Volume 44 - No. 38
September 25, 2014
by lyle e davis
When I was but a young lad, about a hundred years ago, my dad was a route salesman/driver for Omar Bakery in Omaha, Nebraska. On his route lived a hermit. There was a dirt footpath from way back in the woods out to the roadway . . . and there was an ordinary metal pail. Inside was a note ordering how many loaves of bread the hermit wanted and the exact amount of money necessary to pay.
Dad showed me the pathway and the pail once; I never had a desire to go find the hermit or his cave. I was an adventuresom kid but this was too spooky for me. I don’t remember whether dad ever met or talked to the hermit. It’s been quite a few years and the memory dims.
Hermits have been with us down through time . . . way back to biblical times, perhaps even earlier than that.
This year there was a more modern version of the hermit and the story emerged in this month’s issue of Gentleman’s Quarterly, in a feature article written by Michael Finkel.
For nearly thirty years, a phantom haunted the woods of Central Maine. Unseen and unknown, he lived in secret, creeping into homes in the dead of night and surviving on what he could steal. To the spooked locals, he became a legend—or maybe a myth. They wondered how he could possibly be real. Until one day last year, the hermit came out of the forest.
The Pine Tree summer camp, where a few dozen cabins spread along the shoreline of North Pond in central Maine, was prime hunting grounds for our hermit. With an expert twist of a screwdriver, he popped open a door of the dining hall and slipped inside, scanning the pantry shelves with his penlight.
A sharp game warden, Sergeant Terry Hughes, decided enough was enough, It was time to catch the hermit burgler. Using modern day technology he had newly installed in the Pine Tree kitchen, hidThe Paper - 760.747.7119
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Photo credit: Jennifer Smith Mayo
den behind the ice machine, was a military-grade motion detector. The device remained silent in the kitchen but sounded an alarm in the home of Sergeant Hughes, who lived a mile away. The alarm tripped. He raced to the camp in his pickup truck
Photo credit: Andy Malloy Kennebec Journal / AP
and sprinted to the rear of the dining hall. And there he was. The person stealing food appeared entirely too clean, his face freshly shaved. He wore eyeglasses and a wool ski hat. Was this really the North Pond Hermit, a man who'd tormented the surrounding community for years—decades—yet the
Photo credit: Jennifer Smith Mayo
police still hadn't learned his name?
Hughes used his cell phone, quietly, and asked the Maine State Police to alert trooper Diane Perkins-Vance, who had also been hunting the hermit. It was one thirty in the morning on April 4, 2013. Perkins-
The Story of ... a Hermit Continued on Page 2