“With this in mind, I could not help but bring up the subject of Walden and its author, Henry David Thoreau. Rondeau said he had read Thoreau but did not think much of him as a hermit. Then, in a short diatribe, he blasted the sage of Walden Pond. To a young disciple of Thoreau, this was embarrassing and unnerving. Though his acid criticisms seemed un- just, I listened. ‘You call Thoreau a hermit,’ barked Noah, ‘when he spent less than two years at Walden Pond and walked into town almost every day to see his folks. He may be the most talked-about hermit, but to me he was a phony.’”

Noah admitted to reading quite a bit. “Back here I would take a kind of course, like something—astronomy, religion, philosophy or something like that just on my own authority. I’d get a few good books and when I’d get through with it, I’d know more than when I started.”

Seeking seclusion from the rest of the world changed him. He developed an increasing distaste for civilization in general. “I got so I hated the most of the government, and a lot of it I didn’t get over and I don’t want to. I see it that way. There’s too much pressure and too much put on. You know what the taxes are now, and they keep taxing it so that now it’s no better than it was fifty or sixty years ago when I was a boy when people worked for ten to fifteen cents per hour.”

Noah drew a “line of demarcation” between the government and people. He didn’t try to offend people “for nothing maybe in error [he did] as much as anyone else. But the way it is, there’s so many of them. There’s a hundred that could be picked out that they all see that the other fellow is wrong and themselves generally right.”

The men’s conversation shifted, and turned, and returned to a familiar subject throughout their confab.

Ed said, “I considered Noah’s words but did not know if they had anything to do with Thoreau. If people considered him a worthy hermit, that was one thing, but the fact is Walden was a part of Thoreau’s deliberate experiment to put transcendental theories into a life form and he did it. Noah had a firm and narrow concept as to what made a hermit authentic. Evidently, it was not what he [Thoreau] accomplished, but how long he stayed. So, Thoreau was verbally excluded from his fraternity of hermits.

Nor would he give him any credit for sublimating the solitary life. His fiery criticism of the 19th century sage assured me, however, that Noah was probably one of Thoreau’s most unusual and most avid readers.

“In my mind, I began comparing the two hermits. Both were of French descent. Both were ‘of short stature, firmly built, of light complexion with strong, serious…eyes and a grave aspect,’ and each had a ‘face covered in late years with a becoming beard.’ Such was Merson’s description of Thoreau. How well it fit Rondeau—except that his eyes were brown and Thoreau’s blue. Maybe Noah had a less ‘grave aspect’ than Henry and he was probably a more jovial fellow.

“Neither of the hermits ever married. It is said…Thoreau gave it some thought but then turned his back on it.”

Noah said, more than once, he had no room for marriage. I’m “too busy living alone in the woods all alone. So I never got married.”

If truth be told, when pressed about any thoughts of finding someone to share his solitary life, he owned that when some female mountain climbers did begin to come along the trail he was in his fifties and figured there was “no hope.”