I’ve often fantasized about having my own small tropical island somewhere.
Maybe just having a couple of indigenous females (who didn’t speak english) who I could keep as my love slaves and prepare my meals for me. And oh yeah, Wave those HUGE leafs at me when I get hot…
That would be great!!
If I ever win the lottery this is exactly what I’ll do…
Bangiadore Wow. I just drifted into that reality for a few minutes, and it was just awesome. I love Maine, it seems like the perfect backdrop for such a grand adventure.
This old Eagle Scout would drop it all and head for the pines in a minute.
Not soon though 
buttonjockey, there were a number of experiences during that year-and-a-half that were, literally, awesome – in the sense of awe-inspiring. Probably the “best” lessons I learned there had to do with respect for the progression of nature and natural cycles. Take a city-dweller away from twenty-four-hour light and activity and at first there’s a kind of sensory deprivation that’s extremely unsettling. But over time, and with adaptation, I found myself to be not so very different from the animals who lived in the woods. I’d always been a late riser and up all night, but I found myself going to bed not long after dark, and getting up at dawn. On days with bad weather, I’d often hole up in my “nest” like the critters did, and when they started to put things by for winter, so did I, stocking up with fifty pounds of brown rice and fifty pounds of beans, and so on.
And I learned to respect the night more than I had. It belonged to skunks, raccoons, owls…more than a few times I was awakened in the middle of the night when an owl would catch a rabbit and bring it to the top of a tree outside the cabin. The rabbit would, literally, scream, and in the quiet of the woods it was unsettling, to say the least, but it was all part of the cycle. (Some of my friends now call me “mole man”, 'cause I’m still so low-wattage at night!) :eek:
Most of all it was the winter that taught me respect for what the native tribes and early settlers must have gone through during the cold months, without even the basic amenities (like electricity) that I had. I could at least buy my provisions from the co-op in town; they’d had to grow or hunt whatever they had to put aside. And if my fire had ever gone out, I at least had matches. It’s startling to realise how much that fire means when it’s fifteen degrees outside and the snow is whipping around, piling up.
I spent a lot of time reading old Taoist texts, and they really reflected the situation back to me. I’ve sometimes wondered how the experience might have been changed if I had internet access there. 
It would be nice but i’m not sure how ‘into’ the life I want to get. I guess it depends on your motivations as to why you want to try the hermits life. If you want to get away from technology that is one thing, if you want to get away from people that is another. I think I just want to return to a simpler life where I have simpler needs and more control over them and I feel more a part of my surroundings. I guess I would want internet access via satellite, but I don’t need a phone, or mail (the internet serves those purposes). Running water would be nice but its not necessary. Good insulation is necessary though as it gets to 10 below around here in the winter. But still, having no real responsibilities and spending all day reading, meditating or viewing the forest would be really nice.
Hell even going camping overnight can get boring as hell without something to read. The forest is a nice place to meditate and think but I don’t want to do that 15 hours a day. I find it humorous that for all other forms of life the forest is a place of terror, murder, disease and starvation but for us its a place of tranquility. Animals in the forest would probably view living our lives as a nice vacation.
Well, Mr. Clark, I dunno to this day exactly what motivated me. A lot of factors, I guess. I’d grown up in the country years 2 through 10, when my folks yanked me unceremoniously out of the woods I was happy in, and moved into “town”. So I always wondered what I was missing after that aborted taste of it.
And after twelve years of living among nutty artists in Boston, I kind of did crave getting away from the party, and into something simpler. More than that, I was in my early thirties, AIDS had been robbing me of way too many friends for most of a decade, and I was pretty confused about what was what in my life. The woods seemed to be, and was, a good place to examine that.
Concerning simple living, my experience really did put the brakes on a lot of urban habits I’d developed that were pretty excessive in terms of consumption, hyperactivity, and so on. Like Thoreau said, “I went to the woods to live deliberately.” Certainly I’m more of a simpleton to this day than I was before I went. But really, it wasn’t absolutely necessary to get to that point the way I did, even though I’m glad I did it that way. Now I live a lot like the way Aesiron describes, comfortable with spending as much time as I feel like by myself. And I’ve never resumed being much of a consumer. I think it’s probably just a matter of finding the time to narrow things down, which is harder to do in a heavily-populated area.
Reading really was key in the situation, too, as you suggest. And writing. I regret that I seem to have forgotten by now how to write a letter on paper! I had some wonderful correspondences going on with friends when I lived in the woods.
One thing you wrote I disagree with though: I never had a sense that the animals around me felt that they were in a place of “terror, murder, disease and starvation” at all. For the most part, it all seemed extremely harmonious, and, the rabbits caught by owls notwithstanding, most critters seemed very healthy and almost glossily clean in such a way that it struck me as odd, at first. YMMV, of course.
I’m an extrovert, and a life of isolation (and you folks who are trying to run internet connections are cheating, BTW - if you’re going to be a hermit, be a hermit) has no appeal to me.
I think about this a lot.
I’d strongly prefer to have indoor plumbing, but I could easily do without the telephone, internet, radio, or TV. Electricity would be a big plus, so there’d be hot water to wash my backside everyday, but I suppose I could get used to heating a bath over a wood fire. Might be kind of cozy. Food would be trouble as I’ve never hunted or fished.
If I didn’t have a wife and six cats, I just might be tempted to give it a whirl for a year.
I was born in and grew up downtown in a large city. Then time passed, things changed, life took its curious turns and now I live on a cattle farm in the middle of thousands of acres of woods. It’s two miles to a paved road and the nearest neighbor and 12 miles to a grocery store. We do have a modern house with all the conveniences. We’ve got satellite TV and a dial-up internet connection that rocks along at 24 kbs on its best day!
If one was living as a hermit, it would be different. I mean, if your house doesn’t have electricity there’s no worries about the power going out. If you don’t have a car, there’s no need for concern about trees falling across the road. I could go on and on.
By and large, I wouldn’t want to live anywhere else. You just need a somewhat different way of looking at things. Living out like this requires a greater degree of self-sufficiency. We have a portable generator so that in extended power outages we can run the well for water, keep food in the refrigerator and freezer from spoiling, watch TV and so forth. After hurricane Opal in 1995 we were without electric service for 24 days and the generator saved us.
You need to keep a couple of chain saws in good working order. After a storm it can take two days of hard sawing to clear a path to the paved road. A reasonable selection of guns and dogs is necessary for varmint control, and a good tractor and good truck come in handy. Speaking of storms, hurricane Ivan is expected to pass through here in a day or two and I’ll probably be running a saw all weekend to clear the road.
You have to be able to do hard physical work outside when it’s hot, cold, wet or windy. Natural disasters seldom come in pleasant weather. After the Great Blizzard of March, 1993 we were isolated for four days because of downed trees and heavy snow on the ground. Snow is not something we normally have to prepare for.
You can’t mind getting dirty, and you can’t get too up tight about bugs, snakes and similar delights of nature. Other than that, it’s a blast!
Lucky for me, my wife hails from tough-minded pioneer stock, and she fits in with all this very well. She was quite citified and civilized when I found her but she regressed to being a frontier woman rather quickly. In fact, the first time I brought her home with me to see where I lived, she said: “Well, if you don’t feel like cutting grass for a week you don’t have to worry about neighbors bitching because the grass needs cutting, do you?” She likes the privacy.
I don’t know if this is a plus or a drawback, but extended family for a hundred miles around insists on calling this place “home” for holidays. On Christmas, Thanksgiving, Easter and Fourth of July anywhere from 20 to 50 people come here. They bring their kids to swim and fish in the pond, wade in creeks, shoot guns and lose my tools and stuff.
The last nearby neighbor we had did live as a hermit. He lived about a half-mile away, across a swamp. We could walk there, but there was no way to drive from place to place. He first lived in an old house that was built in the 19th century. One day he got drunk and went to sleep on the couch. Having run out of wood, he was burning tires in his fireplace for heat. One of the tires burned to a certain extent, then rolled out of the fireplace onto the wooden floor and his house went up in a blaze of glory. He moved into his chicken coop and lived there for several years, with no electricity or running water. Then he got sick and had to be hospitalized. After the hospital they placed him in a nursing home and he died there. I went to visit him about a week before he died and he told me he was just getting sicker because there was no fresh air in the nursing home. He said: “The walls are too tight.”
Every now and then we’ll get antsy and go somewhere for a few days to do something a little different. At other times my wife will get the urge to visit relatives, a thing I don’t enjoy, so she goes for a few days but she’s always glad to get back. Every now and then I’ll get the urge to hit some bars and see some bands, a thing she doesn’t enjoy, so I’ll boogie off to Mobile or New Orleans for a few days. But I’m always glad to get back too.
If you get a chance, try it; you might like it. Or not.
Well, if you don’t mind a creedo and manifesto, there is a communal alternative called Andor available in the woods of Indiana (click site map at bottom of page to view all details). I’m positive all beliefs are negotiable and a desire for a return to nature and the natural life is the only requirement.
Addendum: A Grove Stewardship in Andor would be closest to the idyllic hermitage that you long for, Wesley.
Interesting thread. I don’t know why, but I’m surprised that so many folks have seriously considered the hermit life…and that several have actually lived it!
I think that my home is as much of a hermitage as I’d ever need/want. I’ve been living by myself for 10 years, and, for the most part, when I’m home the solitude is quite deliberate. The doors are locked, sometimes the blinds are drawn, and I almost never answer the door if someone knocks/rings the bell (no one I know would drop by unannounced). I’ll answer the phone if I recognize the name/number, and I tend to be online in the evenings and on weekends; by and large, however, my abode is my refuge. It’s not unheard of for me to have people over, but it’s rare (though I’m proud of my home when I do have guests). In fact it’s been rather weird adjusting to the loss of my 18-year-old cat, because she was always part of my ‘hiding from the world:’ I’m quite often alone, but never felt lonely at home until she died last month. Go figure.
Anyway, I’m pretty happy with that level of alone-ness. I definitely like all of the modern conveniences, and the fact that civilization is just outside my door. I like living close to work. I like being about an hour from downtown D.C. I like the internet, my television, and Netflix. 
I think the only thing ‘missing’ is that I’d like to rent/own a single family home: I’m currently in a townhouse, and while the amount of neighbor noise is considerably less than I used to hear in apartments, it still intrudes from time to time. Kind of ruins my ‘fortress of solitude’ moments. 
So I think that a single family home surrounded by trees – though the lot doesn’t have to be big at all – would be really nice.
Thank you devilsknew, those are good links. If I weren’t too drunk to read i’d probably know what they were talking about.
Some of you seem to not understand the meaning of this thread. It isn’t about being a hermit for its own sake, it is about a desire to lead a simpler life that you are more involved in and that you feel more connected to your surroundings in. Cutting wood for heat in 0 F weather just to survive is a totally different situation than working overtime as an actuary to earn money to pay the gas company, if that makes sense.
Hopefully one day I’ll follow in Bangiadore’s footsteps and buy a cabin in the middle of the woods and spend a year there. I think I would want internet access just to have something to do as spending 16 hours a day doing nothing but reading books and meditating gets tiring fast. But other anemities are not really that important.
Yes, I have an idea to live in the woods roughly near Ottawa within a hundred km or so. If I ever decide that I seriously want to do it I have it all planned out.
So what form of energy is best for cooking and heating (and maybe refrigeration)? Solar power, wind power, stream turbines, propane, kerosene, natural gas, or what? It would have to be portable. I am assuming propane but i’m open to suggestions. I assume Kerosene and probably propane would be bad ideas for heating an enclosed area. I know kerosene is but I don’t know about propane.