RUSH: “Fly by Night”

(Fly by Night LP, Mercury, 1975)

The plan required snow, a snow beginning overnight: snow heavy enough to help hide my escape, not so heavy that dispatchers would have sent plows out ahead of it. Those overnight hours would be all the time I’d have. From the cupboards, I’d steal peanut butter, Ritz crackers, a big jar of applesauce, a box of granola bars, packets of hot chocolate. I would already have stashed my other supplies—flannel shirts and wool socks, waterproof matches in a metal container from the brief weeks I was a boy scout, the Boy Scout Handbook itself, Swiss Army knife, flashlight, sleeping bag—in the mess of my bedroom closet. My father’s fiberglass canoe didn’t weigh much, and he’d shown me how to heft it from foot to hip to shoulder and portage it: but I wouldn’t need to carry it, since, I assumed, its patched belly would glide through new snow, my provisions and its paddles weighting the back end as I pulled it by the length of clothesline tied to the bow. I was pretty sure I could cover the distance, dragging little more than an eighteen-foot sled, overnight: and, come morning, snowplows would have erased my tracks completely….

That summer my parents had taken my sisters and me to a small state park in the town next to ours: a pond spilled over a dam and downhill through a fieldstone channel to what had once been a gristmill. Now woods and overgrown fields surrounded the place, and, rambling among the azaleas and mountain laurel above the pond while my boring family lingered at the shore, I found granite ledges I was sure sheltered some small caves, though my mother called me back to the car before I could explore them. A runaway boy, I realized on the drive home, could paddle around the pond, catch fish, disguise a canoe (which quickly became “mine,” not “my father’s,” in this fantasy) under sticks and leaves at nightfall, huddle in the cave in a sleeping bag—or light a fire at its mouth if there were no people around. I assumed someone would eventually see me, paddling the edges of the pond, or bathing in it, but, in a state park, who would find the presence of a boy with a canoe remarkable? Before long, some other family with a girl my age, as estranged from her family as I sometimes felt from mine, would arrive for a hike, and she would wander off from them. “Do you want to see my cave?” would be a pretty cool line.

And though the fury at my family—the desire to quit them and flee in the night—came often enough during those preadolescent years, I never did find the correct alignment of snowy night, rage, and gumption to put my plan into action. Nor did I ever quite forget it, no matter how ridiculous I knew it was.

Along with so many kids in the late ’70s and early ’80s, I liked the band Rush and owned a handful of their records, though I saw them play live only once, on their Grace Under Pressure tour. I attended the show amid the unlikeliest cross-section of friends: a future varsity basketball player, a musician-turned-jock, a road bike freak, a future “best dressed” prep, a skate punk. My self-understanding that year evaded me so reliably I have no idea how my friends might have described me, or how I might have hoped they’d describe me, or even how I might have described myself.

“Rush pulled off a triumph,” one review of that concert read, “… proving that lingering rumors and the band’s worst fears were groundless: rumors that the Canadian trio was fragmenting after years of almost non-stop touring; fears that their fans… were beginning to drift.” Still, the affections my friends and I may once have shared for earnest virtuosity, epic drum solos, “profound” lyrics, and a bass player who—as one elder kid once assured me—“played keyboards with his feet” were maybe the last forces keeping us together. We could no longer agree on long hair in back vs. long hair in front, Saturday Night Live vs. Night Flight, Nike vs. Converse, smoking vs. not smoking, but we all air-drummed Neil Peart’s fills and solos in the privacy of our bedrooms when “Subdivisions” or “Limelight” came on the radio. Before long, we’d all moved on to mostly mutually exclusive cliques, and, as we each contended with how we’d “be cool or be cast out,” even passing each other “in the high school halls” felt awkward.

Embarrassed I’d ever liked Rush, I hid the band’s records amid my mother’s old LPs in the living room cabinet. That October night I saw them, the band didn’t play “Fly by Night,” one of my boyhood favorites, which was just as well: “This feeling inside me says it’s time I was gone…. / Enough with the reasons: I want to get away.”