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Into the woods: how one man survived alone in the wilderness for 27 years
- oska 10y agoPreviously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8205993 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8205993
- digler999 10y agojust to save everyone the suspense: he "survived" so long by stealing resources earned by other people who worked for them. Apparently the so-called "hermit" didn't mind people that much.
- blacksmith_tb 10y agoWell, he robbed vacation homes, so I don't know that owners were really put out as much as all that. What strikes me as funny is that he went to such lengths to rob them, it seems like gardening, hunting and fishing would have been easier. But I suppose it's possible it was the thrill of getting away with it that motivated him.
- jboggan 10y agoHe burgled vacation homes, huge difference. Hunting and fishing are not as calorically rewarding as what he could get concentrated in peanut butter and sweets. Read the GQ article, it's fascinating how he would intentionally get fat for the winter.
- svachalek 10y agoI've never heard "burgle" used as a verb in the U.S. although it seems to still be common elsewhere.
- hossbeast 10y agoYou need to read J.R.R. Tolkien
- DonaldFisk 10y ago"Burgle" is a back-formation from "burglar". "Burglarize" is the earlier form of the verb, first used in 1829 by the English author William Hazlitt.
- azinman2 10y agoCommon for U.K.
- sbuttgereit 10y agoRobbery is robbery; the immorality of which has no dependency on how "put out" his victims were... as though it were for you or me to even make such a determination. He was a thief that stole stuff from people: nuff said. I hope at some point his victims got justice.
- totalZero 10y agoRobbery is not robbery. Burglary is not armed robbery. They are different in the eyes of the law, and justly so. Theft of a candy bar carries a different penalty from theft of an automobile, and justly so. A thief is a thief, and a criminal is a criminal, but not all crimes are identical. There is a difference between the rigidity of ethics, and the flexible punishment-must-fit-the-crime nature of justice.
- et-al 10y agoHe admits to this: "I stole. I was a thief. I repeatedly stole over many years. I knew it was wrong. Knew it was wrong, felt guilty about it every time, yet continued to do it." If folks haven't already, the GQ article by Michael Finkel (linked in the older post oska pointed out) is worth the read: The Strange & Curious Tale of the Last True Hermit - http://www.gq.com/story/the-last-true-hermit?printable=true http://www.gq.com/story/the-last-true-hermit?printable=true
- digler999 10y agoI dont even think it's worth reading about him. He's a criminal who got away with it for a long time because of geography and the supply and demand relationship between cold weather and unoccupied cabins.
- et-al 10y agoIf you think of him in that terms, sure. I think much of the disappointment people have here is that they were expecting a man vs nature story and instead read about a thief who lived off the fat of the modern world. The responses in this thread differ from those from the earlier discussion [0] oska linked. I suspect it's due to the different titles and resulting expectations. Personally, I didn't know about original thread when it was posted, and your original comment actually prompted me to find the GQ story and read it under the expectation that I was going to learn about a societal mooch. What ended up making an impression was Christopher Knight's unique writing style, his observations on everyday interactions we take for granted ("I’m not used to seeing people’s faces," he said. "There’s too much information there. Aren’t you aware of it? Too much, too fast."), and how he survived those winters. And yes, I get it, he stole. He used stolen propane tanks to fire up the stolen Coleman to melt snow in a stolen pot to drink water. But still, he fattened himself up for winter and camped in the winter months of Maine while not leaving behind footprints for 25 years. I was impressed. Yes it's not Primitive Technology [0] ingenuity, but Mr Knight is still an outlier and shared an experience I don't encounter every day. [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8205993 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8205993 [1] https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAL3JXZSzSm8AlZyD3nQdBA https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAL3JXZSzSm8AlZyD3nQdBA
- pizzetta 10y agoOne interesting aspect is that he did not contract any major (contagious) disease while not having access to a doctor or any medicine (beyond what he may have found/stolen from cabins, etc. He attributed his good health to being away from people (and thus disease). Also he was able to take good care of his Rx glasses for all those year. No loss or breakage.
- digler999 10y agoI was wondering about his dental hygiene. I've never had a major toothache before, but I've heard they are off-the-charts painful. Maybe he went to the dentist, too, off his stolen goods ?
- hogrammer 10y agoJust like the Democrats!
- djrobstep 10y agoHow do you know the other owners worked for them? They may have inherited them or paid for them from capital (ie non-labor) income. Stealing from the rich increases equality, and is thus a morally good thing, not a bad thing.
- dpandey 10y agonot much of a "wilderness"
- salesguy222 10y agoFor someone with such extreme dental problems, you think he would steal some mouthwash or something :)
- dang 10y agoPlease don't post unsubstantive comments.
- salesguy222 10y agoDo you have me on a watch list or something? I knew about this story years ago. The guy had dental problems from being out in the woods for 20 years. He routinely stole food and supplies from neighboring cabins. Hence, you think human nature would be to steal some mouthwash to lessen his pain. Seriously dang, I'm going to stop commenting here if this keeps happening, and I'm sure nobody will miss me. But understand that my fucking comments contain nuance and substance that you need to read the article AND background topic to understand. You can't just take it at face value and then chime in like you have it all figured out, dude...
- dang 10y agoWe don't have watch lists. If you'd included this context in your original comment, it could have been a substantive one. We can't know that if you don't include it.
- Dangisbiased 10y agoStop being a little bitch dang
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- rongway 10y agothe title is misleading- it implies that he was outdoors as a rugged survivalist not however breaking indoors, and being the next moment outdoors....
- Mz 10y agoAll his life, he had been comfortable being alone. Interacting with others was so often frustrating. Every meeting with another person seemed like a collision. If he were growing up today, they would likely give him some diagnosis on the Autism Spectrum or some related diagnosis and try to give him meds and force him to somehow fit in. For as long as humans have existed, there have been those that don't connect well socially. We may label them and pontificate and categorize, but this has always been true and is not likely to change. Perhaps we should get over our arrogant idea of normal.
- DiabloD3 10y agoI don't understand why parent is being downvoted. As someone who was diagnosed with Aspergers, and someone that greatly dislikes annoying, confusing, and overly excited people that rely almost entirely on certain forms of non-verbal social cues to communicate (to the point I think they're just as broken as I am, just in the exact opposite way; they seemingly lack the ability to use words and logic to convey ideas, preferring emotions and impulsivity to interact with the world and others)... I actually understand the hermit to some extent. I do believe that he could easily suffer from something the DSM V considers on the spectrum. It is unfortunate that society's supports fell through for him.
- sanswork 10y agoProbably because instead of taking the position that support fell through for him she sounds as if she is glorifying the result.
- Mz 10y agoI have no idea at all how you can draw the conclusion that I am glorifying this. Quite the opposite. This pathological outcome is partly due to the fact that "normal" people are such assholes to anyone who doesn't readily fit into their social expectations. People who supposedly have all kinds of social skills often merely use them to torture people who don't have them instead of using their savvy to bridge the gap.
- ianaphysicist 10y agoFor those who wish to hear this sort of story from the author's own voice, Finkel was recently interviewed on Maine Public Radio: http://mainepublic.org/post/north-pond-hermit http://mainepublic.org/post/north-pond-hermit
- Zikes 10y agoFor anyone that wants to see the real deal, watch Alone in the Wilderness by Dick Proenneke: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M23j1U0esvc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M23j1U0esvc
- charles-salvia 10y agoThis story... doesn't really strike me as that worthy of contemplating for too long. Really, how is this guy really particularly different from someone who is basically just homeless? I mean, instead of living on the outskirts of summer resort towns in Maine, he could be homeless living on the outskirts of Bayonne, New Jersey, sifting through trash or breaking into 7-11s at night. The whole "into the woods" thing is sort of almost beside the point here. The guy didn't actually live as some sort of pre-Columbian hunter-gatherer. He was just basically a homeless guy who robbed houses. I'm not sure why anyone thinks we can learn something from him... other than, perhaps, how to break into houses.
- aklemm 10y ago"Are you not entertained?" he must wonder.
- ythn 10y agoI think Dick Proenneke is a way better example of this. He built his own cabin in Alaska and lived there alone for 30 years. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYJKd0rkKss https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYJKd0rkKss
- js2 10y agoAlone in the Wilderness and Part 2 are both very much worth watching, but he was resupplied periodically by plane in the summertime.
- aklemm 10y agoSure he was, but his skills are astounding and imposing compared to most of us today. That makes watching his work such a thrill.
- tomcooks 10y agoWhat really struck me was his ability to build a house, survive on his own set of tools and his contributions to science by keeping accurate logs on local climate and wildlife
- ythn 10y agoFrom a different article about the same dude: "He’d not been sick in the woods, and his worst accident was a tumble on some ice, but his teeth were rotten, and no wonder. I dug through his twenty-five years of trash, buried between boulders, and kept inventory: a five-pound tub that once held Marshmallow Fluff, an empty box of Devil Dogs, peanut butter, Cheetos, honey, graham crackers, Cool Whip, tuna fish, coffee, Tater Tots, pudding, soda, El Monterey spicy jalapeño chimichangas, and on and on and on."[1] http://www.gq.com/story/the-last-true-hermit http://www.gq.com/story/the-last-true-hermit
- Daneel_ 10y agoAfter 27 years, you'd hope he might have built his own accommodation or other useful tools in the style of Primitive Technology (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAL3JXZSzSm8AlZyD3nQdBA https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAL3JXZSzSm8AlZyD3nQdBA). Interesting read, but I don't think there's much to take from it.
- santaclaus 10y agoSo what happens with the IRS if you disappear into the Alaskan wilderness for 20 years (or get hooked on meth and become homeless or whatever) and subsequently want to reintegrate into society? Do you get tossed in the slammer for failure to file?
- LaneRendell 10y agoYou aren't required to file if you make less than 3000 dollars of income a year.
- LaneRendell 10y agoActually it's a bit more than that, my bad: https://www.irs.gov/publications/p17/ch01.html https://www.irs.gov/publications/p17/ch01.html
- mysterypie 10y agoSince you found the answer, why didn't you mention it? It's nice that you gave a citation, but that's a 100-page document that you linked to. The answer is that if you are single and under 65, then you don't have to file a U.S. tax return if your gross income is less than $10,350. (As usual with the IRS, nothing is simple. There are reasons you might be compelled to file anyway and possible benefits to file even if you were under the threshold. But you can still give the short answer of $10,350, and a link for the long answer.)
- flomo 10y agoAs a practical matter, the IRS has bigger fish to fry. There's so many lower-income people who don't pay income tax, and a few get made an example of, but most fly under the radar indefinitely.
- wahern 10y agoThere's a strong constitutional argument that if you don't actually owe the IRS money, and you're otherwise a regular Joe, you don't have to file. This is different than the tax protester argument regarding the 5th Amendment. Going back to the SCOTUS debate over Obamacare, remember that one of the conservatives' theories on its unconstitutionality hinged on an obscure concept in the Anglo-American common law that the law cannot in the first instance impose affirmative (positive) duties on a person, as opposed to prohibitions (negative duties). It most often comes up when discussing why under the common law there historically could never be an affirmative duty to provide assistance to a stranger in peril, and why courts traditionally struck down laws which created such a duty. A person must first take some significant affirmative step with the knowledge (usually implied) that he's subjecting himself to positive law. Thus, while you have no duty to help a complete stranger in peril, if you begin to help him you may have opened yourself up to legal obligations that govern your help, including whether you can withdraw it. (If you're a licensed doctor, OTOH, arguably the law could impose such a burden, but only because you first _chose_ to become a doctor, with the implicit understanding that the act of joining a highly regulated profession might attach certain obligations.) The two big exceptions in this abstract theory are 1) taxation and 2) military service. If you remember, Chief Justice Roberts' concurring opinion upholding Obamacare was based on his finding that the penalty for violating the individual mandate was a tax. Roberts, too, put stock in this distinction between positive and negative duties. It was difficult from an analytical standpoint not to accept that theory. If the conservative justices claimed the scope of the Commerce Clause didn't encompass the individual mandate, which thus exceeded Congress' enumerated powers, then logically neither could the Commerce Clause, e.g., support Federal prohibitions against growing and smoking marijuana in the privacy of your own home. None of the conservative justices were willing to sacrifice the War on Drugs for their principles. (Were Rehnquist and O'Connor still on the bench Obamacare would have been struck down because they dissented in the famous marijuana case 10 years earlier.) Thus, if Roberts wanted to save Obamacare while preserving the ability to reject similar but more onerous future obligations, he had no choice but to classify the penalty as a tax. He was the only justice on either side to do so. (Note that the individual mandate law was intentionally written, in part, to make the tax argument plausible. It's just that it was almost universally thought that it would live or die according to the scope of the Commerce Clause.) Participating in commerce is another affirmative activity that allows the government to impose positive duties, and taking income for labor could arguably be considered commercial activity. Paying taxes might be another activity that could attach reporting obligations. But there are reasonable ways to differentiate those activities. Everybody, theoretically, has to work (they certainly have a right to work, at least) and if choosing to undertake simple remunerated labor opened you up to endless government regulation it wouldn't be very fair; there wouldn't be any real freedom not to subject yourself to government regulation. Similarly, because taxation is the big exception, if taxation alone could indirectly attach a bunch of ancillary obligations you're not really free to refrain from subjecting yourself to other positive law. So, theoretically, if you're just an average working stiff who dutifully pays their taxes, there's a strong case to be made that you don't have to file with the IRS. Until Obamacare, this facet of legal theory was mostly a curiosity which really only functioned to preserve the fiction that an individual, like in the case of this secluded Russian family, could theoretically live in some sort of state of nature free from government control.
- mrunseen 10y agoFake story
- qume 10y agoNo one here interested in the concept of not having direct human interaction for 27 years? Regardless of how he achieved it? There is much to learn from this case. I suspect only a few handfulls of humans in history have completed that epic journey. I personally know poeple who have solo nonstop sailed around the world, speaking on the radio every day, and even that has a huge impact and is less than a year. Perhaps we can put aside the moral aspects with how he achieved it and focus on the rest of this astonishing edge case?
- paganel 10y ago> No one here interested in the concept of not having direct human interaction for 27 years? Regardless of how he achieved it? I guess we could also ask Thomas Silverstein. From his wiki page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Silverstein https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Silverstein): > He has been in solitary confinement since 1983, when he killed prison guard Merle Clutts at the Marion Penitentiary in Illinois. I'm betting there are other people in US prisons who have been in solitary confinement for 10+ years.
- 3131s 10y agoA few people have been in solitary for more than 40 years. http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/05/us/herman-wallace-held-41-years-in-solitary-dies-at-71.html http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/05/us/herman-wallace-held-41-... https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/21/us/for-45-years-in-prison-louisiana-man-kept-calm-and-held-fast-to-hope.html?_r=0 https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/21/us/for-45-years-in-prison...
- distances 10y agoThat's simply sickening.
- taway_1212 10y ago> There is much to learn from this case. A big "lesson" here is: everything's easier when you have no problem with stealing.
- scandox 10y agoI'm amazed at the way people are looking at this. I think we're very jaded when we lose our capacity to see just how remarkable homelessness is. Being homeless and living homeless is something amazing. Just because it is common, doesn't make it any less so. Just because it is common doesn't mean that we understand it. The only thing that makes this more or less interesting than some tale of independence and "acceptable" survivalism is the contempt of the beholder. One of my absolute favourite books as a child was The Autobiography of a Super-Tramp by WH Davies. Perhaps it has coloured my vision, but I think we owe at least a grudging respect to people who can survive in the modern world (by any reasonable means) as such outcasts.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- 1maginary 10y agoAt least from my perspective, this wasn't a matter of remarkable vs unremarkable, it was about the expectation the title set. Maybe it was the "into the woods", maybe it was the "alone" part, but I just wasn't expecting a story of some person stealing from others and getting caught after 27 years.
- charles-salvia 10y agoI don't understand why this guy is particularly more interesting or amazing than the countless other homeless people who have survived in our inner-cities for decades. The only thing that makes this guy different is the superficial aspects : the setting is more rustic, there's no drugs or begging involved, he lives in a forest instead of in an abandoned subway line, etc. In some ways, this guy actually had a much easier time surviving than many of the inner-city homeless. He essentially had access to a low-security, well-stocked resort town in rural Maine - entirely to himself with no other criminal competition and a very small police force to worry about. He didn't have to worry about getting killed by other desperate homeless people or by police, or having to constantly search for a different place to sleep every night. Also, he wasn't even forced into homelessness. He just made a willful decision to live this kind of parasitic lifestyle. Perhaps he was mentally ill in some way, but regardless, I can't be particularly sympathetic without further information about his motivations.
- jack9 10y agoThis is a repeat. It hasn't even been 3 months before it comes up again?
- fishsaysno 10y agoI've first heard about this guy on Sword and Scale. Peanut butter. He loved peanut butter. http://swordandscale.com/sword-and-scale-episode-77/ http://swordandscale.com/sword-and-scale-episode-77/