He also valued the philosophy of Henry David Thoreau. “From my middle teenage years, I had self-Thoreauized myself — so now I needed a little real-life Rondeauizing to give balance to the bookish ideas as to what a hermit is really like in the wilds. Rondeau was a primitive Thoreau, a Thoreau gone to the wilderness instead of Walden Pond.”

“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 unjust, 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.” …

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 …

Edwin’s thoughts swung back to comparing Thoreau and Rondeau. “Both hermits were good with their hands in repairing and building things. This basic skill of self-reliance appears to be one of the prime requirements for a successful hermit.

“As far as formal education went, Rondeau, an elementary school dropout, had very little. On the other hand, Thoreau grew up in an atmosphere of intellectualism, in close contact with such great minds as Ralph Waldo Emerson.

“Talking about Thoreau with a real, live hermit deep in the Adirondack wilderness was a great experience. There could not have been a better classroom for such a discussion. In this environment, however, Thoreau seemed at a terrible disadvantage, not only because he could not represent himself, but because he seemed tame and academic, and not the man of the wilderness often depicted in books by his modern-day admirers, but a man of the gentle, pastoral scene.