In 2002, Finkel was a New York Times Magazine contract writer who wrote the infamous feature story, “Is Youssouf Malé a Slave?” which chronicled the life and work conditions of a young labourer on an Ivory Coast cocoa plantation. Although Youssouf Malé is real person who indeed exists, Finkel built his feature story for the New York Times Magazine around a composite character, combining the stories of several boys, with time sequences and certain other facts falsified. The real Youssouf Malé spent less than a month at the plantation, not a year as Finkel reported. Youssouf’s return to his home and his parents, of which Finkel wrote, was told to him by another boy. A scene from the article in which a psychologist interviews Youssouf Malé never took place. Finkel wrote about what he had done three years later in 2005 in True Story: Murder, Memoir, Mea Culpa, and has pretty much gone onto successfully resume his freelance journalism career over the last decade.
As for the subject of his new book, Maine’s Christopher Knight, one expects that someone who voluntarily disappears from the world and into a hermit’s life from 1986 to 2013, might have some deep philosophical insights with all that away-time from the distractions of the Modern World. You might expect that, but you’d be wrong. It’s not Knight’s story, at least as Finkel tells it here. Still, it is an absorbing story, a compelling read, but you get no sense of Knight being analogous to fellow New Englander Henry David Thoreau and Walden Pond in Massachusetts, where he goes to journey within, to explore “the private sea, the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean of one’s being.”
Assuming Finkel is a reformed fabulist and not a fabulist of 18th-century English history, aside from Knight’s personal story, I can’t deny being fascinated by the background to the piece, where I learn: “It was believed that hermits radiated kindness and thoughtfulness, so advertisements were placed in newspapers for “ornamental hermits” who were lax in grooming and willing to sleep in caves on the country estates of the aristocracy. The job paid well and hundreds were hired, typically on seven-year contracts. Some of the hermits would even emerge at dinner parties and greet guests.”
Who knew? Not me.
The closest I’ve ever been to a real-life hermit was on the day of the two H’s in the late fall of 1999. I was assigned by the then Truro bureau chief of the Chronicle Herald to spend a day deep in the woods looking for a hermit near Earltown in Colchester County, on the north slope of the Cobequid Mountains of Nova Scotia.
Or in the alternative, he said, I could spend the day up around Londonderry and the Cobequid Toll Plaza on Highway 104, climbing down highway embankments counting lost hubcaps, as he speculated there was an inordinately large number of same to be found. Either way it was going to be an outdoor day. Hermits or hubcaps: I opted to look for the hermit, Willard Kitchener MacDonald, the so-called “Hermit of Gully Lake,” who had gone AWOL in 1945 after being conscripted and abandoning a troop train during the Second World War. Canada declared an amnesty for army deserters in 1950, but MacDonald, who didn’t like killing people, he said later, retained a lifelong suspicion of government and police, and never came out of the woods.
Well, at least that’s what folks around there said to strangers. When I stopped in at Earltown General Store on Highway 311 up in the Cobequid Mountains between Earltown and Tatamagouche on the North Shore to enquire about MacDonald, I was met with more or less polite silence, although one person allowed it might just be possible the Hermit of Gully Lake just might be known to Canada Post and the occasional piece of mail might arrive for him to be held for general delivery. And that was the extent of the helpfulness of folks who were protective neighbours solicitous of Mr. MacDonald’s long-held privacy. MacDonald may have been a hermit, but he wasn’t without friends, lest anyone think the two – being a hermit and having friends – were incompatible. Not for all hermits apparently. Reclusiveness is a relative thing.
So it was then that I spent an unseasonably warm late November day tramping around the sun-dappled woods and sun-reflecting and still unfrozen ponds, squinting and listening, trying to somehow locate the Hermit of Gully Lake. It was a very pleasant gig as daily newspaper assignments went, but I never did find MacDonald. But he may have found me. There were several discretely unsettling moments that afternoon when I had the certain feeling I was being watched from the dense bush and forest by someone. I could feel their eyes on me, although I never saw them. The watcher had become the watched. Little did I know that day near the close of the 20th century and dawn of the new millennium that within a couple of years of my futile late 1999 hunt for MacDonald, the Hermit of Gully Lake would become something of a Nova Scotia folk hero and minor celebrity of sorts during his twilight years. There were indeed people who knew about his dilapidated, two-metre-by-two-metre shack, where he would sometimes compose music on a homemade guitar.
MacDonald, 87, disappeared for good when well-meaning and probably conflicted visitors went to get medical help, against his wishes, after he became ill in late November 2003, almost four years to the day after my one-day quest to find him.
MacDonald had been born in the Bay State, more specifically in Somerville in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, on Aug. 13, 1916. Many years later, I, too, would live in Somerville, more specifically West Somerville, near Powder House Circle, between August 1980 and August 1981. It is also known as Powder House Square. Circle, square. Where else but Massachusetts would the two be synonymous? I was 23 and 24 years old at the time. My daily walks often included strolls over the Somerville-Medford-Arlington lines, passing Tufts University on my walk. Or a bicycle ride over the Cambridge line on my 10-speed CCM Targa up or down nearby Massachusetts Avenue, invariably known locally as “Mass Ave,” the second-most famous Massachusetts Avenue in the United States, trumped only by the street of the same name in Washington, D.C.
But this was our Massachusetts Avenue right in Massachusetts. Harvard Yard in Cambridge in one direction to the southeast and Minute Man National Historical Park at Concord in the other to the northwest. In November 2007, Boston Magazine aptly enough described Mass Ave this way: “Its 16 miles of blacktop run from gritty industrial zones to verdant suburbia, passing gentrified brownstones, college campuses and bustling commercial strips.”
Which makes wonder what Somerville was like in MacDonald’s 1920’s youth? I never got to ask. Willard Kitchener MacDonald’s body was found on June 27, 2004 by more than 100 volunteers searching the Gully Lake area for his remains. Since then, the Truro-based Cobequid Eco-Trails Society has officially named a trail the Willard Kitchener MacDonald Trail. One wonders what MacDonald might think of that.
The old cabin’s gone, it burned to the ground
They go looking still to find him but he doesn’t make a sound
60 years of walking down, this long road alone
He’s earned the right to stay and choose how to go
Joan Baxter, a well-respected Nova Scotia author, journalist, development researcher/writer and anthropologist, who now divides her time between Canada and Africa, wrote a biography, The Hermit of Gully Lake: The Life and Times of Willard Kitchener MacDonald, published in 2005. The book was short-listed for the Booksellers’ Choice Award at the 2006 Atlantic Book Awards.
A year later, in September 2007, Toronto-based filmmaker Amy Goldberg’s Willard: The Hermit of Gully Lake, a documentary on the by then famous recluse, debuted at the Atlantic Film Festival in Halifax.
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