What I Found on the 365-Mile Trail of a Lost Folk Hero
March 12, 2025 at 04:40PMSam Anderson isn’t the first writer to seek enlightenment by walking. But most writers aren’t Sam Anderson. So when he sets out to retrace the steps of a mysterious 19th-century wanderer, your best choice is to go ahead and read the ensuing story. It’s exactly as humane and affirming as you hope it might be.
Today, the Old Leatherman is one of those stories that you either really deeply know or have never heard of at all. I discovered it by accident, 14 years ago. I was having a perfectly normal day, minding my own business, reading a book about local caves, when suddenly this absolute MOLTEN CHUNK OF AMERICAN LORE leaped out of the pages and installed himself in my brain. The Old Leatherman hit me with almost religious force. He was a perfect little parable about something both universal and, to me, very personal: the tension between alienation and belonging, rejection and rejecting. Who gets to belong to a group? What are the smallest possible triggers for inclusion or exclusion? And what happens when someone flips that dynamic: when the individual is the one rejecting the group — rejecting, in fact, the whole society? But also refusing to go away?
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/03/12/old-leatherman/
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