In Walden, Henry David Thoreau wrote, “We do not ride on the railroad; it rides upon us.” Those are the same tracks that rode right by the house I grew up in, two stops away from Walden Pond. That’s the line that goes from Boston to Fitchburg, just as it did in Thoreau’s era. Thoreau’s hermitage in Concord is just about as far from my childhood home in eastern Massachusetts as the Commonwealth’s other notable hermitage, John Smith’s Castle in Erving, is from where I live now. I even live in a village named for its train station, which hasn’t operated in something like a century.

I say this to introduce myself, to situate myself as the resident hermit this month at Necessary Fiction, and to lay the sleepers and rails from Steve Himmer’s novel, The Bee-Loud Glade, which is about a hermit, to myself.

I could make a mild, though irreverent and inconstant, claim to a hermitic life. I live in a rural hill town that has never seen cable, DSL nor any sort of internet access beyond dial-up modems. There’s terrible cell phone coverage here. College radio turns to Christian radio in the center of town. This, I think, to many people would seem like the contemporary version of monkish isolation, but it’s just a miserable fact of life here. I get very few visitors, far less than Smith or Thoreau. I get personal phone calls maybe three times a year. My mother spent the last decade of her life alone, somewhat desperately. My father lives alone, one stop away from that same rail line’s terminus, where he is unable to walk to his mailbox. In summers, when I’m teaching online (I bought a satellite dish for the internet) or am jobless, I sometimes go a week at a time without speaking. My only regular visitor is Jack, my neighbor’s ever-roving cat, who lets himself in through a dog hatch in my cellar door and drops by after dark for snuggling and play now and then.

But during the school year, I drive most every day to the state university where I enter a city full of twenty-year-olds, most of whom, I imagine, have never experienced solitude and many have never been beyond the reach of their phones.

I brought up John Smith, Hermit of Erving, to a friend I was visiting earlier this week. It was a good time to visit, since the dirt road he lives on is still frozen and has yet to turn into the undrivable porridge it becomes each spring. My friend sat at his kitchen table eating fried eggs and toast. To the left of his plate, where many of us would place our forks, he kept a huge holstered antique revolver which takes bullets half the size of my little finger. His huge German shepherd lay under table on top of my bootless feet. This big dog gets kept in the cellar when I come over, ostensibly for my protection, and is let out after several minutes of whining. Upon release, he French kisses me for a while, insists I shake his paw for a good twenty seconds, and then naps slumped against my legs. There are supposedly command phrases which turn the dog into a berserker, but I’m not much worried.

My friend and I were talking about a possum I’d seen in my yard recently. My friend said possums were delicious, which is what he says about most creatures. He says he doesn’t give a damn about people, but hates to see animals suffer and rates most of them by their edibility. He said that some blues musician’s wife (he knew the name; I’ve forgotten) liked them so much she wanted to eat them before they were even skinned. I actually believe a good part of most of what my friend tells me about such things. I know he grew up in rural poverty near here and he makes his income now by foraging for greenery in the woods to sell to florists in Boston.

So we got around to talking about the Hermit of Erving, and he said what most people say: his cave is a real disappointment. And it is, too. We don’t get dramatic caves around here in the granitic hills. The places that you could wedge yourself into are mostly the products of jumbles of fallen boulders and tumbled cliff. There are probably fireplaces in Boston mansions deeper than John Smith’s cave at the base of the cliff in Erving. My friend and I went on to have the mandatory conversation about firewood—how many cords we’ve burned, which vendor takes Heating Assistance money, whether this winter was worse than last year’s. He told me he’d found a pile of rocks in a tree in the woods—fully knowing that it was me who made it and that I consider it a sculpture—but he pretended he didn’t know how it got there and implied how strongly he disapproved of it, yet had told no one of it. I didn’t mention Steve Himmer’s novel to my friend, nor my intention to write this essay, though my friend does read and often carries a Larry McMurtry novel in his saddlebag. I did recommend the movie All Is Lost to him, which is a wordless film about a solitary man whose yacht sinks.

Most locals have been to the Hermit’s Cave in Erving at some point. Usually in small bands as teens. John Smith probably would have hated them, though he liked ladies and gentlemen who came to visit. And they did. He was a tourist destination. During his time, a carriage road led closer to the cave than roads do now. His site is up a steep hill that rises up from the Millers River, the train tracks, and Route 2. Sheer cliffs rise up above his cave, which is more of a concavity than cavern, and above them whirl vultures, hawks, and, now, even bald eagles in the summer. In Smith’s time people came to see a man live simply and willfully in the woods and to escape the squalor and bustle of their urbanized lives. This is when the train really did stop nearby and my town had more than double the three-digit population it has now. Smith’s “castle,” as it’s known locally, wasn’t too far from the French King Bridge which spans a handsome bend at the confluence of the Millers and Connecticut Rivers.

Smith lived with his cat, Toby, in a structure long since gone that supposedly incorporated the cave. You can still see some of his stone walls and some of the view down to the river he must have had. Trees have grown back in the last century, but most of this region was denuded of its trees and animals after Europeans and their descendants settled here. The site gets predictable vandalism with paint and smoke smudge signatures and insults written on the cliff, some beer bottles and trash, and stolen sineage. On the other hand, you have to work to get there, and most local morons do not consider traveling by foot fun, so it’s not so bad. The stone walls Smith made were enclosures for gardens and who knows what else. They’re mildly impressive, but there are uncountable piled stone structures in this region that dwarf what he made.

The hermit was Scottish and had kicked around this region for a few years before he settled there. Hermits were a phenomenon in his era. European aristocrats kept men installed on their estates to add color and demonstrate rusticity. Smith wrote of his neighbors, “I often wonder America should be so void of the sense of hermits.” To the visitors who didn’t harass him, he sold books he’d written and wreaths he’d woven from mountain laurel. It must have been very hard going in the winter there.

I’d read once that Smith was buried in the Erving Center Graveyard, a pretty and stately hilltop yard with the usual smattering of Puritan death’s head granite and slate stones, architectural-style Civil War-era stones, and much crasser modern stones of polished granite. I failed to find it one hot summer day, thinking I’d covered every single stone. A friend of mine who’d grown up in Erving as the son of the owner of the store offered to take me to Smith’s stone. As we walked through the yard, he narrated. He seemed to know relatives of most of the dead there. We did not linger long by his family plot. At the far end of the graveyard, in a hidden spot that seemed more like part of an abutting house’s backyard, we found two small undated marble stones almost covered in dead leaves. One says across the top “THE HERMIT” and on its face reads “Of Erving Castle. John Smith AE 82.” The other smaller stone beside it bears just the name of his cat, “TOBY.”