Lying there on the boulder, with the still-roaring falls nearby in my ears, my memories of past-months, lived exploring caverns deep beneath the ground, began to muddle. I realized what must have happened. I dimly recalled being pummeled by water, praying for help, and an eventual quiet acceptance that I would soon be meeting Jesus.
The memories of being battered and bruised seemed real enough. But the parts about waking up in a cave, something about lizard-people(??), a great underground city, and weird tumbling scenery seemed like they were out of another world. Then, out of the quiet finality of unconsciousness, a general sense of well-being had flooded through me and I remembered the strength flowing back into my inert-body and the water releasing, and flowing back into me. I felt lifted as if by a buoy to the surface, then above it as if by a hand. I’d come out of the water to the roaring laughter of My Waterfall, and even as I had been puking and coughing up water, I had found myself laughing right along with her. With it, I meant. Then, finding myself laying on the remainder of the broken ledge, I had automatically retrieved my shoes and socks, and clambered back up here to recover on my familiar yet somehow-new warm rock, like the half-drowned animal that I was!
“Thank you Jesus” I eventually whispered, once I had finally caught my breath. But even if Jesus himself had lifted me out of the water, I was sure that I was in for a spanking when I got home!
Mama had told me not to go near the creek, and the justifications I had made in my head weren’t going to carry near as much water as my clothes currently were! Tho the warm rock was helping. My shirt was drying out, but my jean shorts were another thing. I hated lying, all the more cause I knew I was good at it! That only left one option; hiding it. But how would I manage that? And was it really much better than lying?
I can get into my room through the back. At this point I shouldn’t drip too much, and then I can head to the shower and warm up. If Mama catches us and asks why I came in the back, I can just say I didn’t want to get the living room carpet wet, since the back door is a bit closer to the bathroom anyway.
In retrospect, I’m not sure why I was trying to hide that I was wet, given that me and my friends had already gotten soaked playing in the water that had been running down the steps by the house. Almost certainly it was because I’d felt guilty. I already had experienced plenty of feelings of guilt in my life. Whether from the occasional successful lie (which I invariably turned myself in for: thanks again guilt!) or ultimately because I knew Jesus had suffered horribly and died because of me, as payment for my sins. As young as I was, this was already embedded deep in my psyche.
I was only nine, but I had been studying the bible and learning theology from my Dad’s bookshelf. I loved my Jesus so much for it, but any time I did something wrong, the guilt over having personally hurt him plagued me. It was the real reason I was such an honest and obedient kid. Sure, kids were supposed to obey “because it was the right thing to do”, at least that’s what my parents always said, but I knew that every time I did, it hurt Jesus a little more. It’s just what I had learned to feel.
So hiding my disobedience in this situation was pretty out of character. Not only that, I didn’t typically have internal dialogues with myself. Sometimes I’d say things to myself out-loud, like Mama did, but most of the time my internal thoughts were more like memories happening in real-time within my imagination. Sensations interpreted as wordless-stories, moving through me and over me. Making them into words was usually extra work, which I often didn’t do. On some level, based on my interactions with my few friends (mostly from church, who seemed to like my weirdnesses), and the kids at the day-camps I occasionally got taken to during the summer, I realized I was a bit odd, even for a homeschooled kid.
But who needs to be normal? I thought, as I stretched and struggled back into my still mostly wet but slightly warmer clothes. As long as I can seem like it when I need to, I’d rather be weird! Like the Margaret Murray and Charles Wallace. Maybe I’ll be a time traveler when I grow up!
Ok, that was some kind of a weird thought, even for me, but whatever. I cut up from the seep-glen on the secondary, less-direct route back home: a path that cut through a twelve-foot wide fringe of trees, and up onto the one-lane gravel track that flanked the woods, then my neighbor’s yard, then my backyard. I climbed over the low spot where the honeysuckle had weighed-down our back fence, and then descended through the upper two thirds of our yard along the board privacy fence our neighbors had put in that spring, and got to the final obstacle.
I dropped over the stone retaining wall and into the leaf-filled gap that separated our stone-and-timber back-porch from the encroaching hillside. There was about a three-foot gap between the two walls; the retaining wall and the wall that surrounded the back porch. Us kids loved to use it as a “secret passage” not only because it stayed so cool in the summer, shaded as it was by the large oak tree just over the neighbor’s fence, but also because it was just an amazing, if slightly musty, kid-sized space. Tho wearing wet clothes now, it felt truly cold!
I went through the screen, down the length of the damp earthen floor of the back porch, past Mama’s fancy (working) new (used) laundry machines and past the cat litter-box. I quietly opened my back door and was confronted by Copy, our big tom-cat, who had been about to go through the cat-door out to the porch. He gave me a growl and a hiss briefly, which seemed strange, and then rubbed against my legs which was similarly strange! He was usually aloof unless he was bringing home dead animals to show us his affection, or clawing the furniture brazenly in front of my mother.
I was in my room now, and it felt like a warm relief. I paused by the back door to listen, and I felt like I could hear every little thing in the house. I had always had good hearing. Maybe it was just that, combined with being scared at having almost died, but now I felt like I could imagine myself moving through each of the rooms and hearing the way those rooms felt and who was where. My baby-brother was asleep in the crib a few steps from me, so it was quieter in the house than usual, and I barely had to listen past the thankfully-shut hallway door to hear that my mom was on the long-corded dining-room phone with her best friend, and feeding the other kids.
I slunk into the bathroom, shucked out of my wet clothes, threw them in the old steel wash-tub my baby brother got baths in, and got into our tiled, mildewy shower-stall. I started it on extremely-low pressure, knowing I only had a few minutes of warm water thanks to our water heater being filled with hard-water lime, that hadn’t been cleaned in at least two years, and leaned back against the one clean wall that didn’t have black and brown fuzz erupting from between the tiles.
My mom wasn’t a very good housekeeper, with home-schooling me and my middle brother, a baby who was still nursing. Between us, and the two other kids from church who she watched while their single-mom was at work, she mostly did ok. Me and my brother didn’t really understand how poor we were, being kids. We did have a three acre yard, with incredible overgrown landscaping bushes and trees which we loved to play hide and seek in. With it being the 80s, we also had free range of the woods and creek, plus the length of the gravel road that turned around between the end of our yard and our neighbor’s driveway. Great to cruise on our bikes. We even sometimes snuck into the town dump, which was across the creek at the bottom of the hill just before you got to the old train-station which served as City Hall.
It didn’t matter at all to us that the floors were horribly cluttered, any flat surfaces were covered in books and junk mail, or even that there were holes in the kitchen ceiling that constantly leaked rainwater, and soft-spots in the floor that leaked cold air. I leaned against the shower wall, thinking about how lucky I was that I' was living in this amazing place, with my amazing parents who loved me so much. And so many books and CDs on the shelves in my parent’s room!
My dad ran a radio station at the small college he had graduated from the year I had been born. He’d taken us away to grad-school and come back with a communications grad-degree and a ton of books, both his favorite sci-fi and fantasy, and also the books he’d gotten regularly at the Inter-Varsity christian book-store.
He had read us The Hobbit about a year before, and I had just recently started my own second-reading of The Lord of the Rings, since I’d just finished rereading The Horse and His Boy in between. I had added Tolkien’s masterpiece to my other current projects: a reread of the Book of Job (currently my favorite book of the Bible), Watership Down, A Swiftly Tilting Planet, The Finale of Miller’s “Singer Trilogy” box set, and was about to finish Heinlein’s Citizen of the Galaxy.
Ahh… thinking about all my stories, and standing under the warm flow felt like heaven as long as I kept my eyes closed. I felt so alive, and like I could feel every droplet of water as it rained down on me, and leaning against the wall I started to imagine…
Rauros roared in my ears, as I stood on the white-pebbled shores of the lake. Boromir had died nobly in the end, laid to rest by his comrades in a boat with all his marvelous gear, carried gently by the current to the brink of his his ancestral lands, over the mighty falls. What a noble ending, forever looked-for and remembered, in the impenetrable Thundering Mist.
I grew a bit light-headed in the steam and near-blisstiring water, and wondered what it would be like if someone found… a cave. A cave under and behind Rauros. A cave with a stair of slick wet stone, leading down and leading up.
Above, I knew, it lead to the Secret Seat. Carved by unknown hands so subtly into the peak of Tol Brandir that none knew of it, and below… below and beneath it, into the dripping dark it led… Flanked by a little stream it led… it led……
The bathroom door opened without warning and Mama entered, waving away the steam that filled the bathroom at this point.
“Uhhhg! How can you stand it this hot and muggy in here! Sorry, I can’t wait anymore! Are you ok in there?” she asked, sitting down to pee.
“Yes Mama, I’m fine!” I said, rolling my eyes. “Just got cold in the water outside and wanted to enjoy the hot water while it lasts.”
“Well it’s bad for the wallpaper; you should at least crack a window! It’s the middle of summer!”
“Yes Mama,” I said, despite pangs of guilt that I’d never thought to do it. She washed her hands and cracked the window herself. “Oh, Frankie and Jessie’s mom came and took them by the way” she said, and she left abruptly, to deal with my baby brother who I could hear beginning to scream himself awake in his crib.
At least he’d gotten a nap today, and would hopefully not scream all afternoon! He was only one and a half and clearly hated sleep. Changing his diapers was a pain since he screamed and kicked when he was cranky, whichwas often. I did it sometimes anyway tho, to help when Mama was struggling. The water abruptly chilled to below body-temperature, and I quickly shut it off and got out. Toweled off, warm and pink, and heard my mom take the baby into the living room.
I ran quickly to my room and got dressed in a new light weight Tshirt and jean shorts. I didn’t like how little everything was on my lately. Everyone told me I was “shooting up” and I was strangely proud of how tall I was getting, but Mama was short and everyone said I was going to be taller than her in the next year or two, which felt somehow wrong to me. I didn’t want to grow up!
I put a CD of Beethoven’s 7th Symphony into the boombox which was affordable but which Daddy had probably spent too much money on, so we could listen to his radio-station and CD’s he brought home to go to sleep to.
I opened up Fellowship of the Ring again, determined to get through the boring walking-sequences between Rivendell and Moria today. I climbed up to my top-bunk and opened the top of the curtains which covered the still-warm window that acted like a wall-notch leading down to my brother’s lower bunk. We passed stuff between us through it all the time when we were supposed to be sleeping, but now I jammed a pillow into the crack, and propped my book against it in the in the afternoon sunlight.
I was in the hardest part of the Trilogy. These particular chapters did a good job portraying the vast sense of scale the landscape was supposed to have, but the characters didn’t really do much. “If it wasn’t for the rest of the books, who would ever have read past all the boring descriptions of rolling hills and mountains for hour after hour?” I asked my favorite stuffed-animal friend, Tender Heart carebear and felt him shrugging in my mind.
“Yeah, I don’t know either, but Mama always says, sometimes you have to get through the boring parts to get to the good-stuff!” Moria was coming up, I knew. And somehow, in the back of my mind, I knew that reading it this time was going to be different.