Into The West

We live between The Two Towers.

Disclaimer: We don't live in Middle Earth. And the towers aren't really towers, they are chimneys. They are structures that are taller than they are wide, built to take advantage of their height, at one time venting hot flue gases or smoke to the outside atmosphere. To me, they are towers.

The chimneys are remnants of days gone by. One is at the mostly-derelict Tilbury Cement Plant, formerly the Olympic Portland Cement Company. The plant is now quiet except for the constant squawks from the swarms of resident seagulls and the occasional screech of metal from dismantling equipment. The original facility was built in 1913, so the smokestack is a well-known landmark in the area.

The other is a remnant of the sugar beet processing plant. In 1925, the Utah and Idaho Sugar Company (U & I) bought the property and constructed a sugar beet processing plant at the site. The chimney was part of the drying process turning beet juice into sugar. The Oeser Company has operated a pressure wood treating facility on this site since 1942, producing mostly telephone poles. Decades of using creosote and pentachlorophenol (PCP) has led to this 26-acre property becoming an EPA Superfund site.

As readers of The Lord of the Rings know, any pair from the set of five towers in the story could fit the title: the tower of Cirith Ungol, Orthanc, Minas Tirith, Barad-dûr and Minas Morgul. A note at the end of The Fellowship of the Ring and Tolkien's final illustration of the towers gives the pair as Minas Morgul and Orthanc. Tolkien later indicates the two are Orthanc and the Tower of Cirith Ungol, but felt such an identification was misleading due to the opposition between Barad-dûr and Minas Tirith.

In my mind (and many others, I am sure), the two towers are Barad-dûr in Mordor and Orthanc in Isengard.

The wood-treating facility and the toxic waste surrounding it may not be as evil as Barad-dûr, built by Sauron, the Dark Lord of Mordor, but it's close enough. And while the cement plant smokestack was not built during the end of Second Age by the Númenóreans of Gondor, it is a reasonable Orthanc. This means we are located approximately in East Emnet, a wide grassy plain just west of the Falls of Rauros on the river Anduin.

It's not middle earth, and it's not journey's end, but it's home.