The Hermit in All of Us

Alone on a wilderness island, it is hard not to ask yourself what if I just stayed?

The bow of the Little Dipper snuggles gently into the sands of the unnamed beach with just the slightest hiss. It is early in the day, early in the season. Panes of ice still glaze the pockets of still water between the rocks. The trees carry just the faintest hint of birdsong and buds. There are no other boats in sight, no footprints on the beach. The island seems deserted, the way I want it. I’ve come, after all, in search of a hermit.

Hermit Island is not among the most-visited of the Apostle Islands. There is no dock, no campground, no maintained trails or interpretive signs to guide you. It doesn’t have the deep maze of sea caves that riddles Devils Island, nor the comet’s tail of a sandspit that punctuates the southern tip of Cat. But what it does have is a legend and a bit of mystery.

Securing the Little Dipper carefully in the quiet water of the bay, I slip on a day pack, scramble up the bank, bend back the branches, and push my way deeper into the mystery.

For as long as there have been organized societies, there have been individuals who have turned their back on them seeking to live outside of social confines. Hermits, from the Greek “eremites” (“living in the desert”), have for centuries skirted the edges of polite society, moving off to … to do what? Listen for voices in the wind? Search the clouds for signs of the divine? Think dark thoughts, enlightened thoughts, no thoughts at all? Some come looking for answers, others to escape the questions for the curtain of solitude hides as well as illuminates.

Whatever the reasons, our national parks and forests are home to a good many hermit stories — Louis Boucher of the Grand Canyon who raised goldfish, rode a mule named “Silver Bell” and is the namesake of Hermit Rapids and the Hermit Trail (which he himself helped to construct); Jim Huscroft who raised foxes on Cenotaph Island in what is now Glacier Bay National Park and baked 14 different kinds of pies for his Christmas dinner; Earl K. Parrott who left a note on his supplies to ward of ransackers whenever he left his cabin saying “Dear Oliver: the cork came out of that bottle of Poison and a lot of it spilled in here all over this stuff. I don’t know if it would be safe to use any of it. Remember what the druggist said, a very little of it would kill a horse.”

And then there is the hermit of Hermit Island in the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore.

It is said that from 1847 to 1861 Hermit Island was home to a mysterious man who lived alone, tended a garden, and built barrels to sell to passing fishermen. Beyond those few scant hard facts, little else can be said with certainty. No one is even completely sure of his name. The old maps speak of this place as “Wilson’s Island” but was that his first name, or his last? How did he come to live here, and why? What poetry or curse did he find in the silence of this 778-acre island? 

A clipping from The Bayfield County Press dated October 22, 1953, written by Eleanor Knight more than 90 years after the hermit’s death, claims that “Wilson” was born in Canada of Scottish parents in 1792. At 18, he left his home, and a fiancée behind to board a sailing vessel taking him down the Pacific Coast cruising timber and living the wilderness life. “Fear was unknown to him,” the article says with perhaps a little too much poetic license, “And the things he did … grew into legends.” Returning home in 1817, he found his parents dead and his intended bride married to another. Wilson lit out for the wildest country he could think of trying to out-run his sadness: the Apostle Islands.

By the 1840’s, according to the newspaper article, Wilson was working with the American Fur Company on nearby Madeline Island. His wilderness life had left him “powerfully built” and “lithe, quick in all his movements.” He considered himself “the best man on Lake Superior.” That is, until he met John W. “King” Bell. A feud between the two men came to a head with a public fist fight in 1847, or so the story goes, and Wilson, the loser, loaded a small boat with his belongings and what was left of his pride, and set off to find an island of his own.

The heart of Hermit Island rises slowly. From a clearing near the island’s crest, the lake twinkles below like a blue eye just opening from sleep. I stop for a rest and to wonder, is this where his cabin was? It is said he built a one-room cabin, kept chickens, read The Whole Duty of Man by lamplight, and left only for supplies and then only on Sundays hoping to encounter as few other people as possible. But there is no record of where Wilson’s cabin stood, no sign of it now so many years later. Lack of solid details leaves the mystery open. Is this the clearing where his garden was? Is this a trail he might have walked? Did he sing while he gardened? And when he saw a fishing boat far off with a trailing flock of gulls like puffs of white smoke, did he wonder what the voices in the galley sounded like after so many months of silence?

In death as in life, Wilson’s story is shrouded in mystery. Reports range from being murdered by thieves ransacking the cabin for his fabled stash of Mexican gold coins, to coiling in the throes of delirium from the evils of homemade alcohol.

Whatever the truth is, the hermit left more questions than answers. The newspaper article author herself says “unfortunately, time has erased all but the plain facts, and even the ‘facts’ contradict each other.” Who was this man? Was it solitude or the fear of society that did him in? With solitude, where is the line between invigorating and insanity? Did he somehow slip across that line? Will we ever find the truth, and should we even try?

In the face of such questions, it is impossible not to ask a few of yourself. Would I have the skills to live alone on an island this small? Would I be scared, joyous, lonely? What would I miss — baseball games on the radio at night, ice cream, the voices of children playing? What in my own life could I so easily throw off? What do I hold too dear to leave behind?

These, and many more questions, are written deep into the landscape of this small island. I walk nearly every possible corner of Hermit Island, scramble over its shoreline rocks, nearly lose my boots in its bogs, and eventually end up right back where I started, the quiet bay where the Little Dipper tugs gently on its anchor lines, waiting. A stiff breeze is kicking up whitecaps on the lake and so I’ll stay put in the protection of the bay for a time and wait it out, alone on the island of the Hermit.

While I wait out the wind, there is time to think about solitude and the social contradictions built in to the term and its connotations, which are many and complex. Recently, long after my trip to Hermit Island, our Surgeon General, Dr. Vivek H. Murthy, published an impressive report titled “Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation” detailing both the public battle with the isolating effects of COVID and his own personal struggles with depression and loneliness. In this unusually frank and thought-provoking government publication, Dr. Murthy writes “Loneliness is far more than just a bad feeling—it harms both individual and societal health … The mortality impact of being socially disconnected is similar to that caused by smoking up to 15 cigarettes a day, and even greater than that associated with obesity and physical inactivity.” He declares that we have “an obligation, to make the same investments in addressing social connection that we have made in addressing tobacco use, obesity, and the addiction crisis.” The report is worth reading in its full 82-page long form.

Yet I feel that the report focuses on only one side of the issue missing the opportunity to highlight some important positive effects of time spent alone — developing a stronger sense of self, a lowering of stress levels that can be raised in social settings, a greater sense of competency, and more. One prescription for loneliness not offered by the Surgeon General is the concept that being comfortable alone is a skill that can be practiced and learned, a skill most of us have forgotten. Call it the lost art of solitude.

No one wants to be lonely or be unwittingly isolated from others. But when does the overstimulation of society become too much causing its own string of possible side effects on our health? When does solitude cross that line between empowering and endangering and become its darker version of loneliness and isolation? What happens when we lose the skill of being alone in a healthy fashion and become dependent on the artificial connection of chat rooms, texting, and cell phones? Is there a balance to be struck between the two? No one, not even the Surgeon General of the United States, has answered many of these questions.

On the beach I sit for hours in blissful solitude, content to be miles from any other human being and outside the reach cell phone coverage. I don’t yet have that Surgeon General’s report with its anti-solitude overtones and the complications of our post-COVID world to think about but people have been debating the tightrope walk between social engagement and solitude and what constitutes a healthy balance long before any government reports. I wonder what the hermit of Hermit Island would have to say on the matter. But, as long as I sit alone on that beach, the spring breeze bending the birch trees into question marks, no answers are whispered to me on the wind.

(all photography by Jeff Rennicke)