Laurie Anderson The Geographic North Pole Lyrics

The Geographic North Pole Lyrics

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 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.�



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 ###080318.



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