| The summer of 1974 was brutally hot in New York and I kept thinking about how
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| nice and icy it must be at the North Pole. |
| And then I though, ў‚¬"Wait a second,
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| why not go?ў‚¬ќ You know, like in cartoons where they hang going to the North
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| 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,
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| a huge backpack, maps, knives, sleeping bags, lures and a three month supply
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| of Banic, a versatile high-protein paste that can be made into flat bread,
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| biscuits or cereal.
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| Now I had decided to hitch hike and one day I just walked out onto Austin
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| Street, weighing down seventy pounds of gear, and stuck out my thumb.
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| ў‚¬Ђќ 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
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| Hudson Bay and began to hitch in small mail planes. |
| The pilots were usually
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| guys whoў‚¬"ўd gone to Canada to avoid the draft or else embittered Vietnam
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| vets who never wanted to go home again. |
| Either way they always wanted to show
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| off a few of their stunts. |
| Weў‚¬"ўd go swooping along the rivers doing loop do
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| loops and baby ###080 152. And theyў‚¬"ўd drop me off at an airstrip.
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| ў‚¬"Thereў‚¬"ўll be another plane by here couple of weeks; |
| see ya; |
| good luck.
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| ў‚¬ќ
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| I never did make it all the way to the geographic pole; |
| it turned out to be a
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| restricted area and no one was allowed to fly in or even over it.
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| I did get within a few miles of the magnetic pole though. |
| So it wasnў‚¬"ўt
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| really that disappointing. |
| I entertained myself in the evenings,
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| cooking or smoking, and watching the blazing light of the huge Canadian
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| 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
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| thereў‚¬"ўd been a nuclear holocaust and that I was the only human being left
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| 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,
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| watching the stars as they turned around and their enormous silent ###080 318.
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| I finally decided to turn back because of my hatchet. |
| Iў‚¬"ўd been chopping
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| some wood and the hatchet flew out of my hand on the upswing. |
| And I did what
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| you should never do when this happens: I looked up to see where it had gone and
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| it came down ў‚¬Ђќ fffooo ў‚¬Ђќ just missing my head and I thought, ў‚¬"My God!
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| I could be working around here with a hatchet embedded in my skull and Iў‚¬"ўm
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| ten miles from the airstrip. |
| And nobody in the whole world knows where I am.
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| ў‚¬ќ
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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 itў‚¬"ўs 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 |