Bay Watching

Now that we can safely (if not easily) get Nyel from bed to wheelchair and back again, his choice of activities has expanded somewhat – or at least his choice of where he wants to do them. Yesterday he spent several hours looking out our east windows at the bay which, unpredictably, tugged at my heartstrings more than any of his situation so far.

Partly it was the realization in a totally visual way of how many things we all take for granted day in and day out. Nyel is not a ‘water person’ – doesn’t sail or swim or even walk down the lane to sit on the bench and enjoy looking at the water. But when I asked him where he wanted to sit yesterday, he chose to stay right in the East Room and face the other way from his position in the hospital bed… “to look at the bay.”

I suddenly wondered how my grandfather had been situated in his bed during the months he, too, was bedbound. Bedbound, the first time – not in his final months at age 81, but when he was in his 40s, still in the prime of life. My uncle Edwin, a teenager at the time, years later wrote this remembrance of 1924/1925:

A Final Call for Papa

Ed Espy Horse Seining on the Columbia, 1924

This may sound like a death knell but in a real sense it was the death of hopes, dreams and doubtless at times even of his raison-d’etre as he saw it in his lowest moments. Sometimes when I visited him in his bed he would try to conceal that he had been weeping and I would ignore it unless there was something I could do for him. His condition resulted from two events: a serious accident on the farm and a bit later the onset of flu, pneumonia, and finally an asthma condition that put him in bed for a long time and incapacitated him for any regular work for the rest of his life. When all this occurred he was only in his late forties but he continued to live with his limitations, breaking through wherever he could, until he was nearly eighty-two.

H. A. Espy (“Papa”) circa 1920

Papa first was incapacitated by a very bad accident. During the haying season he was driving his regular team of Empress and Dolly, who were hitched to the double-trees attached to a long rope cable hauling great slings-full of hay by pulley up to the second floor of barn number one. [There were three barns.] Papa was directly behind one of the horses when a single-tree broke and crashed back with great force against his hip-bone. He was confined to bed in great pain for some time and he showed me the frightful black and blue area that must have been eighteen inches up and done the bone area and half way around the leg.

 I don’t know how long he was incapacitated but I often wondered whether the shock of this accident may have weakened his system and made him more susceptible to his later chronic infirmities.

Was Papa able to see the bay from his cot? As he recovered, was he able to sit in a chair for a few hours at a time? And how did my little grandmother cope with three teenagers still at home, without electricity or running water, with wood stoves for heating and cooking? I am sure she had no household help; without Papa to run the dairy farm, they were up against it financially. I hope she had loving and attentive friends (as we do!) to help ease the burdens she must have faced.