Someone Sovereign Somewhere Someday
Chapter 9: At the Sign of the Prancing Pony
25 days ago 40 trillion gallons of water fell on Southern Appalachia and washed away linear time; the lines on the calendar just ink in the river along with the rest of it. I hang the days back up as if on a clothesline, photos on my phone helping piece it back together.
On September 26th, the Hobbits seek shelter from the Old Forest in the House of Tom Bombadill and Goldberry. That night Erin and I have appointments to get spray tans for a long-awaited weekend getaway to Miami; the airbrush kind that contours you to look like you do pilates. At 9 am we text about getting a martini maybe before, maybe after. By 5 pm I call Alex frantic, scared, wondering where the fuck he is and why he’s not home yet. That night all four of us sleep in our full-sized bed, farthest from the big glass windows that face the forest. Our babies curled up like cats at our feet.
On September 27th the Hobbits are delayed by heavy rains and I make pancakes by candlelight in the eye of the storm. In Tom’s house and mine, the fires are lit. At Tom’s, Frodo stands near the open door and watches “the white chalky path turn into a little river of milk and go bubbling away down into the valley” (pg 169). At mine, the roads, the bridges, cars, motorcycles, bikes, our neighbors' houses are in the river. We won’t know it for a few more hours, when the trees stop bending.
On September 28th the Hobbits awake to a new day—“cool, bright, and clean under a washed autumn sky of thin blue” but by noon they’re caught in the fog of the Barrow-downs. Alex clears trees, we shout across the loud water to our neighbors stranded on the other side, someone pulls an AR-15 out of the mud, we roast marshmallows. I stand on the beach where the hopniss used to be just two days before and start to cry until Lucia takes my hand and says, “Come on, Mama, that’s enough for today.” All you can really see is what’s happening right in front of you.
On September 29th it’s 5 am and I’m alone on the side-by-side making my way through a menacing tangle of downed oaks, poplars, locusts, hemlocks to help the neighbors harvest water-logged grapes before they split open on the vine. Caught in my headlight is a woman with hardly any clothes on who I’ve seen in the holler before. There’s a house nearby where people go to use drugs. I slow down to check on her. I offer her a ride to the top of the road. She wasn’t so sure where she was headed anyway, she says, so she takes me up on it. She says she knows me, she asks me how her daughter’s doing, how Hector’s doing, how Bill’s doing, how’s his arm, how’s his heart? I tell her I don’t think we’ve met, I’m just on my way to help some folks out. You sure about that, she says? I’m sure, I say. Now she wants to know who the fuck I am, in that case. She stands up in the seat and leans out, listing to starboard. Who is she? Who am I? Where are we? What the fuck’s going on? Who the fuck’s this bitch, she wants to know. Who the fuck does she even know around here? Two women in the dark with the road falling out from under us. Mud and gravel where the goldenrod’s supposed to go.
That night the Hobbits arrive at last to Bree. There’s a man guarding the gate into town, wondering who they are and what they’re doing there. A lot of queer folk about. Some of them wondering where to buy a bumper sticker that says I Mucked Mud Out of Marshall. Some of them ready to make land grabs. Some of us trying to find silver linings: light pouring out from open doors. Just before the Hurricane I stopped myself from hitting send on a bunch of words that didn’t say anything new, really, about sovereignty, indigeneity, Anarcho-Christianity, witnessing, the writing process. The thing about Chapter 9 and the Bree-landers I’d been thinking about most is this bit about the Bree-landers belonging to no one but themselves. Can you imagine a world like that? A sovereign world? In this one that we’re in, everything, everywhere, can be bought and sold.
On September 29th, Frodo, Pippin, and Sam are drinking and chatting gayly with guests at the Inn. Strider beckons Frodo to sit with him. Pippin, enjoying the attention, starts telling the story of Bilbo’s birthday party. Worrying that he’ll mention the Ring, Strider tells Frodo to do something about it. Frodo gets on the table and, at the urging of the crowd, sings a little song. All eyes are on him. Panic, confusion, not knowing what to do, wanting to disappear, feeling absolutely out of control of your own life—that’s when you belong to no one but the Ring. That’s when, somehow, unaccountably, the Ring ends up on Frodo’s finger.
Yesterday, October 20th, Elrond and Gandalf flooded the River Bruinen1, sending Black Riders downstream so that Frodo, gravely wounded, can ford the river to Rivendell2. Today’s my birthday, October 21st3. Today Frodo rests at the last homely house, making his way back from the wraith-world. For fourteen days and 200 miles, Strider and the Hobbits have journeyed from Weathertop where, on October 6th, Frodo was stabbed in the shoulder by the Witch-king of Angmar with a morgul blade. That day we took the side-by-side to Bat Cave to bring supplies to a friend and couldn’t make sense of what we saw: roads in the Rocky Broad River, homes in the road, mountains of mud. Everywhere, wounds that cannot be wholly cured.
Our daughters’ school got filled with mud, and so I’ve been here in the woods with them, alone, in a shadow-land of my own, belonging to no one and nothing but the passage of time. Summer’s cicada choir has made way for a soundtrack of helicopters, chainsaws, dump trucks, and the thud-thud-thud of displaced birds smashing into the window. Beneath it the beckoning whisper of the Ring. An invitation to the wraith-world, calling. I’ll resist. By October 24th, Frodo is due at the council.
Also called Loudwater.
Also, Viggo Mortenson’s birthday.
Ursula LeGuinn and Kim Kardashian’s too.
Aw beautiful. Happy birthday ❤️