Through the eyes of a hermit: Maine’s North Pond Hermit and the Hermit of Gully Lake in Nova Scotia

Hermits fascinate us. Or maybe it’s just the idea of hermiting that fascinates us, especially after a bad day in civilization. In any event, hermits were back in the news recently with the publication of The Stranger in the Woods by Michael Finkel, which the Guardian had a March 15 online excerpt from at: https://www.theguardian.com/news/2017/mar/15/stranger-in-the-woods-christopher-knight-hermit-maine

Finkel is an immensely talented writer, and in an odd way perhaps the perfect choice really to write Christopher Knight, the North Pond Hermit’s story. Finkel’s also been an outsider and a rule-breaker, which might be considered more praiseworthy than condemnatory, if he wasn’t also something of a fabulist. I’m not sure much other than Finkel’s more polished writing skills and a matter of degree of culpability separate him from such other well-known earlier fabulists as Stephen Glass, who was a staff writer at the New Republic in the late 1990s, or contemporaneously with Finkel’s own work, New York Times reporter Jayson Blair. Perhaps we just need to have faith that time has redeemed Finkel.

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.

The Nova Scotia Department of Community Services financed construction of a small cabin for him. He tried it but found it too close to civilization. A forest fire wound up destroying his preferred dilapidated cabin, so he went back to the winterized cabin.

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.

Pictou County, Nova Scotia songwriter Dave Gunning wrote a song about Willard Kitchener MacDonald in 2004 called “Let Him Be.”

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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From Steve’s in Somerville, Massachusetts to Ben & Jerry’s in Burlington, Vermont, New Englanders have a single-minded zeal for super premium ice cream

It has now been more than 30 years since I lived in the Boston area but Boston stays with you forever.

I lived in West Somerville, near Powder House Circle, which is a few blocks east, if I’ve recalled my geography correctly, of the Cambridge line and Massachusetts Avenue, and just south of Tufts University and the Medford and Arlington boundaries. Somerville is where I discovered Steve’s Ice Cream, started by Steve Herrell seven years earlier on Elm Street in Davis Square in Somerville in 1973, which was hand-stirred in the front window in a Nashua, New Hampshire-made four-and-a-half gallon Triple Motion dasher White Mountain rock-salt and ice freezer, making for a ice cream based on a low overrun, or the amount of air in the ice cream while freezing, with  “mix-ins” like Heath® Bar Crunch added at the counter. At the very center of the twin-blade dasher White Mountain rock-salt and ice freezer is a center blade turning clockwise while the other blade turns counter clockwise, which are in a canister that also turns clockwise. This triple-motion action mixes and folds the ingredients completely creating smooth and creamy homemade ice cream.

What you need to know about northern New Englanders is they are crazy in love with their super premium ice cream. And I’m not shitting you on that, as a New Englander might well say in a way that sounds much less vulgar verbally in Massachusetts than it probably appears here in print. Some things do sort of get a bit lost in translation. To say I was surprised to discover how much residents of Massachusetts and Vermont in particular love their ice cream year-round would be a really big understatement. Up until then, I had lived all of my life in Southern Ontario in Canada, just a bit to the northwest side of the Adirondacks, and the climate I was used to was at most just a few degrees colder than much of northern New England. And, hey, I liked my Central Smith Creamery ice cream, found between Peterborough and Bridgenorth from what had started out as a farmer’s co-op in 1896, expanding to scooping ice cream in 1979, just fine, but they very sensibly, or so I thought anyway, closed their retail window at the creamery for the winter given the almost zero demand for a cone in December, January and February. Canadians, eh?

New Englanders are fanatics, however. Fanatical about ice cream any time of year; fanatical about their Bruins, as I discovered sitting in the “Gallery of the Gods” high up in the cheap seats in the old Boston Garden; and fanatical about the Red Sox, I also discovered sitting behind the “Green Monster,” the 37-foot, two-inch high left field wall at Fenway Park, which is only 310 feet from home plate.

I actually worked for a few weeks right in Harvard Square in Cambridge for yet another ice cream joint, Brigham’s Ice Cream Parlor during the long ago summer of 1980 (no relation to Brigham’s briar pipes, founded by Roy Brigham in his pipe repair shop in Toronto in 1906), the legendary Boston ice cream shop founded in 1914 by Edward L. Brigham. Sadly, neither Steve’s or Brigham’s has their ice cream parlor businesses in the Boston area any longer, although you can still find tubs of ice cream distributed under their brand in New England grocery stores, or at least so I’m given to understand.

I can’t remember now if we sold burgers at Brigham’s Ice Cream Parlor in Harvard Square and actually had grill cooks or just ice cream and pop, but what I recall most was it was a cultural introduction to those small but significant differences between Canadians and Americans. I used to actually work the cash and give customers their orders on occasion.

Around the Boston area the most common term used for chocolate sprinkles on ice cream is “jimmies,” which I got used to more or less soon enough. But every time someone bought a cold drink in one of those waxed cups, I’d ask if they wanted a lid with it. Invariably they would look happily stunned, while my co-workers would just look plain stunned. A “lid” was a drug term not much used in Southern Ontario at the time but apparently universally used in Massachusetts in 1980 for either an ounce or gram of marijuana, depending who you ask for the history of the measurement (which some say relates to coffee cans). “Do you want a lid with it?” made me a very popular Brigham’s employee during my brief tenure in Harvard Square.

Ice cream is the stuff of legend in New England. And no ice cream scoopers have been more legendary than Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenberg (a.k.a  Ben & Jerry). Their story of meeting in Grade 7 gym class in 1963 at Merrick Avenue Junior High School, as two chubby kids who liked to eat and disliked running track, while growing up in suburban Long Island, New York – and then in their mid-20s, after Greenberg had been rejected from some 20 medical schools and was not content to work as a lab technician – splitting the cost of a $5 Pennsylvania State University correspondence course in ice cream-making with Cohen, so that on Saturday, May 5, 1978, with $12,000 scraped together from loans and savings, they opened Ben & Jerry’s Homemade, Inc. in a renovated gas station at the corner of St. Paul and College streets  in Burlington, Vermont, has been told now so often for so long, it is as smooth and as well crafted, as, well, a pint of Chunky Monkey Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream.  In 1980, they were still showing movies on summer Saturday nights on an outside wall of the gas station, I remember.