Though there has been no call for evacuation yet, you can smell the smoke. In some places there is 50, 100 years’ worth of fuel on the ground. So I’ll stay here as long as possible.” The spot fires, left unfettered, now grow and begin to converge. “I don’t have the heat of inland or the fog of the coast. “The Bay Area is made up of many microclimates, and the one I am living in is particularly nice,” he tells Windy in one of his letters. She has only ever known him as that wise, constant presence in her life. Until recently, she had never heard his voice as he took the vow of silence back when Jimmy Carter was president, communicating by chalkboard and jottings on paper. Once a month, he rents a car in town, in Santa Cruz, to procure his supplies, including 800 pounds of seed to feed the animals, and to visit Windy, a friend’s 43-year-old daughter whom he helped raise. He has no plumbing and stores his supplies in plastic barrels. Within miles of these growing fires lives the old man in the remote enclave of Last Chance, in a gully beneath the ridge. 17 - the lightning has set the grasses and underbrush on fire in the mountains around Big Basin Redwoods State Park. His inheritance was an anger that kept growing almost a substance: even now it smolders and ignites.īy the next day - Monday, Aug. He went into the military, in 1967, and was sent to Germany instead of Vietnam, growing to hate authority figures and command chains. He went to college and rambunctiously flunked out. Was gravely ill at one point and probably concussed himself after hitting a tree with his sled. Patiently played with his younger sister, Jill. He loved camping and fishing with his father. He has a history too, born a middle child, to a mother of blighted artistic ambitions and a father who was a traveling salesman, with two sisters, living in a comfortable Sears Roebuck house in Columbus, Ohio. But how did he come to be here, feeding the jays and squirrels each day, under the redwoods? His vow of silence, one he takes in his early 30s, makes him an enigma to others, for silence is one of our great American fears. We all start somewhere - and end somewhere too.
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