SOLITARY PURSUITS
A handful of hermits, from Austria to Australia
Hermit wanted
australian tarzan
Since 1955, the star athlete son of a former Georgian princess and a master at Sydney’s Shore School roamed alone in the wilderness of northern Queensland, “testing” himself against some of the harshest terrain in the world. In his younger days he wore no more than a loincloth and was burnt almost black by the tropical sun. Michael Peter Fomenko saw himself as a modern-day Odysseus, and grew obsessed with building and sailing dugout canoes. In 1959, he survived a perilous 600km (373-mile) voyage in such a dugout from Cooktown to Merauke, in today’s Indonesian province of Papua. He lived among remote Cape York Aborigines, killed wild boar and crocodiles with a machete, fought off sharks with his bare hands, covered himself with ash at night to ward off mosquitoes, and vanished like a ghost at any signs of officialdom. He was known as Tarzan, the King of the Coral Sea, or the Wild Man of Wujal-Wujal – and for many Australians he was a living frontier legend.
News of Fomenko first reached FT in 1981 [ FT36:13]. From about 1990 until quite recently, he was living in bush hideouts south of Cairns. He emerged occasionally to jog to a nearby town for supplies, his trademark sugar bag over his shoulder, sparking waves of “Tarzan sightings” among his Internet followers. In 2012 all sightings ceased, and speculation grew that he must have died in the bush. Then, in September 2015, news came that he was living permanently at the Cooinda Aged Care Centre in Gympie, three hours’ drive north of Brisbane. He’s been there since late 2012, when he became ill while ‘walking’ to Sydney to visit kinsfolk. At 85, Fomenko had taken his solitariness indoors. He doesn’t speak to other residents in the home, and has refused all requests for interviews. (Queensland) Courier-Mail, 24 Aug 2009; (Sydney) Sun-Herald, 3 April 2011; (Sydney) Morning Herald, 24-215 Nov 2015; ‘Bizarrism’ (199) by Chris Mikul, pp.86-87. See also FT181:12.
the snow guardian
For the past 40 years, billy barr, 65 – he insists his name be written with lower case letters – has been living alone in Gothic, Colorado, a ghost town deserted since the 1920s, passing the time by recording all sorts of data, anything he can measure. He never imagined his hobby would help scientists better understand climate change and earn him a cool superhero name – The Snow Guardian. bar first came to Gothic in 1972 as an environmental science student doing water chemistry research. He liked the quiet life so much that he never left. He began the winter of 1974 camping in a tent, not ideal in a place where snow reaches 25ft (7.6m) a year. Luckily, the owner of an abandoned mining shack let him move in, and it became his home for the next eight years, and the place where he started his impressive database on snow. The only motivation for his epic journal was to fight boredom.
When the shack burnt down, he found another place to stay. He only uses measuring devices of his own invention: a marked pole to measure the depth of snow, a snowboard to measure daily snowfall, a hanging butcher’s scale to determine the snow’s density. He notes the first arrival of animals in the spring, and when the ground first reappears after a snowmelt. In a separate journal, he has kept detailed notes about the avalanches he observed in the valley, a record which many consider to be the most comprehensive data on natural avalanches in the world.
barr goes weeks at a time without seeing another human being, and the only way to reach the closest town is by skis. He travels the four miles to Crested Butte about twice a month to restock supplies, but he’s not a big fan of social interaction. Put together, his mountains of data paint a clear picture of the radical transformation of Colorado’s high alpine landscape in the last 40 years. “The trend I see is that we’re getting permanent snow pack later, and we get to bare ground sooner,” he said. His claims have been labelled as biased by climate change deniers, but he wasn’t out to prove anything when he first started meticulously recording data. No one can accuse him of having a hidden agenda because he started his project long before people began talking about global warming. Recently, barr was the subject of a short film called The Snow Guardian (www.daysedge.com/film/2016/11/ the-snow-guardian) and appears in the documentary The End of Snow (www. endofsnow.com/). odditycentral.com, 9 Jan 2016.
hermit wanted
There are no neighbours and the views are stunning, and if you can live without heating, running water, electricity and Internet then why not apply for a job as a hermit? Such is the position that Saalfelden near Salzburg in Austria is seeking to fill, inhabiting alone one of central Europe’s last hermitages, built into a cliff above the town. “Since its creation 350 years ago, the Saalfelden hermitage was inhabited every year,” said priest Alois Moser. “But we don’t have a successor to the last hermit.” According to the job description, the successful candidate should have a “connection to Christian belief” and be “at peace with themselves” at 1,400m (4,600ft) above sea level.
Applicants should not expect complete seclusion, however. The hermitage gets a steady stream of visitors coming to “enjoy the view, to pray and to talk,” the advert on Saalfelden’s website cautions. “The applicants need to know that the Saalfelden hermit does not lead a lonely life. Many people come and want to confide in someone. He has to be there for them,” said Moser. The previous hermit, former priest and psychotherapist Thomas Fieglmüller, returned to Vienna after just one season – the hermitage is only open from April to November – to write. “Life in the hermit’s cell is spartan, but the nature is very beautiful. I met lots of nice people and had good conversations,” he said. “But there was also criticism from apparently arch-conservative Catholics because I didn’t have a cowl or a beard… Maybe I was the wrong person.” Before him, a Benedictine monk lived there for more than a decade. In 1970 a man fired a shotgun at the doors of the hermitage, sending the hermit fleeing. The motive turned out to be jealousy – the gunman had applied for the job himself. One thing to bear in mind for those applying to fill the vacancy – by post only; no emails – in time for the 15 March deadline: the job is unpaid. [AFP] D.Telegraph, 15 Jan 2017.