What picture comes to mind when you hear the words “nutcase survivalist wannabe?” Christopher McCandless of “Into The Wild” fame? Theodore Kaczinsky, AKA “The Unabomber?” Or how about the guy crouching with an AK for 12 hours in the woods outside a West Palm Beach golf course waiting for POTUS 45 to play through?
For my money, it’s none of the above. Rather, it’s Henry David Thoreau. Remember him? The guy who wrote “Walden” while living in a cabin on property owned by his friend Ralph Waldo Emerson. A cabin that was situated less than two miles away from Thoreau’s boyhood home in Concord, MA. That’s where his mother still did his laundry while he was writing his manifesto of living the simple life. Yeah, you heard me: A mama’s boy, through and through.
The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation. What is called resignation is confirmed desperation. From the desperate city you go into the desperate country, and have to console yourself with the bravery of minks and muskrats.
At least Chris McCandless died pursuing his survivalist’s dream in an abandoned school bus in remotest Alaska. Ted Kaczinsky, who spent 25 years in a southern Colorado Supermax after his 17-year bombing spree conducted from a remote Montana cabin, finally died in prison last year. The guy with the AK near the sixth hole in West Palm Beach? We’ll see. But my guess? He probably does his own laundry.
The true measure of a nutcase survivalist wannabe is not how remote or how rustic the digs. It’s how divorced from everyday circumstance the rhetoric. In that contest, Henry David Thoreau wins by a country mile. And you can quote me on that too, Pardner. Brave minks and muskrats? HA!
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Alaska officials removed Chris McCandless’s school bus in 2020 because it had become become a lure for dangerous and sometimes deadly pilgrimages into treacherous backcountry.
The same cannot be said for Thoreau’s cabin on Walden Pond. Don’t be fooled by flowery words. There’s “quiet desperation,” and then there’s… well, you know: Like I said, “Mama’s boy.” But don’t listen to me. You can read the full story, here.