Park Perspectives: The Mayor of Cold River

By TOM WOODMAN

I’m overseen each day in my office by a white-bearded man with a craggy aspect and a gaze focused far beyond my humble desk. His is one of the enduring stories of the Adirondacks.

Noah RondeauHe’s Noah John Rondeau, kept alive in a photograph taken by a former colleague of mine at the Schenectady Gazette and given to me by Marc Schultz, another friend and photographer at the paper, now called the Daily Gazette. Marc’s father, Ed Schultz, took this portrait. It’s a somewhat unreal image; the face is all that’s visible floating in high contrast to the black background. It’s a mythic presentation in keeping with the storied status that the old hermit and “Mayor of Cold River” has attained.

Fascination with Rondeau grew from the decades he spent in the twentieth century alone in a shanty on the Cold River. The publication of Noah John Rondeau’s Adirondack Wilderness Days (Page 61) is just the most recent evidence of the continuing power of the Rondeau story. The image of a man living self-sufficient and in harmony with the wilderness is an archetype in the Adirondacks. Few of us could or would want to live this way. But something in us finds the idea important even if it is pretty much alien to our real lives.

But trying to see this ideal in our modern world brings complications. If we are looking for iconic stories to shape our understanding of nature and wilderness, we need to be careful not to oversimplify the Rondeau story.

When I look at this photo by Marc’s father I also remember the powerful pictures Marc took for a series on hidden poverty in the Schenectady area. One of the most memorable individuals we profiled was a homeless man living in a tent beside the Mohawk River in the shadow of a giant General Electric plant.
He was getting by on his own through the harshest of conditions and with no desire to be discovered or helped. He and the few people he let into his secret credited his survival to outdoors skills he had perfected growing up in the Adirondacks.

A generation after his father memorialized the hermit of Cold River, Marc was revealing the ways of a loner withdrawn from the world around him, an Adirondack hermit displaced from the Adirondacks.

An impulse to have a solitary personal relationship with nature can be a dysfunction if carried too far, if it becomes a failure to live as part of a larger community, to accept responsibility for someone other than oneself. It can, in a distrustful or fearful extreme, become a form of survivalism that throws up a wall in an effort to block out the outside world.

Environmental activism, including protection of the Adirondacks, would seem by its nature to rest on communal values. To protect a larger natural world often requires that we set aside immediate self-interest to embrace larger values. We agree to forswear the Hummer because we recognize the greater value of fighting climate change.

But even in the language of environmentalism and sustainability we can spot places where it might veer toward survivalism. In a piece excerpted in the November-December 2009 Explorer, environmentalist Bill McKibben writes:
“It is at least possible that in a carbon-constrained world … we will need examples of places less tied into the global economy, more able to fend for themselves. The Adirondack Mountains possess certain of these characteristics.”

Since this is coming from Bill, who has devoted his work to a global fight against climate change, it’s safe to say he’s not advocating that we bar the gates against refugees from less-fortunate regions—figuratively or literally. His efforts depend on shared responsibility.

But isn’t there a hint of danger in those words “fend for themselves”? Might some give in to the temptation to feel the larger problems are too big and too hard, so let’s do what we can to make our local environment work? And of course we’ll need to keep others from messing it up. Can we glimpse how the idealized image of a hermit who shares his values with the community could distort into the recluse holding protectively to life in a tent on the outskirts of town?

The fact that we know so much about Noah John Rondeau testifies to the fact that he was not misanthropic or averse to society. At his hermitage he enjoyed entertaining visitors. He told his tales at sportsman shows and in his later years even worked as Santa Claus at a theme park. He did not, in reality, wall himself off from the world.

A hermit who completely withdrew from the rest of us might have admirable wilderness skills or a fascinating philosophy, but who would know? He wouldn’t register a bit on the public consciousness, much less serve any greater good.

The Adirondack community is enriched by the Rondeau story not because he was good at fishing or skinning muskrats, but because he was able to convey his respect for nature to a larger world. Maybe one of the happiest threads of his story began with his willingness to show the ropes to a young visitor named Clarence Petty. Clarence, who died in November, grew to become one of the Adirondack Park’s most influential preservationists. He fondly told of his visits to “Noey” when he was a boy, returning home with a basket of trout and deeper knowledge of the ways of the wilderness.

That early inspiration didn’t lead Clarence to find a hiding place in the forest in which to make his own independent way. He took those lessons as a starting point for a career in public service, using his knowledge of solitary places to bring lasting protection and public access to the natural world.