Helpless

There is a bar in Kamiah, Idaho where Nickel miners go to stop-up their bleeding need for air. Many years ago I found myself there looking for company while on a children's theatre tour. Never mind the name of the theatre, suffice to say it was me and a woman and a Ford Ranger driving across North America teaching theatre to kids.
Anyway, I had been in this bar for two nights and I talked to a guy who worked in the mines named Steve. I sat down on a stool next to him and we talked the whole night until the lights came on and I went back to the house where I was staying.
I stayed in a new house owned by a lady who had moved there from the East to "escape" after her divorce. It was a great house built like a cabin, very lofty and wooden sides and all that. The roads of her new subdivision were gravel, but were better than most roads in town besides the highway going through down town, which was asphalt.
A Nickel strike was in progress so there was a new town outside of Kamiah of trailers and tents. Transient miners will go where there's work, and it doesn't matter what's pulled out of the ground. There's a need and they fill it, no matter what it does to them and their own. They know their jobs and they keep moving in order to keep doing their jobs. Think about it next time you use a piece of man-made material.
Anyway, this guy Steve had a kid in the show I was directing, so that night we talked about his kid and about moving from strike to strike. He had a good job there, though. He had been hired on as a manager, and it looked to be a good strike, so he was set, and had even bought a real house and all.
The next night I sat at the bar and Steve came in. I said "Hey, Steve!" and he sat next to me.
" What's your problem" he said.
"I... what?" I said.
"What's your problem?"
"I'm John, man, we talked last night."
"What the fuck IS your problem?" He had risen off the stool and was starting to face me off.
"Hey man, no problem, just saying hi, you know?"
"Oh" he said and sat down to his beer.
The bartender, well she came up when Steve went to the juke box, and said, "You ok?"
"Yeah. No worries."
We got to talking and it turned out she was new to the town. Her dad had followed the nickel strike, and she'd followed him. Her husband had been beating on her, so she moved herself and her two kids into her father's trailer and had gotten this job, only her second night doing it. Her dad didn't really want her there, but what could he do?
"The kids make a mess and leave their toys everywhere, and he just wants peace when he comes out of the hole."
She hoped to be able to buy a little two-bedroom house near the bar the next fall. She looked at me the whole time, knowing I was not from there and would be soon going away, but asking me and needing me with her look anyway. Then she said:
"Ever heard the song 'Helpless' by Neil Young?"
"I Love that song," I said.
"I want to go THERE."
Someone called her over and the next day was the show and the mayor took me out and got me drunk and then I left for the next town and did it all over again.
Except this time it was an old biker from the Sierras who played the piano and he wanted me to say hi to his buddies back in Sonora and Twain Flats when I went back there. Everywhere I went I met people who saw in me a young wandering man with a purpose, and who went with me in their minds. They were there: stuck, not rooted.
Wandering in their minds.
There was the transvestite in Wetaskawin, Alberta who told me of his deliriums in Vancouver where he had been Queen Elizabeth. He wanted sex with me in my motel room after a 12 pack of Miller and then smashed the lamp on my head when I demurred. That night I tore up my Room. I broke that fucker and smeared my shit on the bathroom walls and yelled "No"
while thinking of the day I'd had.
It was May first: May Day. ( May Day May Day...). From a payphone in a bar in Edmonton I had spoken to my fiancée and she finally broke everything off with me two months before the wedding because she was now seeing someone else.
My tour Partner was a snake charming Pentecostal woman who counseled me to seek Jesus. I then faced hundreds of miles of asphalt while listening to her tell the tale of the lord raining down on her like cool water.
What I saught was a bottle instead and that town in North Ontario with a clear crystalline wind blowing across my flesh to scourge, bless, cleanse me.