As far as backwoods encounters are concerned, we tend to make a fuss about the oversized critters. Peckish black bears sniffing around the flaps of your tent for that Luna bar wrapper that you just realized is still in your pocket. A rutting bull moose that could turn your cranium into jelly with a flutter of hooves. But the thing that unnerves me a lot more than megafauna is the prospect of encountering people in the woods.
Not hikers or similar day visitors, but people who are living out in the wild.
It’s a trepidation with roots in 17th Century invasion and colonization of Pennacook and Wampanoag lands that would become eastern Massachusetts. The Puritans had fled England to escape the reach of institutions which they saw as corrupted: a threat to their way of life. But what they didn’t escape was the affliction of cruelty—which they inflicted upon the indigenous peoples here—and the paranoia that had seeped in during those years of religious persecution. The vast woods of New England became a rustling incubator in which that latent paranoia could fester and consume minds.
No movie has depicted this more eerily than Robert Eggers’ The Witch. The setup is pure dread. A family of Puritan colonists whose fealty to God is too extreme for the other Puritans (!) leaves their village and heads off into the woods to build their own farm. Bad things happen. The youngest of the children disappears. One of the goats, Black Phillip, beigins walking on his hind legs and acting aggressively. There are rare glimpses of a woman skulking around the woods. Is she a witch, responsible for the terrors inflicted upon the family? Is the family becoming overwhelmed by superstition and turning on each other, imagining the “witchcraft?” It’s a horrifyingly ambiguous movie and while I won’t spoil its delicious finale, I will say this: it doubled my fear of people in the woods. A coven of witches…or a family of paranoid religious zealots.
But there’s another reason why the thought of bumping into people in the woods gives me pause. People retreat to the woods when society has turned on them. If you run into people living in the woods, it could be a barometer that things are not well outside the woods. And there’s a reasonable chance that people in the woods don’t want to be found by you.
Historically, the woods have been a reliable hiding place for fugitives and hermits, but also, persecuted peoples who survived war or genocide by taking shelter in the forest. One of the most remarkable instances of this concerns 25,000 Jews who managed to ride out World War II by living in the forests of Poland, Belarus, and other countries in Eastern Europe. Some of them, such as a group of Jews led by the Bielski brothers, took up arms against the Nazis, forming a resistance and waging guerrilla warfare in the forest. But they also created a woodland refuge—a literal village that became large enough to include a small hospital, a synagogue, and even a bakery. They would send men into the ghettos of cities to rescue Jews and ferry them to safety in the woods. By 1944, when the Red Army arrived at the village, more than 1,200 people lived there.
Then there are the stranger stories.
In 2009, a Kentucky man named James Hammes was caught stealing millions from his employer, a Pepsi-Cola bottling company. Hammes went on the run by reinventing himself as a thru-hiker. He disappeared into the woods and spent the next five years yo-yo-ing up and down the Appalachian Trail. His trail name was Bismarck, he grew a great bushy beard that would look right at home in The Fellowship of the Ring, and by the accounts of fellow thru-hikers, he was a fond and familiar presence within the AT community. It wasn’t until 2014 when one of those thru-hikers recognized Hammes’ picture on an episode of CNBC’s American Greed. A call was placed to the FBI and the next year, Bismarck was arrested by federal agents at a B&B in Damascus, Virginia.
Around this same time, an even more arresting story was unfolding in Maine, when a fish and game warden found and detained Christopher Thomas Knight—also known as the “North Pond Hermit.” Since 1986, Knight had lived in the woods around North Pond, about half an hour west of Waterville. He pilfered food from nearby camps and did his cooking with a little propane stove to avoid having to light a smoky fire and risk giving away the location of his encampment. During the frightfully cold Maine winters, Knight would walk around his encampment to keep warm. He would borrow canoes from houses on the lake and when he returned them, he would sprinkle them with pine needles to cover his tracks. As to why Knight went to the woods, no one really knows. The journalist Michael Finkel tried to wring an answer out of Knight, pursuing him for interviews and eventually publishing a book about him, The Stranger in the Woods. But after reading through Finkel’s conversations with Knight, which are troubling in their depiction how hard Finkel tried to befriend the North Pond Hermit (some might call this journalistic exploitation) it sounds like Knight really just wanted to be left alone.
This is what rattles me. You go for a hike one day, you meet someone who has fled to the woods, and just like that, you’ve potentially blown their cover. You’ve torn open their little hideaway. It may sound like a bit of a stretch but you don’t have to look hard to find stories about people who’ve gone dark in the New England wild. In fact, you can hike to some of their old hideouts. Rest assured, the important word here is “old.” These are wooded refuges that once housed people living on the margins of society, and as windows into their stories, the hikes make for an unusually rich forest foray. But there’s also a chilly tension to walking in the footsteps of these forest dwellers.
When I embark on any hike like this, I’m usually overcome by two thoughts.
1: If I had been in the shoes of the people who once lived out here in the woods, could I have survived like they did?
2: Is it possible that somebody might still be out here, in the vicinity of this hideout? And if so, how badly do they want to remain hidden?
It’s an apprehensive, atmospheric note on which to begin a hike, but hey: we’re just 3.5 weeks out from Halloween and it’s time to lean into the spookier side of New England life. So if you like the occasional tingling of goosebumps with your fall candle flavored coffee and your flannel-lined vest, then consider these two hikes to former hideouts.
(Click on each hike name below for a trail map and directions to the trailhead)
Judges Cave (New Haven, Connecticut)
Hike distance: 1.8 miles (out-and-back)
Elevation gain: 383 feet
Back in the mid 17th Century, 59 British judges sentenced King Charles I to death for treason and for abusing his power (at one point, he had tried to dissolve Parliament.) The judges effectively blew up the monarchy—but only temporarily. When Charles II persuaded Parliament to restore the throne, he went after the judges who had condemned his dad to the executioner’s ax. Two of them—Edward Whalley and William Goffe—were based in Connecticut at the time. At first, they went into hiding in several safe houses in New Haven. But eventually, they left the city and absconded into the surrounding woods for a more primitive kind of shelter: a large rock with deep cracks that comprise a very small cave. The judges spent several weeks living within the rock, subsisting on food scraps brought to them by a few sympathetic New Haven locals. Eventually, a close brush with a panther sent them north into Massachusetts. They spent the rest of their lives laying low in Hadley, presumably in cushier digs.
Hermit’s Cave (Erving, Massachusetts)
Hike distance: 4 miles (loop)
Elevation gain: 524 feet
The woods and hills of the Pioneer Valley are routinely passed over for the grandeur of the neighboring Berkshires. What better place for a Massachusetts hermit to settle in? That’s what a Scottish immigrant named John Smith did in the late 19th Century. He made a meager living by picking berries and chestnuts in Central Mass. and selling them in Boston. One afternoon, while harvesting bounty in what’s now the Erving State Forest, Smith stumbled upon the entrance to a cave beneath the overhang of a cliff face and he decided to move in. But here’s where the story really takes a surprising turn. Locals in the nearby village of Erving welcomed Smith. They brought him food and furniture for his cave. The landowner allowed him to stay. Smith would regale visitors to the cave with stories and songs. He was, by several accounts, a jolly and gregarious hermit. That might sound like an oxymoron, but the memories of Smith endured, and the land on which his cave lies was later named “Hermit Mountain.”
It’s been a couple of weeks since I delved into rustic books and movies, SO….
I recently finished reading Nicholas Evans’ The Smoke Jumper. Evans is the guy who wrote The Horse Whisperer and this 1999 novel was his followup title. I bought it for a buck earlier this summer at a wonderful used bookstore in Vinalhaven, Maine called Second Hand Prose. It’s a love triangle between two smoke jumpers and a wilderness therapy instructor amid summer forest fires in Montana, and this is the first sentence of the back of the jacket.
“His name is Connor Ford and he falls like an angel of mercy from the sky, braving the flames to save the woman he loves but knows he cannot have.”
Done. Sold. There is no version of reality in which I would not purchase this book and read it. It was as melodramatic and torrid as I hoped it would be, even if the final act in Rwanda was a bit of an ambitious misfire (one of the smoke jumpers later becomes a war zone photographer…it’s not a subtle book.)
The Smoke Jumper made me nostalgic for the days when studios would throw money at hot-blooded melodramas set in beautiful but violent landscapes. Think Legends of the Fall. I’m not sure why this book/movie/TV genre hasn’t been resuscitated, but an era of worsening climate change could demand it. The thing I couldn’t stop thinking about while finishing The Smoke Jumper was how you could tell the same story today, as historic wildfires incinerate broad swaths of the planet. I imagined the two smoke jumpers as volunteers of an international civilian climate corps, formed somewhere down the road. I thought about how climate change is all around us but weirdly absent from our fiction. (Here’s a good VICE story about that paradox by Geoff Dembicki.)