123 SMITH JOURNALTHE YOUNG MAN SWUNG THE AXE
AND BIT DEEP INTO THE TRUNK OF A
WHITE PINE. IT WAS MARCH IN
MASSACHUSETTS, 1845, AND WINTER
HADN’T QUITE LEFT THE FOREST.
On a fine day the mercury might climb to nine
degrees, but below freezing wasn’t uncommon
either. A little way off, the ice on Walden Pond
was beginning to thaw, and in the hickories all
around you could hear the larks and pewees,
happy to see some spring sunshine at last.
The man was Henry David Thoreau, a teacher,
essayist and sometime poet, and he was
felling timber for his house. It was going to
be a simple, one-room cottage with a stone
chimney, two windows, and an earth-dug
cellar out the back. In June, Thoreau gathered
a few of his meagre possessions and moved in.
He would live there, as a hermit, for the next
two years, two months and two days.
Fast forward to 1992, and a group of Alaskan
hunters, stalking moose on the remote Stampede
Trail, come upon a school bus – an incongruous
rusting wreck, once a haven for road workers
in the early 1960s. There is a disquieting note
taped to the door: a call for help.
Inside they find a Remington rifle, a box of
shells, some torn jeans, a backpack... and the
body of Christopher McCandless, wrapped
in a sleeping bag. There are also eight or
nine dog-eared paperbacks. Among them is
Walden, Thoreau’s masterpiece – his account
of those two-and-a-bit lonely years spent
living by Walden Pond. McCandless clearly
referred to it often. The pages were well worn,
yellowed by the sun, but the words hadn’t
lost their power:I went to the woods because I wished to live
deliberately, to front only the essential facts of
life, and see if I could not learn what it had to
teach, and not, when I came to die, discover
that I had not lived...........................................
About a month ago, I stumbled on Walden
in a bookshop. It’s not so well known on this
side of the Pacific, but in the U.S. it attained
major cult status as a credo for stripping back
the non-essential layers of life. If you remove
everything superfluous in human existence,
Thoreau claimed, you’d be left with just
four fundamentals: food, shelter, fuel and
clothing (and even there he found room for
simplification). Living this way, Thoreau felt
you could “drive life into a corner and reduce
it to its lowest terms.”I bought the book and took it home. Thoreau’s
writing is archaic and hard going, but the
story – like his life at Walden – has a simplecharm that keeps you turning the pages.
I became curious. Hermits. Real hermits.
What had happened to them? Did they still
exist? How far would you have to run now to
reach Thoreau’s “abode in the woods”? And
what would you find when you got there?
I decided to do some research.There are several stereotypes about hermits,
swamis, ascetics, misanthropes – whatever
you want to call them. The first is the bearded
man, sitting in some high fastness, dispensing
wisdom to travel-weary pilgrims from the lotus
position. In the beginning, hermeticism was a
religious act – or at least a spiritual one – born
out of the desert theology of the Old Testament.
(The word ‘hermit’ actually comes from the
Latin ĕrēmīta, meaning ‘of the desert’.) These
were Christian missionaries like Paul of
Thebes, who trekked into the dunes and never
came back. Preachers of sand and insects.
People would seek them out for spiritual advice
and counsel, the theory being that life in the
wilderness improved your divine reception,
like tuning an AM radio.Some took it a step further, bricking themselves
inside a cell or living for decades, presumably
quite uncomfortably, at the top of a pole.
They were known as Stylites or Anchorites –
hardcore, even by hermit standards.>>how to be a hermit
IS LIVING ALONE IN THE WILDERNESS THE ENLIGHTENED
EXPERIENCE IT’S CRACKED UP TO BE? ONE WRITER INVESTIGATES.Writer James Shackell