The Geographic North Pole

Text of Anderson's Epic Journey follows. Please feel free to comment.



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
Austin 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 (…). 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'sa long thin thread
Across an ocean.
Down a river
of red
Now that the living
outnumber the dead

Speak my language

Laurie Anderson: ‘The Geographic North Pole’