"...so I just can’t get out of society anymore. I’ve hidden too many years and I’ve built relationships and those relationships have continued to expand.... Maybe the things I’ve been trying to avoid are the things that I really need in life.… I grew up never being hugged or kissed, or any close contact... I’ve had somebody ask me once, about my wife: 'Did you really love her?' And the question kind of shocked me for a second. I’ve never loved anybody in my life. And I shocked myself because I hadn’t realized that. And that’s why I was a hermit. Now I can see love being expressed that I never had before."
Said David Lidstone — "River Dave" — quoted in "‘River Dave’ says he doesn’t see how he can ‘go back to being a hermit’/‘Society is not going to allow it,’ says New Hampshire man who lived off-the-grid life until his cabin burned down last week" (The Guardian).
"Maybe I was a hermit for nothing."
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"I was a hermit for 30-years and all I got to show for it was a ZZ Top beard."
He seems very mentally and physically healthy so by that measure he is a very wealthy guy. Must be all that New Hampshire Free Living.
Was he living with the wife as a hermit?
I’d be a lousy hermit. My hair and beard wouldn’t look right.
River Dave was in the news last month because, even though his cabin has been in use for 30 years, it was built on someone else's private land.
He had been jailed for contempt due to his refusal to abandon the cabin and that makes this fire seem very suspicious.
The earlier story
Maybe it's because I've been spending too much time on reddit's AITA sub, where almost every story is just too pat to be believable. But my gut reaction is that somehow, some way, this story is fake. The hermit thing has been working for him all his life, but suddenly now he sees and understands love and has had an epiphany about human relationships? I mean, it's possible, but it doesn't seem plausible. I want to say the Guardian is playing up his hermitude, and his epiphany, for maximum Feelgood points with its readers.
I'm not sure he'd getting all this love and attention if he hadn't been living as a hermit, if he'd just been some old guy sitting in assisted living somewhere.
Henry David Thoreau, he ain't or no longer is. Walden?
or Wordsworth, the world is too much with us, getting and spending we lay waste our powers...
but then it may not have been about being one with nature, just not one with the rest of us. Except now he wants to be. Until the crowds all fade away.
Interesting voice. Sounds automated, similar to voice prompts on certain automated telephone systems. The phones are speaking hermit.
Yancey, maybe it was like on the Simpsons, where the mountain man married a bear.
"Maybe I was a hermit for nothing."
That is the key line in the whole thing. But would all of these strangers care about him and send him offers of help if he had never lived as a hermit?
All I can think of reading this is that Monty Python sketch of a BBC newsman interviewing a hermit and it degenerates into an entire community of hermits exchanging tips on decorating their caves and lending their goat out to another hermit to milk.
"Still, there's one thing about being a hermit, at least you meet people."
-- the closing line of Monty Python's immortal "Hermit Sketch."
Being a hermit can only work where there is so much wilderness and so few people that the hermit can squat on the land without anyone caring, OR if the hermit is permitted to squat by an indulgent landowner. River Man's story is that this latter scenario was the basis of his existence for these last decades, until that owner died and the new owner turned out to be less indulgent.
My state of North Carolina once had a hermit-as-tourist-attraction, the Fort Fisher Hermit, who dwelt in the salt marshes south of Wilmington in an old WWII concrete "bunker" (really, just a room with one tiny window). The Hermit was eventually murdered in the middle of the night, beaten to death, and no real investigation ever made. He was just a crazy old man, after all.
In a city such a man would be called homeless and would dwell in a cardboard box, and would panhandle for necessities. Only in the wilderness away from the mass of people does he become a hermit, and his interactions with fellow men depend on how self-reliant he is; the mountain men of the 19th century western US were very self-reliant; the typical hermit is far less so, and relies on a few friends or relatives to survive.
That ain't workin', but that's the way you do it
Be a hermit for nothin', cause your chick to flee
Meh. New Hampshire. He was closer to cities than most, but we have lots of people living less extreme versions of that life here. When you work in the state psychiatric hospital, you meet a fair percentage of them over time.
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