Sam Anderson has an enjoyable story in Sunday’s NY Times Magazine (archived) about a once-famous wanderer in the Northeast of the U.S. in the Civil War era:
The word “strange” hardly captures his strangeness. He was rough and hairy, and he wandered around on back roads, sleeping in caves. Above all, he refused to explain himself. As one newspaper put it: “He is a mystery, and a very greasy and ill-odored one.” Other papers referred to him as “the animal” or (just throwing up their hands) “this uncouth and unkempt ‘What is it?’”
But the strangest thing about the stranger was his suit.
In summer and in winter, in every possible kind of weather, the man wore, from head to toe, an outrageous outfit he seems to have made himself: rough leather patches stitched together with long leather strips, like a quilt. It was stiff, awkward, stinky and brutally heavy. It looked like knight’s armor made out of baseball gloves. To anyone encountering him on a quiet country lane, he must have seemed almost unreal: a huge slab of brown, twice as wide as a normal man, his suit creaking and squeaking with every step.
In the years following the Civil War, the wandering stranger became an object of curiosity, then a frequent subject of the newspapers. People gave him a name: the Old Leatherman.
It’s a great read, but I’m bringing it here for the Hattic bits:
Month after month, people watched the Old Leatherman clomp past their farms and through their woods and right up the main streets of their tiny towns. At mealtimes, he would stop at sympathetic households — the same ones, over and over — to ask, with a grunt, for food. He rarely spoke, and when he did his words were clipped, strange. In the silence, rumors grew. People speculated that the Old Leatherman was French, or French Canadian, or Portuguese. They said that he couldn’t speak at all, or that he just couldn’t speak English, or that he spoke English perfectly but pretended not to. […]
Who was he? Why was he doing this? People were obsessed. But try as they might, no one could figure it out. “One of the most noted philologists in the State spoke to him in a half-dozen different languages,” The New York Times reported in 1884. “He could get no reply but a guttural sound which meant nothing, and which was more animal than human in its character.”
Maybe he was… a Neanderthal! Or possibly just a Gael.
sounds like young Gandalf on TV
Where the Old Leatherman wrote down a string of numbers 15342, I think that Albee was essentially right about him demonstrating the limits of his numerical literacy, although I’m not sure I would refer to it as a “peculliar method” for writing numbers.
Those learning to write show time and again that some characters lend to being written backwards, That the Old Leatherman wrote 2 and 5 backwards is unsurprising.
There’s no way to know wonder if he stopped because that was all he knew or if he felt that was a sufficient proof that he knew numbers or if he simply ran out of paper.
That they contemporarily misinterpreted his efforts as his birthdate written European-style suggests that they had already bought into the myths surrounding his origins.
I agree, and it’s amazing how thoroughly our preconceptions cloud our understanding.
Looking up ‘Hattic’ on the Merriam-Webster site, I found this and similar examples:
“I know nothing more, doctor, but just they’re going off to Australia,” said the landlady, mournfully; “and Miss has started packing the big boxes as have been in the hattic since ever they come: they’re going off back where they come from—that’s all as I know.”
The NYT article might have benefited from supplementing the photos with a map making it easier to visualize the 365-mile (really? exactly 365? that’s improbably precise and quite a coicidence to hit a number that has a symbolic resonance that 359 or 368 would have lacked …) circuit. There’s one here https://www.ctyankee.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/leatherman.pdf Unfortunately it’s a lousy/distorted map in terms of geographical accuracy – it doesn’t account for the “panhandle” jutting southwestward out of the rest of Connecticut, so Greenwich/Stamford/etc. are all farther east than in reality and the “top right corner” of New Britain is badly mislocated – it’s actually farther north than Waterbury and not nearly so far east as [Old] Saybrook.
Miss has started packing the big boxes as have been in the hattic since ever they come
I love it!
In the Cologne inner city there are down-and-out-looking people who walk around alone, apparently aimlessly, either saying nothing or talking to themselves. Many years ago there were two of the silent kind that were always alone. Then once I saw them standing together, talking to each other – not an animated conversation, but still an exchange of some kind. Not as if between friends, but not between strangers either.
This messed up my mind, to my credit. Clearly I had until then written them off as mere creatures in the landscape, as down-at-heel sparrows. For all I know they had previously sized me up as well, to my discredit.
down-at-heel sparrows
In Cologne, even some sparrows can talk.
I talked someone down from suicide today.
But I lied to her that I had done it before.
My point is: if you’re eager to feel sorry for someone, there are enough people in your proximity to occupy you. No need to romanticize about a Civil War man long dead and gone. Maybe he just totally lost it when his boyfriend was trampled to death by a horse. His language is that of despair, at any rate.
@Brett
You should have corrected yourself, e.g., “To be honest, last time I shouted ‘jump’, but you misheard it as ‘don’t jump’. This time I am shouting ‘don’t jump’. Please don’t mishear this as ‘jump’, as I do not want to have to go to the dry cleaners again.”
I didn’t notice this on first reading, but Anderson’s description of the Leatherman as “rough and hairy” tends to evoke the Biblical personality Esau. No idea if Anderson intended that or not.
Maybe he just totally lost it when his boyfriend was trampled to death by a horse.
And there was just nowhere in the region for leathermen to go to commiserate until The Eagle’s Nest opened on the West Side Highway.
@Brett: I first thought you paraphrased something I hadn’t noticed upthread, but it seems not. Well done. Whoever she is, I hope she’ll have the help she needs.
the West Side Highway
Yeah, I bet The Eagle’s Nest is a hotbed of eager commiseration. I surmise as a retired shag queen.
@Brett: I first thought you paraphrased something I hadn’t noticed upthread, but it seems not. Well done. Whoever she is, I hope she’ll have the help she needs.
Indeed – and as unsolicited advice, hope you have access to the help you may need as well – knowing people who’ve done such things it’s often useful to talk through with someone to process a fairly shocking experience &c