December 10, 2008
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More Robert Service for You
I’m Scared of it All
I’m scared of it all, God’s truth! so I am;
It’s too big and brutal for me.
My nerve’s on the raw and I don’t give a damn
For all the “hoorah” that I see.
I’m pinned between subway and overhead train,
Where automobillies swoop down:
Oh, I want to go back to the timber again –
I’m scared of the terrible town.I want to go back to my lean, ashen plains;
My rivers that flash into foam;
My ultimate valleys where solitude reigns;
My trail from Fort Churchill to Nome.
My forests packed full of mysterious gloom,
My ice-fields agrind and aglare:
The city is deadfalled with danger and doom –
I know that I’m safer up there.I watch the wan faces that flash in the street;
All kinds and all classes I see.
Yet never a one in the million I meet,
Has the smile of a comrade for me.
Just jaded and panting like dogs in a pack;
Just tensed and intent on the goal:
O God! but I’m lonesome — I wish I was back,
Up there in the land of the Pole.I wish I was back on the Hunger Plateaus,
And seeking the lost caribou;
I wish I was up where the Coppermine flows
To the kick of my little canoe.
I’d like to be far on some weariful shore,
In the Land of the Blizzard and Bear;
Oh, I wish I was snug in the Arctic once more,
For I know I am safer up there!I prowl in the canyons of dismal unrest;
I cringe — I’m so weak and so small.
I can’t get my bearings, I’m crushed and oppressed
With the haste and the waste of it all.
The slaves and the madman, the lust and the sweat,
The fear in the faces I see;
The getting, the spending, the fever, the fret –
It’s too bleeding cruel for me.I feel it’s all wrong, but I can’t tell you why –
The palace, the hovel next door;
The insolent towers that sprawl to the sky,
The crush and the rush and the roar.
I’m trapped like a fox and I fear for my pelt;
I cower in the crash and the glare;
Oh, I want to be back in the avalanche belt,
For I know that it’s safer up there!I’m scared of it all: Oh, afar I can hear
The voice of my solitudes call!
We’re nothing but brute with a little veneer,
And nature is best after all.
There’s tumult and terror abroad in the street;
There’s menace and doom in the air;
I’ve got to get back to my thousand-mile beat;
The trail where the cougar and silver-tip meet;
The snows and the camp-fire, with wolves at my feet;
Good-bye, for it’s safer up there.To be forming good habits up there;
To be starving on rabbits up there;
In your hunger and woe,
Though it’s sixty below,
Oh, I know that it’s safer up there!
Comments (10)
This is simply lovely. I’ll have to look him up. Thank you.
Thank you for sharing this here. I can totally relate although I’ve never lived in the wilderness. I wish. I imagine you saw the movie Into the Wild?
“We stood at the window overlooking the city of nightmares and cried, and we wondered how anyone desperate for money could live such a life, the onramps the offramps and staggering street tramps and legions of the damned, said sister and brother hang onto each other, the computers are jammed.”
-Michael Murphey
There are many reasons why certain people shun population. I can relate to most of them, but was never able to wax poetically about them.
My dad had me in the woods 10 to 20 % of my young life. It was my most spiritual times.
Now I’m too selfish and lazy to live out there…………………..
I love the words to this poem. I prefer small town living than th ebig city-to scarey.
I like this muchly.
oh my stars! this is beautiful!
thank you for the post and how are you doing with the cold weather?
@dlm0908 - It hasn’t been cold for a while. It has been snowing a lot. That’s winter weather here: either cold and clear or warm and snowy.
@butshebites - No, I haven’t seen the movie about Chris McCandless. I remember the news reports when his body was found, and I read Jon Krakauer’s original article in Outside. When the buzz started over Sean Penn’s movie, several people on Xanga asked me what I knew or what I thought about Alex Supertramp. At the time, I found an excellent website with interviews of people who had known him. Now, since the movie made him famous, I had to wade through bazillions of facebook and myspace pages of people using his name, before I found this article by Craig Medred (with links to several good sites) and a piece from the New York Times. My impression from what I have read, based on his near-death in the Mojave desert and the note he left at the bus on the Stampede Trail, he kept going off unprepared by himself, expecting somebody to come along and rescue him.
@saturnnights - Is that Michael Martin Murphey, singer-songwriter, who did Wildfire, one of my old favorites? I haven’t heard the bit you quoted here, and google wasn’t helpful, just kicked me back to this page.
I love your latest profile pic, “Be nice to America or we’ll bring democracy to your country.” It is reminiscent of several similar slogans from the ‘sixties.
@SuSu - Yeah. Michael Martin Murphey used to go by just Michael Murphey. He wrote Wildfire, Carolina in the Pines, Renegade, etc. The piece of song there, was called “Without my Lady There”. It was on Blue Sky/Night Thunder LP with Wildfire. Good stuff he did back then. I have about 5 or 6 of his records. He’s the real thing.
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