THE WAY OF THE HERMIT

A Thoreauvian account of solitary life in the Scottish Highlands.

A few miles from Scotland’s tallest mountain is a deep fissure called Loch Treig, “the lake of death.” Poke around in the misty, mossy woods around it, and you may come to a hut called Stagge Inn, the “r” having fallen off long ago. Smith, who has lived there for decades, writes, “that sign is no more than a metaphor for the gently sliding state of things.” As he notes in this spry memoir, he’s getting old, living on scraps, far from supplies and medical care. However, that’s just as he wishes. He has a radio to listen to the weather forecast and old symphonies, and he’s adept at the art of home brewing. If his existence is a little hobbitty, at least he hasn’t had to work for anyone but himself. His path to that solitude—it’s not really a hermitage, he reckons, since he doesn’t shun people and the Highlands are a popular spot for tourists—was roundabout, beginning when he signed on as a teenager to plant trees and wound up being what he calls “a homeless nomad” for years before talking the laird into letting him build his hut on an old estate. Smith is a quite selective member of society, most of whose trappings he rejects: “I’ll tell you what I think is weird,” he cajoles, “and it ain’t the hermit.” Instead, it’s the world of confinement and consumption and a little time off a year to visit, perhaps, “a place, like where I live, for a week of the happiness I feel every day.” One envies that, though perhaps not the ice storms, pine martens, slugs, and other tests of spirit.

A delightful manual for would-be back-to-the-landers, if not hermits in training.