T H E
Paper YOUR WEEKLY
NEWS MAGAZINE
June 8, 2023
Volume 53 - No. 23
by lyle e davis When I was but a young lad, about a hundred years ago, my dad was a route salesman/driver for Omar Bakery in Omaha, Nebraska. On his route lived a hermit. There was a dirt footpath from way back in the woods out to the roadway . . . and there was an ordinary metal pail. Inside was a note ordering how many loaves of bread the her-
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mit wanted and the exact amount of money necessary to pay. Dad showed me the pathway and the pail once; I never had a desire to go find the hermit or his cave. I was an adventuresome kid but this was too spooky for me. I don’t remember whether dad ever met or talked to the hermit. It’s been quite a few years and the memory dims. Hermits have been with us down
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through time . . . way back to biblical times, perhaps even earlier than that. This year there was a more modern version of the hermit and the story emerged in an issue of Gentleman’s Quarterly, in a feature article written by Michael Finkel. For nearly thirty years, a phantom haunted the woods of Central Maine. Unseen and unknown, he lived in secret, creeping into
homes in the dead of night and surviving on what he could steal. To the spooked locals, he became a legend—or maybe a myth. They wondered how he could possibly be real. Until one day last year, the hermit came out of the forest. The Pine Tree summer camp, where a few dozen cabins spread along the shoreline of North Pond in central Maine, was prime hunting grounds for our hermit. With an expert twist of a screwdriver,
Hermit
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