envious, but it’s probably come through. It undoubtedly started by you marrying right.
Quick hospital story: A buddy’s dad was in the hospital for a few weeks. He had dementia but was still a feisty old guy who could probably lift a small ox. He told my buddy “you gotta get me out of here! This probably costing me HUNDREDS of dollars!”
I laughed at that, hundreds.
If I haven’t said it before it bears repeating, marrying well is the single most important thing you can in your adult life. I am a very fortunate man to have done so.
Happy ending!
Dr. Twofer highly suggests the gal goes back with a case of horse paste.
Yes, very glad she is ok, and has survived NYC. West Central NH is truly a beautiful place (well, except for Claremont), and your farm is a beacon of treasure and hope in that area. Glad I didn’t sell my little slice of heaven up there when I moved away and still get to visit. Hope to get up there a few times this year and will be sure to stop by and visit.
Let me know when you plan to visit if possible – it would be great to see you too!
Doc
I will indeed.
Very well described! Will it be a divorce of urban and rural populace, like, two foreign countries? Division with a bang or with a whimper?
Thanks HF,
You reminded me in a rather tormenting way, the reasons that I left, and the sadness that I feel for the friends I left behind. I was born and raised in that cesspool called The Big Apple. I had a good childhood in a middle-class neighborhood in Queens, and I lived there for half a century. Despite a loving family and a nice neighborhood, I did see things here and there that hardened my heart even as a child. When I was about 10 years old, I discovered a dead body in a parked car near my home. Dependent lividity had set in, creating purple splotches visible on his arm as it hung out the window; his facial pallor was a grayish color. He apparently overdosed the night before. I very rarely think about it, but your missive caused me to remember it once again, but I’m not quite sure why. That hardness of heart that I just referred to is the cancer that continues to eat away at the City.
I joined the local volunteer ambulance corps at 17 which is a bit ironic since the City has a municipal ambulance service. The quality of the service was so bad that local communities had to create their own. In retrospect, I did it to keep alive the humanity that I had inside. Eventually, I became a paramedic and wound up working for that same municipal ambulance service. I managed to serve 12 years, primarily in the South Bronx because I had an internal duty to help people. In that time I became burned out, realizing that most people don’t really want to be helped. I was shot at 7 times on that job. Still, I know that I touched peoples lives, however. Little things like holding hands with a dying little old lady going for her last ride; her family not interested in going with her kept me in touch with my humanity.
I finally gave up. The crime and the noise, the dirt and the traffic (and the TAXES!) got to me. I moved to the hills of central New Hampshire. I still volunteer with my local rescue squad, but have noticed that I’m appreciated for it here. People smile and wave to people they don’t even know. Instead of multiple locks on their door, people here don’t even know where their house keys are. Some of my neighbors have never locked their doors in their lives! I now realize that it is the big cities that have always been the parts of civilizations that ceased to exist. The Romans, the Greeks, the Egyptians, and all of the others that have collapsed over time – it was the cities that died – and I know why.
Marc,
I’m glad to hear that your daughter is recovering nicely. I truly hope that one of the biggest parts of her education down in that big city is to realize that, eventually, city life leads to the destruction of humanity.
Doc
Thanks for the ride-along….nothing short of the love for a child would get me to go to that chity….I never had any, so that apple can rot on the branch.
Pneumonia? Is that what they are calling it now? At least till we get a little closer to the selection….
Glad she’s doing well, enjoy the time you have with her until she heads out for more
Do they even allow teachers to teach nowadays?
Beautifully expressed.
If your daughter were in College Station, your experience would have been different.
You are a Good Dad.
Hope she’s fully mended by now.
What the fuck is HSF’s daughter doing going to school in NYC? I am lost for words, as that is incomprehensible.
Glad she is ok. But damn, NYC?
Wishing a timely recovery for both of you!
That the “suck “of the city is still embraced by some remains a puzzle to me, though the art and old architecture of these places will remain until the spirit that created it is killed by the stupid.
Good luck, always nice when you get out of a hospital situation these days in one piece.
I feel like the de-urbanization of America is one of the great trends rarely discussed. Most people don’t like living in high density cities. If you consider that as a unifying theme among suburbanites and people living out in the country, we’re the majority now, by a long shot. Chicago, Detroit, Cleveland, St Louis, etc – they’ve all lost huge populations even as the total number of Americans has grown. The newer affluent ‘blue’ cities with all their credentialed urban planning (Seattle, Portland, Denver, Austin, etc) are way less dense, and account for a much smaller percentage of the population, than big American cities of the early to mid 20th century.
NYC is the one unique place holding on (sort of) as a major high density urban core, but even it has been vastly eclipsed by the enormous lower density growth in places like Florida. NYC used to be much larger than all of FL. Now FL has more residents not just than NYC but all of NY.
Big cities are no place for humans. See it in their faces. Stay well and your family too.
Nice recount. Enjoyed reading. I too live close to the earth. A million lives in every square foot.
THIS , is wisdom.
Thanks.
Hardscrabble-
I’ve lived in NYC my entire life; Your prose does a better job describing NYC than I could do.
What you saw, is not really any different today than it was fifty years ago; in many ways, and certain neighborhoods, things are much better than the 1970s.. murder rate is 90percent less, car thefts down 80percent, assaults, rapes etc down similar amounts. I credit Rudy Guiliani for much of the improvement; many people today weren’t living here back then .. they only think of Guiliani as just one of Trump’s guys, not knowing he was the Mayor of NYC.
Today I was at a flea market, talking to a middle aged Hispanic woman, most likely an immigrant from decades ago; she noticed some Chinese people trying to haggle, and let it slip that they weren’t “our new neighbors”, “call them what they are … Illegal immigrants!” Followed by twenty minutes of her ragging on the Democrats, praising Trump, bitching about Biden. I’ve had similar conversations with others whom you wouldn’t expect to be conservatives based on their outward appearance; the truth is that the tide is turning, there are huge numbers of far right wing “people of color” here in New York, but they keep quiet about it. I expect a large turnout for Trump seven months from now.
Very glad to hear your daughter is recovering well…I share your dislike of cities and wouldn’t live in one for any amount of money…
Another well written essay Mr Hardscrabble , glad your daughter is on the mend ,and as someone else here noted she is lucky to have you as a father . Yes , the big cities represent to me a kind of civilizational terminus . Heck, I don’t even get into the proper heart of them but just what is referred to as ” the greater areas ” as in ” the greater Seattle or Tacoma area’s ” and they I’m sure are nothing on the scale of New York City but I still cant handle it for long , get me back over That Narrows Bridge this place is an asylum .
Thanks for a great essay.
Best wishes to both you and your daughter.
(Sometimes – not often – but sometimes I do miss the NYC i knew for a few short years when in my 20s – far too long ago. It’s not what it was then, and it wasn’t even ‘just’ 25 years ago.)
Enjoy your homestead instead!
I went to Pratt for a single year in ’78. It was a great adventure, I’m not gonna lie, but being a starving artist in NYC was nowhere near as romantic as it sounded and Infantry Basic was like a promotion when I decided I’d had enough. Probably a part of the reason my daughter wanted to go to college there. Hopefully experiences like this one will remind her of why I left the city and she follows suit, but hey, you want them to be their own people.
Yup. Off to North Idaho by way of Saskatchewan and Alberta. Stopped in the Northern Peninsula of Michigan to chat with some Finnish farmers. We may have a chance to create a new nation among these western states and provinces.
Thank you for your article HF; God bless you and your daughter.
Aside from those few times changing trains at the station, I’ve only been to NYC once, back in 84, I.went with a few of my college credo visit a classmate who had moved there after graduation and was working in the Commodity exchange at the WTC. He was living rent free in Manhattan, next to the Walcott Astoria in a co op his great Aunt bought in the 40s and retained ownership of after.she retired and moved to FLA. So a nice area, but I couldn’t stand the place. Too crowded, too busy. The only place where the people are more obnoxious is DC, and that’s in a different kind of way.
Wow, perfect description of my home town. I can’t wait to get out of here. The last 12 years have really ruined this place. The medical care here is excellent though and I hope your daughter recovers well.
There are real world consequences for importing millions of non-Americans, cramming them into American cities and then expecting them to act…..American.
Give it a few more years and this is going to look like Da City’s golden days. And when the economic collapse happens, Boy Howdy is it going to be a hellscape, and the grocery trucks won’t be coming in short order after, they’ll be feeding each other, literally.
It will make Port a Prince Haiti of today look like the Paris of the 1890s in comparison.
I suspect that many, if not most..or even all of the “migrants” are going to deeply regret coming to the FUSA, because in the end all the free shit in the world won’t be worth it.
Jews
Glad to hear your daughter is fairing well..at seeing the title of your essay I knew it was you before seeing the author..went by your drive yesterday, almost stopped..have meant to many times..will get to it soon. May you and yours be well.
Blessings.
Read: Next Stop Execution: The Autobiography of Oleg Gordievsky
His description of Moscow society is a description of New York City today. We are a communist country.