Tekst piosenki
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
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
Now I had decided to hitch hike
And one day I just walked out onto Houstin Street
Weighing down seventy pounds of gear
And stuck out my thumb
— Going North? I asked the driver as I struggled into a station wagon
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 low along the rivers doing loop do loops and baby hueys
And they’d drop me off at an airstrip
„There’ll be another plane by here couple of weeks; see ya; good luck
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
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
And then, when these lights went out
I stretched out on the ground
Watching the stars as they turned around
And their enormous silent wheels
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.”
Daddy Daddy, it was just like you said
Now that the living outnumber the dead
Where I come from it’s a long thin thread
Across an ocean. Down a river of red
Now that the living outnumber the dead
Speak my language
Komentarze (0)