As others have reported following their camping experience on Cold River Hill, the Mayor of the City always left the impression he was scarcely bothered by anything in the world around him.  “I’m never bothered with the assessors or the tax collector, anyway,” he’d quip.  He was also not lonely.  

In the course of many confabs Klauser had with Noah, he had heard all about the isolation — those long years, the rainy days and evenings when he couldn’t venture outside and those winters when snowstorms would pile up deep snow.  Noah’s homespun philosophy neatly summed those times up. “I prefer to think of it all as solitude.” And he was right when you think of it. There is a difference between loneliness and solitude. He’d read Thoreau and liked to joke that he distanced himself from the philosopher, because his Town Hall was “farther back from the cookie jar than Walden Pond ever was.

“No, I’m not lonely.  Loneliness is only a state of mind.  I’ve been more lonesome waitin’ two hours in a railroad station than in a whole cold winter alone in the mountains.  Lonesomeness isn’t jest when you’re alone; it’s when you’re destitute and lost. Some people can be lonelier in a crowded railroad station than I can right here in my woods,” was his standard answer when asked if he ever felt lonely.  

It might have seemed strange to look about Cold River City and discover the hermit had no pet. Why?  “That’s simple,” he’d explain.  “I never did like cats and dogs.  I could have a pet raccoon or a fawn, but that would be cruel to keep them away from their woods.”

While he didn’t live his life with respect to a reverence for a higher power, Noah did have his own “Higher Authority” ideas.  He would say he had no religion, “but it isn’t that I’m against it — I just don’t even think about it.” The statement is contrary to his actions, however.  He numbered among his friends two Catholic priests who tarried overnight with him and, according to Noah, “we talked theology by the hour over my campfire.”

Rev. Klauser liked this canticle.  He found peace among Noah’s mountains. Noah believed “Mountain climbers are good folks, mostly,” and with few exceptions, they were also spiritual folks. It seems as though in the mountains one feels closer to God, or whatever or whoever one thinks of as a higher power.