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 automobiles sweep down:
Oh, I want to go back to the timber again…
I’m scared of this 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 forest packed full of mysterious gloom,
My ice field 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 classes I see.
Yet never a one in a million I meet,
Has the smile of a comrade to 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 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 the 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 Silvertip meet;
The snows and the campfire, with wolves at my feet…
Goodbye, for it’s safer up there.

From “Rhymes of a Rolling Stone,” by Robert Service.