COVID, Black Riders, the Beckoning Finger of Despair

Chapter 4: A Shortcut to Mushrooms

Weather Report

This week and last, Alex, the kids, and I had COVID. A beloved community leader and colleague lost his beautiful 10-year-old daughter to sepsis. I had a dream about having a late-term miscarriage three nights in a row. A tadpole I’ve been keeping since last July grew arms and legs and ate its tail. Israel has killed over 27,000 people in Gaza.

Those are some things that are happening when I sit down to write about Frodo, Sam, and Pippin making their way through Farmer Maggot’s fields to the Bucklebury Ferry.

Bamfurlong

We’re in Chapter 4. It’s a friendly one. Frodo, Sam, and Pippin awake from their dreamless slumber to find a bright morning and good food and drink left for them by the elves. They’re making their way to Crickhollow. Frodo worries about taking his sweet and unknowing companions with him into peril, and Sam doubles down on his commitment to stick by his side.

“He was lying in a bower made by a living tree with branches laced and drooping to the ground; his bed was of fern and grass, deep and soft and strangely fragrant. The sun was shining through the fluttering leaves, which were still green upon the green. He jumped up and went out.” pg 112

The sun is shining, the air is clear, and a Black Rider—a servant of Sauron—is hot on their trail. They stay off the road to avoid being spotted, and bushwhack through hedges and ditches and tangled trees. Despite the threat of capture, they sing and keep their spirits high.

They find themselves in the fields of a familiar hobbit named Farmer Maggot (love it) of Bamfurlong, who’d given young Frodo Baggins a beating many years ago for stealing mushrooms. But that’s long in the past, and today Farmer Maggot welcomes them in, eager to tell them about a menacing stranger on horseback who’d been by earlier offering gold in exchanges for information about Baggins. 

Clip clop, clip clop.

Farmer Maggot is unflappable. Salt of the earth. A hobbit I’d like on my side. When this rider showed up—cloaked, hooded, hissing, queer—Maggot says he stood-ground and told him to get gone and never return. The Farmer and his Queenly Farmer Wife pour Frodo and his friends mugs of good ale and feed them a generous farmer’s supper before Maggot takes them by wagon to the Bucklebury Ferry. 

Clip clop, clop clop.

Merry, who’d gone ahead to Crickhollow to get the house set up, shows up on horseback just as they arrive at the ferry. As they say goodbye, Maggot hands Frodo a parting gift, compliments of his wife—a large basket of fresh mushrooms.

If He Makes It

On Day 4 of Quarantine Lucia and I play on the shore of the ice cold Hungry River behind our house, collecting pretty things to weave through the Fairy Gate we made with kudzu root to hang above the path. Mommy, it’s so beautiful here! This is our home! She’s kicking sand and stomping in the water with her rain boots on. She looks over her shoulder at me and smiles with her mouth wide open. She’s so funny with all her teeth missing.

Pull on the gold dangly earring and say, “Please, Good Fairies, May we Enter Your Forest”

Later she tells me I’m a veterinarian and she’s my daughter and apprentice. We have a clinic that saves animals. She finds three—a bunny, a duckling, and a little owl—who’ve been separated from their families in a winter storm. She brings them into our clinic for treatment and asks me to bring her towels to warm them up. “The duckling might not make it”, she says. “I’m really worried.” In real life she’s had to go to the emergency room twice this winter because her blood oxygen levels got so low.

About once a week she tells me she doesn’t want to die. “I just got a call that the duckling’s mother and father were found dead,” she says. She twists her face into worried. “He’ll have to live with me now. If he makes it.”

Clip clop, clip clop.

Clop clop

Clouds Roll In, Clouds Roll Out

Isn’t it so absolutely deranged that the Virus of Our Time can make your brains feel like Hot Cheeto dust and drop you like a waterslide into a sludge pit of despair and self-loathing?

I’m on Day 10 of heavy COVID symptoms. Last week Alex leaves work to pick the girls up early from school for an appointment at the passport office, but I forget their birth certificates so the very patient woman behind the counter tells us we can try back during the drop-in time slot next Saturday. Later I try to drive to Harris Teeter but end up in the parking lot of the Public Library. The next morning I turn the coffee grinder on without a receptacle to catch the coffee. I take a picture to text to Alex and type “What the fuck is wrong with me?” but knock over a travel mug of milk before I hit send. I light a dishtowel on fire. I sit down and try to write about the hobbits on their way to Crickhollow and the only words that came out are variations on, “You’re the stupidest most worthless person in the world.” That night the whole household’s feeling a little rotten so I rally and make Galbi-tang, but stick my fingertips in the pot of simmering beef soup to try to wash the tallow off of them. I take out my shame whip and give myself ten lashes. I lay in bed with my hoodie on and death grip my phone, looking at Hillary Clinton’s stupid fucking hot pink Instagram post about Margot Robbie and Greta Gerwig with her stupid fucking #HilaryBarbie hashtag and I think about all the women giving birth in Gaza with no clean water and limbs being amputated with no anesthesia and all those fathers and grandfathers holding their dead babies and I start shaking and crying with rage. Yes, I know it’s normal and appropriate to be filled with rage at things that warrant it, but Hillary Clinton and white women doing the same shit Hillary Clinton and white women have always been doing doesn’t usually send me spiraling. Alex sticks a swab up my nose and walks out. I tell him I’m confused because I’d been feeling so resilient and clear and grounded and focused but suddenly I’m just a slug wriggling down a drainage pipe.

Clip clop, clip clop.

Clop clop.

“Babe", Alex says from the doorway. “You have COVID.”

Black Riders

When I was a bartender I developed bar rot on my fingers and then eczema that spread up past my elbows and into my armpit. It’d burn and itch so bad at night I couldn’t sleep. During the day I worked on a farm slaughtering chickens and rabbits, then get cleaned up and drive 40 minutes into Asheville where lemon juice and lime juice and tequila and simple syrup would dribble into my red and swollen and angry hands as I chitchatted with my bar customers. I figured out that if I ran scalding hot water over my open wounds I’d experience a full-body euphoria that would start as a quiver in my calves and work its way up my spine and down to my pinky toes until the top of my head split open and melted into an empty, forever expanse of nothing.

I’d pay for it later. Black Riders everywhere.

Or when your heart’s been broken and you know you shouldn’t but you pour yourself another drink and listen to Daniel Johnston over and over and over and roll on the floor and cry and stare at your puffy, snot-covered face in the bathroom mirror and you cry and cry and cry and cry until you’ve handed every little last bit of you over to that hungry pit of darkness.

It felt like this.

If you want to get a real LotR fan riled up, tell them that you think Frodo was kind of a pussy and didn’t really do anything. I remember that was the takeaway for most of the kids at my high school, along with a hyper-fixation on the possibility of Frodo and Sam being “gay for each other”—real critical movie discourse that would pave the way for “that’s so Brokeback” a couple years later. Anyway, it’s no small thing to keep the Ring off your finger. Black Riders beckon.

I’m getting ahead of the story a little bit. In Chapter 4, Frodo hasn’t put the Ring on yet, so he hasn’t tasted that fleeting but delicious moment when you surrender to the long and beckoning finger of despair.

Clip clop, clip clop.

Good friends help keep you here in the Land of the Living.