I can’t get enough of River Dave. I’ve read all the news I can find. I took a video tour of his A-frame cabin on the Merrimack River. I even did a little research on squatters’ rights under New Hampshire law.
In case you’re not as big a fan as I am, here’s the story. River Dave is the nickname of David Earl Lidstone, a hermit who has lived in the New England woods for 27 years. I’ve never met him before, but he seems like a friendly, fun guy, not to mention the ability. At 81, he managed to grow his own food and live off the land for much longer than I could.
River Dave made headlines this summer after being in jail. The owner of the property he was sitting on wanted him to disappear. After his arrest, Dave’s house burned to the ground.
River Dave reminds me of another man named Christopher Knight. Knight also has a nickname: the North Pond Hermit. Like River Dave, he lived off the grid for nearly three decades. He was arrested in 2013 for stealing groceries from a summer camp in Maine. GQ’s profile of him became the magazine’s most-read article of all time, leading to a bestseller in 2017.
There are striking similarities between these two hermits. Both are white New England men who spent most of their middle years alone. Both men spent 27 years in the forest. Both had impressive beards that I envy. Both aroused interest and even financial support from the audience.
But there is one important difference: you can find the River Dave if you have a boat and know where to look. He sometimes comes into town to get supplies. Local kayakers come by and are greeted by a wave and smile. But the North Pond Hermit was completely cut off. According to his interview with GQ, he spoke a single syllable to another person during his katabasis. Sometime in the 1990s, he met a hiker and said, “Hello.” Otherwise he was completely alone, with no human touch or interaction.
I find these men a fascinating study. I think they reveal something important about society and humanity. By separating from the rest of us, they are showing us something that we cannot see in the crowd.
We can hardly blame them for wanting to flee. The demands of modern life can be overwhelming. Grow up. Work. Avoid infection. Save for the future. Keep up with friends. Reading the news. Knowing who to be mad at this week as a good journalist, patriot, Christian, or parent. Society is exhausting. And the bottomless source of bad news can be daunting. Who of us hasn’t already considered a long sabbatical in a forest hut?
But something is keeping us here, hooked up to our phones, our families, and our institutions.
Years ago I gave classes in my church on the importance of fellowship. I told the students the story of North Pond Hermit, showed his picture in a slide deck, and asked for their impressions. I’ve taught this class a dozen times and no one has ever said, “This is a good idea,” “I wish I could do this,” or “This is a healthy way of life”. Instead, they used words like “worrying”, “sad” or “crazy”.
I think that’s because we humans are a type of herd. We are made to live in connection with others. A weekend alone is a good break. A week alone is a relaxing retreat. But 27 years alone is something that instinctively troubles the rest of us. There’s a reason nearly every prison guard in history has used solitary confinement as the worst form of punishment. My faith tells me that we are made in the image of a common, triune God. No matter how much we distrust our neighbors, we need them.
For wisdom here, we can look at another hermit in New England and one of the most famous and enduring images of retreat in America. Henry David Thoreau is often miscast as the River Dave guy: a sweaty, anti-social eccentric holed up on Walden Pond. But Thoreau was deeply preoccupied with the issues of his time. He was involved with the Underground Railroad and wrote an essay on civil disobedience that would later influence leaders such as Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Mahatma Gandhi.
This summer author Jeffrey Bilbro published a book called Reading the Times that will help us find the imbalance. Bilbro encourages us to take Thoreau’s advice: “Don’t read the Times; read the ages. ”Yet, if we are able to engage in healthy ways in both time and eternity, we may find that we are less likely to lose our footing.
One of Bilbro’s core themes is the need for a shared myth. Our identity as individuals and as a society is shaped by our attention to common ground. For the past few years, to our peril, we have ignored this truth.
America is doing the hard and important work of deconstructing the romance surrounding some of our founding stories. For all the dismay it has caused, ventures such as The New York Times 1619 Project and the new book Forget the Alamo have also found success in this work. In doing so, however, we have to be careful not to discard the finding of meaning entirely or to replace the old, solid myth with a flimsy new fact check.
Common identities stemming from religion, legend, or even geography make for robust identities. You can last. But Bilbro finds that our common identities are increasingly tied to ever more volatile fragments of experience. We are “people who only share one common time and economy,” he writes. And since “our thinking is subordinate to our community affiliation”, we think less of each other and belong less to each other.
That’s what happened to the North Pond Hermit; It’s not what happened to Thoreau.
The value of retreating from the world to “read the ages” is not that we lose touch with society; it allows us to belong together in a deeper, more holistic way.
Bilbro’s observations reminded me of an older, simpler articulation from Dietrich Bonhoeffer’s classic Life Together. “If you cannot be alone, beware of the community. Those who are not in community should be careful not to be alone, ”wrote Bonhoeffer. “Everyone has deep dangers and pitfalls.”
After the forced withdrawal of the pandemic lockdowns, it can be difficult for all of us sweat-drenched but not entirely sweaty hermits to reconnect with people. It may be more convenient to keep tormenting Ted Lasso and watch the world go by. And with the Delta variant, it can be even more difficult than we expected to get out of our huts safely. But instead of the North Pond option, we should look to the Walden option.
As someone whose job it is to keep up with the fast, thunderous flow of the daily news, I am here to tell you that a healthy person and nation is more than just information. It is best not to withdraw from time or from eternity. Let’s read the ages so we can better understand what we’re reading in the Times.
Ryan Sanders is a member of the editorial board of the Dallas Morning News.
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