The summer of 1974 was brutally hot in New York and I kept thinking about how nice and icy it must be at the North Pole. And then I though, ¡°Wait a second, why not go?¡± You know, like in cartoons where they hang going to the North Pole on their door knobs and they just take off.
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So I spent a couple of weeks preparing for the trip, getting a hatchet, a huge backpack, maps, knives, sleeping bags, lures and a three month supply of Banic, a versatile high-protein paste that can be made into flat bread, biscuits or cereal.
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Now I had decided to hitch hike and one day I just walked out onto Austin Street, weighing down seventy pounds of gear, and stuck out my thumb.
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? Going North? I asked the driver as I struggled into a station wagon.
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After I got out of New York, most of the rides were trucks until I reached the Hudson Bay and began to hitch in small mail planes. The pilots were usually guys who¡¯d gone to Canada to avoid the draft or else embittered Vietnam vets who never wanted to go home again. Either way they always wanted to show off a few of their stunts. We¡¯d go swooping along the rivers doing loop do loops and baby ###080152. And they¡¯d drop me off at an airstrip. ¡°There¡¯ll be another plane by here couple of weeks; see ya; good luck.¡±
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I never did make it all the way to the geographic pole; it turned out to be a restricted area and no one was allowed to fly in or even over it. I did get within a few miles of the magnetic pole though. So it wasn¡¯t really that disappointing. I entertained myself in the evenings, cooking or smoking, and watching the blazing light of the huge Canadian sunsets as they turned the lake into fire.
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Later I lay on by back, looking up at the Northern lights and imagining there¡¯d been a nuclear holocaust and that I was the only human being left in all of North America and what would I do then.
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And then, when these lights went out, I stretched out on the ground, watching the stars as they turned around and their enormous silent ###080318.
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I finally decided to turn back because of my hatchet. I¡¯d been chopping some wood and the hatchet flew out of my hand on the upswing. And I did what you should never do when this happens: I looked up to see where it had gone and it came down ? fffooo ? just missing my head and I thought, ¡°My God! I could be working around here with a hatchet embedded in my skull and I¡¯m ten miles from the airstrip. And nobody in the whole world knows where I am.¡±
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Daddy Daddy, it was just like you said
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Now that the living outnumber the dead
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Where I come from it¡¯s a long thin thread
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Across an ocean. Down a river of red
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Now that the living outnumber the dead
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Speak my language
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The Geographic North Pole
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| Laurie Anderson |
