The climb used to seem dangerous to reach the correct tier of the waterfall, the best one for reading, especially reading Tolkien. Safe there from the rest of the world, ready to be absorbed into Tolkien’s world, not the world he lived, the world he created. The world where he lived, I would visit later.
But this was my world in that instant, before I really stepped outside my front door for a dangerous adventure. I still lived my bookish life, my wild life, free on a waterfall, with the Fellowship of the King paperback that I still would not have finished years later as I read it on my first business trip cross-country.
That day on the waterfall I was with friends, in the midst of my beloved university academics. I had not yet known love or the loss of it; I had not yet experienced the unexpected losses that come with growing up. Or the gains. I wasn’t thinking about that. Hadn’t a thought or premonition. I was just a girl on her favorite spot of her favorite waterfall. I had no idea that would be the same spot I’d have my first kiss. I was living in the instant. No thought of times to come, only times of fiction that never were. There in the Shire, with my friends Samwise Gamgee and Frodo Baggins.
***
“Six hours. We have to be back in time for the five o’clock train,” Amy said as we power-walked across the bridge between the train station and downtown Oxford. Once we reached the other side, I led our trio of American girls studying in London, on a Sunday trip. I had an objective, a place I had to go, before I could leave the UK; I had to go to The Eagle and Child. The meeting place of the Inklings. Writers, real writers. True writers. The people who inspired me. The people I needed in my life.
“The Bird and Baby.” Though I don’t remember, there is a chance I flung out my arms as I said this, then reached up to straighten my straw hat. So proper to wear a hat in England, while at home I never think to. I was in a different world, a different shade of myself.
There were many times on the trip that I faltered in my steps, knowing the feet of favorite authors had favored the same floors. My feet hesitated and savored every step, knowing I occupied the same space where better writers than I will ever be, had been before. We sat in a nook by a window and watched the world pass by. Tolkien had been there and watched the world pass by. In a way, because of what he wrote and how it played through my mind, it was like he was still there with me, sitting and watching the world.
***
The moment the plane leaves the ground is my favorite, for a second weightless, then feeling gravity with more gravitas, a different weight, the same force, but in a way that you know you are flying. Over a year had passed since Oxford and it was my next trip on a plane, this time to Texas for business. No longer that carefree girl on the waterfall, no longer that excited university student. Now a woman in the world missing those same friends and old routines, but taken by life beyond their reach. Was this how Bilbo felt back in the Shire? Bracing to step outside his front door again but never finding such an adventure to compare?
I cracked open the paperback, embarrassed to have trouble finding my place, the untouched bookmark having fallen out some time ago. Embarrassed to know I had not read it in so long. Embarrassed to know I had not finished it. Embarrassed to know no one cared but me.
Flight is the highest pursuit of my daydreams. Yet on that plane that day, gravity pulled at me like the recent months of loss and the feeling of more slipping away, fingers not strong enough to pull at what would have to be let go of eventually. A ring that would change, its meaning lost, but not quite yet.
Sick of gravity, sick of flying, sick of loss, sick of holding on, I read and read and read until eyestrain and dim lighting made it impossible. The plane landed. I tucked the paperback away.
***
After he left, I took the ring off. I picked up The Fellowship of the Ring many times over the coming weeks, but I felt no fellowship and no ring, and I put the book down again unopened. No waterfalls, no adventures, no stepping out the front door, no flying.
I wanted to escape into the Shire again, but I couldn’t even open the cover, open the door. I could take no more steps up waterfalls or on floors walked by Tolkien.
***
The book sits always on the top stack of books piled by my bed, and I have reached past it a dozen time for others to take its place. The pages have trapped memories, feelings, and hopes I am afraid to let out. Or afraid that if I open it again, more will creep in.
As I write this, I am afraid to ask what Tolkien would do, because I am just a silly little girl and don’t think in any way I could in fact do as he would. So, instead I ask what would Bilbo do?
After all, he is only quite a little fellow in a wide world, quite like me.
And perhaps a cake or two and a drink of something. Yes, that’s what Bilbo would do.