Teepee continued

I am not sure whether I will be able to fully describe the overwhelming fear I experienced. From all that I can recall these are two of the most terrifying moments I've been through in my entire life. Neither one is particularly eventful but during both the sensation of fear was palpable. The first is simple but the combination of a climactic moment in a book and the dark teepee came together to scare me out of my five year old mind, and the second was my father yet again including me in something I wouldn't want to be involved in even today.

As I mentioned in the first part of the teepee adventures for my fifth birthday I was given a boxed edition of The Lord of the Rings books by Tolkien. I was reading those and Jack London on my own a year later but in the teepee when we sat around the fire my mom would read Tolkien to me. I am sure this treatment would intensify the experience of any book but at times in my young mind I was half-ready for Urakai and Balrogs to run out of the woods into our camp. To be clear, I knew the difference between fantasy and reality but could find myself becoming very immersed in the story.

The movies do an adequate job of capturing the scene that overwhelmed me, after fighting the creature that guards the entrance to Moria and after opening the door, Gandalf and the party make camp inside the long abandoned dwarven cavern. I forget which Hobbit drops pebbles into the well, maybe Merry or Pippen, but after dropping several stones into the dry well he awakens the orcs that live below. After they camp and discover the fate of the dwarves that had been sent there, they hear drum being played and are attacked.

I distinctly remember sitting by the fire as my mom read this scene to me. As a young boy Gandalf was my favorite character and this scene is expertly written by Tolkien, who can often drag on into his mythology without any apparent purpose, he manages to build the tension gradually and incredibly. Before ever heading to Moria the Fellowship is warned not to use that passage and that it is not safe. After fighting the Watcher in the Water there is a feeling of relaxation as the party escapes into Moria. Then there is the dropping of stones, and later they read the diary of Balin, the dwarf who was sent into Moria in an attempt to reclaim it from the orcs and Balrog. Just as Gandalf reads the final entry, where it is clear Balin died in a terrible fight and drums are mentioned, the party hears the first dim sound of a drum. From then Tolkien builds the tension to a frenzy before the orcs attack, but he manages to maintain the tension even after - as the party tries to escape and Gandalf seemingly sacrifices himself to the Balrog so that Frodo may survive. Like I said, I can remember this stuff!

I remember being so afraid for these imaginary characters and completely enthralled but also simultaneously hoping that somehow I could stop listening to the story. I don't remember if I could fall asleep that night but I was mesmerized by that moment of the book for a very long time.

Later that summer my father started to work at a store several miles away. He would walk or hitch-hike his way down the mountain in order to get to work. At night he would come back with food for dinner and a proud smile. During some of the time in the teepee my dad was the happiest I ever saw him. He was always more at home in nature than the rest of the world, even behind his drum set. Those idyllic moments didn't last long. On his walks he took to exploring the woods and streets around us. One evening he came back with pans but they weren't new. This raised some predictable questions that he gracefully avoided answering, but a couple of days later he asked me to come with him on a walk. That wasn't anything out of the ordinary, aside from reading, running through the woods with a stick, and watching my sister try to crawl there wasn't much to do in the teepee other than walk around the forest.

"I want to show you something buddy," he said and we crossed the stream. Then we walked up the hill to the main road and walked along the shoulder for a mile or so. The road itself was fairly quiet with a house alongside it every couple hundred yards. Eventually he stopped and walked up toward a dilapidated, run-down, white two-story house. We walked up the driveway and he said to be quiet. There wasn't any car in the driveway and it didn't look like anyone had lived there in awhile at least from the outside. Even at my age I could tell my Dad had been there before. He was comfortable and opened the side door that opened into the kitchen. I have no idea what he was thinking bringing me there. Maybe he was lonely, maybe it scared him too, but regardless he brought me into an abandoned house. It wasn't the sort of abandoned house that pervades television, with junkies passed out everywhere and graffiti on the walls, although that would have been terrifying in its own right. Instead it was a fully furnished, mildew smelling, abandoned house with no signs of the occupants having any idea that they would be leaving.

I am not a superstitious person so do not misinterpret this as being a ghost story. All of the belongings to the family, or couple, or person that lived there still remained. I don't put a lot of value into material possessions, but with someone's entire belongings left behind I couldn't help but wonder why no one knew or claimed anything, or took care of the house. My father looked into the refrigerator and some of the drawers to the side of it, everywhere he looked there were clear orange prescription bottles. Whoever had lived there had been very sick or very old. I don't remember if he grabbed anything, I would imagine he had looted what he wanted before bringing me but maybe he was hoping he had missed some painkillers. Toward the front of the house was the living room which was dusty and dark because the blinds were drawn. For whatever reason David wasn't interested in the living room, but we walked through it to the stairs. Upstairs was darker because we were in a windowless hallway, but we went into the master bedroom. It had a four post wooden frame and a queen size bed made with a floral comforter, in front of it was a medium sized television and I remember standing as close to the door as I could while he went through the television cabinet and later went into the master bathroom to look around. I knew we weren't supposed to be there and I knew that places like this weren't really supposed to exist. Families were supposed to take care of things like this after someone died, or moved, or went to the hospital, but here no one did anything. The power was shut-off so this had to have happened awhile ago, and yet no one had been into the house except for my dad and I. I had all of these questions, why wasn't anyone there? Why didn't anyone care? Didn't someone want this house or these things? What had happened here? Why were we here? Could we leave? But I didn't ask anything. I implicitly understood that what we were doing was wrong and that it was best not to mention anything about it. When I stood there at the threshold to someone's abandoned bedroom, where they may have died but had surely once lived, I wanted more than anything to get out of that house. The terrible unfinished reality of it was suffocating. I didn't say anything, I wasn't very good at standing up for myself then. I stood quietly, trying to look brave and waited for my dad to find whatever it was he was looking for. Thankfully he either found what he had wanted or realized how terrified I was and we left. We walked back to the teepee and I pretended we had gone on a normal walk, I didn't mention what had happened to anyone for years. I had no idea about his drug-use then and even through all of the grotesque scenes that he put me through, this one was the most lasting and shocking to me. I think of it differently than when he overdosed, or was drunk and angry, under those influences I could make excuses for him - but on his own to bring me somewhere like that without any consideration for me was a huge mistake. I honestly don't believe my father was being neglectful or careless.. unfortunately, I think this was a misguided attempt at showing me something exciting. His notion that I was special and therefore didn't need the coddling protection afforded to normal children allowed him to thoughtlessly hurt me without any malicious intentions. This one simple misunderstanding of me led to painful, strange drug-fueled discussions of fate, love, and saving the world.

My father's dad was absent most of his childhood, using his job as a shield from his wife's ongoing descent into dementia. I do not think David had any idea what it meant to care for and protect another person, because of this I learned quite early how to protect myself as well as how to care for those who couldn't care for themselves. What is interesting to me about these two different stories is that even then the world of books offered something that was sorely lacking in my minimal experience of the world: clarity and resolution. I never learned why we went to that house. I guess he was looking for more drugs, but really past that I have no idea what happened there or why nothing was fixed. Life is messy like that.

I personally don't have a deep love for neat parenthetical clean books but I loved the safety and logic behind novels. I wasn't versed in literary criticism but I intuitively knew that every word was chosen, every scene crafted with a purpose in mind. This vision and direction was deeply reassuring. In the midst of a chaotic, careless world people were creating beautiful, captivating people, places, and stories that had a reason for everything.