Rocket Man

 

Through a phrase from Brahms…which ran through my head for an afternoon, I have suddenly come to see that there is a universality which is not of the conceptual order, that is the key to the idea of music. – Gabriel Marcel

We live on the beaches of Hornby Island. Cheap way to live. But money ebbs. We pick up the quickest employment possible. Port Alberni, and a MacMillan Bloedel sawmill answer the call.

I work the midnight shift. All night I rake up flayed tree flesh beneath the shark-toothed grinders of the debarker; sweep the sawdust from under the headrig and the huge circular bucking saw that slices and partitions each log like Wonder Bread. I shovel it all down a shoot, back into the Alberni Inlet, where the sidewinder boats nose logs toward the jack-ladder to lift them into the mill. I work alone.

Every morning after my shift I stop for breakfast at the Alberni Cafe. Waiting for easy-over eggs, bacon and toast, I step to the jukebox and punch in E11. It’s slow that time of morning and the cook, who prefers Tom T. Hall (especially the song about Clayton Delaney), nevertheless, lets me reach around back and turn it up.

A few seconds and the 45 drops, the turntable whirls to life, the tonearm falls and bounces, the needle finds the groove and the speaker crackles and I hear the B-flat piano chord and the base run that starts high and tumbles, then:

“I packed my bags last night, preflight, zero hour, nine a.m.”

And the coffee’s good. And beyond the grease-gauze windows the sky brightens and shimmers, and I think of home, and I think of being alone, and think of everyone at the Bird House, on Burde Street—friends, some waking up and going to the mill, others, scattered though the house, sleeping. And I feel the pull of solitude and Something beyond; and I feel the equally strong longing of being with friends, who have become family…

“I’m not the man they think I am at home, oh no, no, no, I’m a Rocket man…Rocket man burnin’ out his fuse up here alone.”

And I am. A Rocket Man. Free. Floating above the cracked linoleum and chipped Arborite table, above Port Alberni, high over Cathedral Grove, up over the gulf islands where there’s magic; where boats bob off shore at night and stars shoot the lights out of each other in late summer and streak and fall into the Pacific, sending luminous waves to phosphorescent shores.

It’s a song that’s seared a place inside me, and whenever I hear it, it sets me to long moments of wondering.

Fifty years ago, working alone through those graveyard shifts, the song kept me hinged and lucid—more than escape, it gave the nod to my experience, kept me integrated with the island rock, and connected to a universality beyond the conceptual order—the long view, borne of solitude and the yearning for belonging.

The best version is still from Honky Chateau (1972).