On the mornings when I’m up early—harder during cold dark winter but easier now that spring is arriving—I sometimes see the Red-Headed Man hiking down the mountain road. I’m driving up to my studio and he’s striding down to town for dishwashing work, maybe—but not during this closed time—or to get a meal at the homeless shelter or certainly to settle himself at the public library when it’s open where I used to see him at a desk with a lot of books he was carefully reading and noting.
The way he walks drew my attention first: he strides. Long-legged, his red beard now halfway down his chest, he wears a minimum of cold weather clothes, not the big skiing outfits of most of the people who are driving up. He never wears a hat or gloves. And yet the assurance of his walking makes pity or a handout inappropriate, and he never hitch-hikes. There is pride in his walk, not arrogance—a crucial difference, but the earned pride of a being who makes his home year after year and at all seasons in the woods. I’ve never been able to identify where he lives—like the bear, he has a right to his privacy—but I imagine he has a tent, a campfire in a tin drum, a careful heap of refuse he must eventually bury, a lantern, sleeping bag, and books, as well as a kettle for hot water and some snacks. He has learned how to survive in a place I would find, at least at night, forbidding, when all us hikers and skiers have driven back into town and the silence of the woods takes over.
I am proud of the Red-Headed Man.
At my neighborhood meeting next Saturday, someone is sure to bring up anxiety about whether or not he sets fires. There is often a movement to find a way to get him arrested or at least to drive him out, and I must once again summon all my powers of persuasion to explain the absolute rightness of his living in the mountains.
We are all afraid of what we don’t understand, and it is hard to understand the motivation and the psychic and physical strength of an individual who chooses to live outdoors—not a vagrant, a tramp, and I doubt he would call himself homeless.
He is at home in the natural world we are trying so hard to destroy. He is the last person who would endanger it.
Beautiful, thank you Sallie.