Lily Martindale went to the Adirondacks to live alone, to live independently and away from the public eye, and to live her life as a hermit. When we talked about her hermitage in class today, we talked about her desire to live alone as a decision to have a relationship with nature rather than having a relationship with other people. Living in the Adirondacks was for her an escape from the unwanted media attention of the urban world after the plane crash. Her choice to escape by moving permanently to the Adirondacks was what qualified her as a hermit, but it seems to me that this decision is not uncommon.
The most obvious appeals of life in the Adirondacks are the natural beauty and the opportunity to live in a remote and uncrowded community. The relationship with nature that Lily gains is one that many people do have in the Adirondacks, and in many other rural communities that are tied to a landscape. Lily’s classification as a “hermit” stems from her initial decision to exclude all other relationships and only have a connection with the natural world. Is this really so different from people who choose to live in the Adirondacks because of its relative isolation? She mentioned that her choice to isolate herself in the Adirondacks was a kind of death, and a complete escape from all restrictions that come with human societies. I can easily imagine that many people in the Adirondacks, even people less isolated than Lily Martindale, came to this place with a similar hope: a hope of erasing a past life and starting over through limited human connections and a relationship with the land.
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