Eccentric American Solitaires

The November 21, 1938 issue of LIFE Magazine titled “Cuckooland” (“Screwy California” in the table of contents) profiled eccentrics of Holly-wood, California in the 1930s, among them several hermits: Peter Howard, called “Peter the Hermit,” a Dr. Newman, and Harry Hermann, called “Herman the Hermit.” Peter Howard played bit parts in silent films, usu-ally as a “biblical” character given his eccentric appearance: long beard, robe, and staff. He often posed for photos with tourists. Howard lived in a wooden shack on the outskirt hills of Hollywood, with a burro, a goat, and a dozen greyhounds.

Nothing else is known of the other hermits except what the magazine captions tell us: “Dr. Newman” is the sole member of his own religious cult and lives in a tree. Not unlike Peter Howard in appearance, Harry Hermann (“Herman the Hermit”) frequently walked the streets of Hollywood dressed in robe and long beard.

Noah John Rondeau (1883–1967) was born and grew up in the High Peaks region of the Adirondack Mountains of New York State. He worked as a handyman, hunter, trapper, and wilderness guide, moving to the Cold River forest wilderness out of disgust for modern society. He lived between two cabins from 1913 to 1950. Rondeau accepted visitors as early as the 1920s, who came to name his residence Cold River City (he was dubbed “mayor” of the town, “Population: 1”). In 1950, at the age of sixty–seven, Rondeau was forced from his Cold River forest residence when the state’s conservation department closed the forest after a major windstorm. Rondeau subsequently lived in several Adirondack locales, but no longer self–suffi-ciently. In old age he moved to a retirement home. Much of what is known of Rondeau’s daily life as a hermit comes from his extensive journals, which he wrote encrypted.

Ray Phillips (1892–1975), born in New York City, was a World War I veteran, achieving the rank of captain. He worked as a food inspector during the 1920s before moving to Maine to live first on Monhegan Island, then on Manana Island, where he built a twelve by fifteen–foot home of local driftwood, without electricity, using battery–run television and radio. Philips sailed and fished, entertained visitors, and made regular visits to the mainland for supplies and library books. He became known as “The Hermit of Manana Island.”

Robert E. Harrill (1893–1972), born and raised in North Carolina, was committed to a psychiatric hospital at the age of sixty–two, after unsuccessful employment and failed marriage. He escaped, making his way to Fort Fisher State Recreation Area. Harrill discovered an abandoned war bunker near Cape Fear River, in which he lived thereafter, gathering seafood, growing vegetables, and subsisting as a hermit. Revealed to nearby residents, a steady stream of curious visitors come from afar, some leaving donations, others posing for photos with him for a small fee. Harrill was dubbed “The Fort Fisher Hermit” and became a popular tourist attraction in the state.

In the 1950s, hermits and misfits descended on the Everglades, Florida’s southwest coast. Among them were Arthur Darwin, Martha Frock, Robert Ozmer, Leon Whilden, Foster Atkinson, and Al Seely.

Arthur Leslie Darwin (1879–1977) lived on the island of Possum Key from 1945 until his death, allowed to stay on the island after designated part of the National Park System in the early 1950s. He constructed a one–room concrete block house fourteen by sixteen–feet, without electricity, catching rainwater in a cistern. He grew fruit and vegetables to sell in Everglades City, until encroaching mangroves and their tannic acid altered the island soil and forced him to abandon growing. Darwin kept a radio, had no books, and avoided visitors.

Martha Frock (b. 1919?) lived on swampland in the Everglades six miles from the nearest road, in a house made of wood resting on concrete blocks. She lacked electricity, using a hand pump for water, and because she had no vehicle, relied on neighbors for supplies.

The most literate Everglades hermit was Robert Roy Ozmer (1899–1969), former newspaperman, actor, sailor, and artisan. Photos show him in a jaunty beret. Ozmer was well read and traveled extensively. He came to Pelican Key Island to live alone, hoping to cure his alcoholism.

Danish–born Leon Whilden moved to the Everglades in 1949 to live in what became Big Cypress National Preserve. He lived alone on Orchid Isles, at his multi–acre nursery, selling orchids and tropical plants.

Al Seely was a machinist, musician, surveyor, and military veteran. One day in 1969, diagnosed with six months to live, he moved to Ten Thousand Islands, living first in a fishing hut on Panther Key, then on Dismal Key in the two–room house of former resident and hermit Foster Atkinson (about which below). Seely painted, sold his art, read widely with a full bookshelf, and worked his sixty–five acres growing food. He left copious notes published posthumously in 2010 as a book titled The Phony Hermit.

Foster Atkinson resided on Dismal Key during the time Seely lived on Panther Key. Seely moved to Atkinson’s house after the latter’s death at seventy-two. According to Seely, the alcoholic Atkinson failed at everything he pursued. Atkinson had traveled the rails as a hobo and quarreled with every employer. He was selling sea shells while living in a tent on a main-land beach when he became caretaker of the Dismal Key house, where he lived the rest of his life.

Willard Kitchener MacDonald (1916–2004), a World War II military deserter who fled to Canada to avoid conscription, lived in isolation near Gully Lake, Nova Scotia. He became known as “The Hermit of Gully Lake.” In 2003, when he lost his hut in a forest fire, local authorities moved him to a new cabin. Facing health problems and fearing institutionalization, Willard fled to the forest, later found dead.

Bernard Wheatley (1919–1991) was an African American physician who quit his career and moved to Hawaii to become a hermit. He graduated from medical school in 1945, becoming a surgeon in New York and Sweden. One day Wheatley walked away from his profession, family, and friends, wandering Europe and America, and settling into a cave in the Kalalau Valley on Hawaii’s Kauai Island, accessible only by boat or over rigorous mountain terrain.

A 1959 issue of Ebony Magazine describes Dr. Wheatley as persuasive and articulate, able to quote Freud, Jung, Schopenhauer, Kant, and Tolstoy, deeply read in the New Testament, Eastern religions, and esoteric thought. Wheatley cited Jesus and Buddha as his heroes. He quit the world, he explained to his interviewer, because he viewed all institutions as corrupt and spiritually void. On his island, Wheatley inevitably attracted visitors, but had little patience for entertaining insincerity. He lived uninterruptedly as a hermit, and Ebony noted that he would have gone unnoticed had he lived in India.

Richard Proenneke (1916–2003) lived thirty years of solitude in the remote Twin Peaks region of Alaska. Mechanically adept and an amateur naturalist, Proenneke was eminently qualified for the survivalist undertaking. He was eventually employed by the National Park Service for his knowledge and wilderness experience. Proenneke built a log cabin from hand tools, explored mountains and rivers on foot and by canoe, and meticulously observed animal behavior and habitat, recording thoughts with sympathetic attachment to wilderness.

Proenneke maintained a diary, regularly corresponded with family and friends, and enjoyed increased personal contacts during visits away from the cabin. From the beginning, an old pilot–friend flew in food and supplies on a regular basis over the years, permitting Proenneke to perfect his wilderness situation and stay in his beloved cabin year–round. Eventually his stay extended to thirty years. After films about his isolated wilderness life popularized his fame in the 1980s, Proenneke lamented losing his earlier years of solitude, which better revealed the degree of self–sufficiency that he had attained. He began his pursuit of wilderness life late at age fifty–one; at eighty–one he entrusted his cabin to the National Park Service, maintained for visitors ever since.

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Jack Kerouac

American writer Jack Kerouac (1922–1969) was an unlikely candidate for an experiment in solitude, but he undertook a sixty–three day stint as a fire look–out on Desolation Peak, in the Cascade Mountains of Washington State. For years his life had been a zigzag from aloneness to social frenzy. At the time of his solitude experiment, the famous books that were to confirm his place in American literature epitomizing the Beat Generation of the 1950s were not yet written. The winding trail of drugs, alcohol, sex, homelessness, vagabonding, in–group, and incessant reading and writing was beginning to unravel into despair.

In 1954, Kerouac took up the study of Buddhism as a possible solace. On the advice of poet–scholar–translator–roughneck Gary Snyder, who had worked as a fire look–out himself, Kerouac applied for the lookout job and was accepted to work during the summer of 1956. He spent sixty–three days on Desolation Peak with, as he put it, “no characters, alone, isolated.” The record of this period is the first part of his novel Desolation Angels (1965), entitled “Desolation in Solitude,” plus a little of the second part. Since all of Kerouac’s fiction is literal autobiography, these passages testify to his frantic search for solace, highlighted by Kerouac’s jocular, cynical, compulsive, subjective persona.

Kerouac passed most of his fire tower days conjuring memories, fantasizing, and counting the days until he could return to San Francisco, return to normalcy, return to dissipating avoidance of self. Occasionally he evokes without insight the famous Chinese mountain hermit Hanshan, icon of the Beat circle.

“Desolation Adventure finds me finding at the bottom of myself abysmal nothingness worse than that no illusion even—–my mind’s in rags.” Back in San Francisco, Kerouac noted: “The vision of the freedom of eternity which I saw and which all wilderness hermitage saints have seen, is of little use in cities and warring societies such as we have.” The following year (1957) Kerouac finally publishes On the Road, and Dharma Bums the year after that—and so the legendary chronicler of the Beat Generation is established in history. But though he published regularly thereafter, Kerouac’s self–destruction spun unchecked and in growing solitude until his death in 1969 at the age of forty–seven.

Buddhism scholar Robert Thurman remarks in his introduction to Jack Kerouac’s posthumously published book Wake Up: A Life of the Buddha that Kerouac’s Catholicism was a decisive factor in whether Kerouac sided with the Beat Generation’s Zen or with the orientation of Tibetan Mahayana and its closer analogies to Christianity. As Kerouac himself acknowledged, Mahayana Buddhism was for him “the word and the way I was looking for,” a clear allusion to his original Catholicism. In the contrast of Mahayana Buddhism’s angels, saints, and demons to Zen’s dry, hard disciple and emphasis on meditation, Kerouac leaned toward the former, so superficially as to further underscore Kerouac’s inability to control the direction of his life. He called Gautama “the blessed hermit.”

Kerouac found model secular hermits in hobos. In 1960 he published an article titled “The Vanishing American Hobo,” in Holiday Magazine. Kerouac laments the demise of the true hobos, the vagabonding pack rats who founded California, brought down by ubiquitous police from their “idealist lope to freedom” in “hills of holy silence and holy privacy” and out of their cardboard jerrybuilt huts and flying boxcars.

The “footwalking freedom” of mountain man Jim Bridger or of Johnny Appleseed is peculiarly American, notes Kerouac, comparing their lives to Japan’s mountain hermits, “waiting for Supreme Enlightenment which is only obtainable through occasional complete solitude.” In the United States, camping is healthy but a crime for those who make it a vocation. Poverty is a virtue among monks but vagrancy is a crime. The hobo in Brueghel is an innocuous figure, but today a potential criminal, especially the Black hobo, “the last of the Brueghel bums.” “John Muir was a hobo who went off into the mountains …”

Kerouac enumerates other “hobos” fulfilling his notion of nonconformist, iconoclast, perhaps solitary: Jean Valjean, Beethoven, Li Po, Jesus, Buddha, Chief Rain–In–The–Face. Like a sadhu, the hobo walks the back-roads for a meal, not needing to beg. The contemporary hobo ends up in the city, populating the poorer districts, such as New York’s Bowery. Paris is friendly to hobos. Most European countries do not understand them, but “America is the motherland of bumdom.”

Kerouac relates that he was a hobo himself once, until around 1956, when bad publicity about hobos scared the public. Kerouac was once in Tucson walking to the desert with his backpack at 2 a.m., intending to find a place to sleep, when police stopped him. They wanted to know where he was going. Kerouac explained that he’d spent the summer in the Forest Service. Asked if he had money why he didn’t stay in a hotel, he replied that he likes the open air and, besides, it is free. Why? he is asked. Kerouac replies that he is studying hobo. “There’s something strange going on, you can’t even be alone any more in the primitive wilderness …”

THE BOOK OF HERMITS

A History of Hermits from Antiquity to the Present

Robert Rodriguez