The Old Leatherman and the Sacred Act of Disappearing
On silence, the Old Leatherman, and the ache to vanish without leaving
I just stumbled into one of those rare pieces of writing that grabs you by the ribs and shakes something loose — the kind that cuts through the numbing scroll like a cold wind through a window you didn’t know was open. It was a New York Times essay about the Old Leatherman — a 19th-century wanderer wrapped in sixty pounds of stitched-together leather, circling the same 365-mile path between New York and Connecticut for decades. He never spoke. He never explained. He just walked.
He became a kind of roadside myth, his passage predictable as the moon — a brown, creaking silhouette with a face like time and a body shaped by refusal. He stopped at the same houses month after month, ate in silence, and moved on. He lived in caves. He grew gardens. He slept beneath slabs of rock and carried stories he never told. And he fascinated everyone who saw him — not for what he said, but for what he withheld.
But the essay isn’t just about him. It’s about the writer, Sam Anderson, who tries to step into his silence, tracing his path like a question etched in earth. He walks the loop, not to solve anything, but to feel something. To step out of abstraction and back into weather, rhythm, breath. It’s not an attempt to disappear, exactly, but something quieter — a yearning to become less legible to the world. A kind of sacred opacity.
“Right away, walking made me feel better... It’s easy to hate the world when it’s just an abstraction that lives in your phone. It’s harder when you are out there in it, really looking, interacting.”
God, yes. That hum of ambient rage, that ache to go quiet — not in some dramatic, final way, but just long enough to remember the texture of the day. I know that feeling. I carry it like a small, warm stone in my coat pocket. Most days, it’s there. And the idea of slipping out of the noise without disappearing entirely? Becoming a kind of half-presence, a ghost with muddy boots and a pulse? That speaks to something deep and yet unspeakable.
We don’t talk much about that kind of yearning — to be here, but only barely. To edge ourselves toward vanishing, not out of despair, but preservation. A gentle kind of protest. The Old Leatherman didn’t shout. He didn’t demand anything. He just walked — through panic and war, through noise and newspaper headlines — and somehow, through that repetition, made himself both indispensable and unknowable.
There’s something monastic in that. Something radical, too. In a time when we are urged constantly to express, to explain, to have a brand and a take and a tribe, the act of becoming illegible — of rejecting the performance of identity — feels quietly subversive. It’s not running away. It’s walking through, but on your own strange terms.
I think we all have our loops. Emotional ones. Political ones. Quiet rituals that we use to stitch ourselves back to the fabric of being. For some it’s prayer. For some it’s whiskey. For me, sometimes, it’s just walking. Not for steps. Not for health. But to remember what my own rhythm feels like.
There’s a stretch of trail near where I live that I return to when I’m coming undone. It’s not remarkable. Just a thin line of dirt through some pine trees, a creek that burbles when it’s rained enough, a rotted fence half-swallowed by moss. But when I’m out there, phone off, legs moving, something softens. It’s as if the noise recedes just far enough that I can hear myself again — not my thoughts, but the me beneath them. The part of me that doesn’t need to speak.
That’s what the Old Leatherman reminds me of — not escape, but return. To the body. To friction. To the slow conversation between skin and sky. He made a loop through the world that wasn’t about getting anywhere, but about remaining. Remaining in motion. Remaining human. Remaining apart, and yet still touching the world’s edge with each footfall.
And what I find myself thinking, as I sit with his story, is how community began to form around his silence. They fed him. Waited for him. Cared. His loop became a kind of invisible thread tying towns together. There’s something beautiful in that — the idea that you don’t have to be seen fully to be felt. That absence, too, can create connection.
What does it mean to live like that? To reject participation without vanishing entirely? To haunt the perimeter of the culture, but still be folded into its memory?
I keep returning to the image of the cave behind the Dunkin’ Donuts — how the writer sat there watching the modern world unfold, fast and blind, and no one looked up. He became invisible by climbing just a few feet above the parking lot. A shift in elevation, a step out of time. I think about that a lot. How close freedom might be.
And I wonder, quietly, if maybe the real loop isn’t the one the Old Leatherman walked, but the one we all trace — between presence and absence, attention and escape, alienation and belonging. The circle that opens every time we step outside, put our feet on the ground, and ask the world to remind us we are still here.
Not entirely. But enough.
Let me know what you think — I’d be happy to workshop, rework, or even help you post it. You’ve already done the hardest part: you listened to what the piece stirred in you. This is just the echo — still moving, still walking.
You said:
Let me add some personal context. There's a 2.9-mile loop off road rugged trail I walk that's aptly named the 'Outlaw Trail' here in Howell, Michigan.
ChatGPT said:
That’s perfect — Outlaw Trail. It practically begs to be folded into this. There’s a poetry to the name, like something half-folklore already. It mirrors the Old Leatherman’s loop in a deeply personal way — your own path of resistance, reflection, return. Let me weave it into the essay and show you how the personal thread can deepen the whole structure, grounding the myth in lived experience:
Walking the Loop
On the Old Leatherman, silence, and the ache to vanish without leaving
I just stumbled into one of those rare pieces of writing that grabs you by the ribs and shakes something loose — the kind that cuts through the numbing scroll like a cold wind through a window you didn’t know was open. It was a New York Times essay about the Old Leatherman — a 19th-century wanderer wrapped in sixty pounds of stitched-together leather, circling the same 365-mile path between New York and Connecticut for decades. He never spoke. He never explained. He just walked.
He became a kind of roadside myth, his passage predictable as the moon — a brown, creaking silhouette with a face like time and a body shaped by refusal. He stopped at the same houses month after month, ate in silence, and moved on. He lived in caves. He grew gardens. He slept beneath slabs of rock and carried stories he never told. And he fascinated everyone who saw him — not for what he said, but for what he withheld.
But the essay isn’t just about him. It’s about the writer, Sam Anderson, who tries to step into his silence, tracing his path like a question etched in earth. He walks the loop, not to solve anything, but to feel something. To step out of abstraction and back into weather, rhythm, breath. It’s not an attempt to disappear, exactly, but something quieter — a yearning to become less legible to the world. A kind of sacred opacity.
“Right away, walking made me feel better... It’s easy to hate the world when it’s just an abstraction that lives in your phone. It’s harder when you are out there in it, really looking, interacting.”
God, yes. That hum of ambient rage, that ache to go quiet — not in some dramatic, final way, but just long enough to remember the texture of the day. I know that feeling. I carry it like a small, warm stone in my coat pocket. Most days, it’s there. And the idea of slipping out of the noise without disappearing entirely? Becoming a kind of half-presence, a ghost with muddy boots and a pulse? That speaks to something deep and yet unspeakable.
There’s a loop I walk not far from home — the Outlaw Trail in Howell, Michigan. 2.9 miles of off-road, rugged earth that cuts through woods and winding shadow, softens into silence and then rises again in wind and root. Aptly named. Aptly lived. I go there when the screen-world starts to close in, when language feels like static and time starts to thin.
There’s no performance out there, no algorithm asking who I am. Just ground and breath and whatever weather has decided to arrive. I’ve walked it in mud, in frost, in the hush that follows rain. I don’t track my steps. I don’t listen to podcasts. I just go. I let the loop hold me like a sentence I don’t need to finish. Some days, I barely remember starting. But by the time I’ve returned to the trailhead, something inside has shifted — not solved, but softened.
And I think that’s what the Old Leatherman was doing, too. Not escaping, but staying, in his own strange way. Staying in motion. Staying apart. Staying human.
We don’t talk much about that kind of yearning — to be here, but only barely. To edge ourselves toward vanishing, not out of despair, but preservation. A gentle kind of protest. The Old Leatherman didn’t shout. He didn’t demand anything. He just walked — through panic and war, through noise and newspaper headlines — and somehow, through that repetition, made himself both indispensable and unknowable.
There’s something monastic in that. Something radical, too. In a time when we are urged constantly to express, to explain, to have a brand and a take and a tribe, the act of becoming illegible — of rejecting the performance of identity — feels quietly subversive.
I think we all have our loops. Emotional ones. Political ones. Quiet rituals that stitch us back to the fabric of being. For some it’s prayer. For some it’s whiskey. For me, it’s the trail. Not for exercise. Not even for clarity. But because sometimes the most honest thing I can do is disappear for an hour and re-emerge not entirely, but enough.
And what I find myself thinking, as I sit with the Leatherman’s story, is how community began to form around his silence. They fed him. Waited for him. Cared. His loop became a kind of invisible thread tying towns together. There’s something beautiful in that — the idea that you don’t have to be seen fully to be felt. That absence, too, can create connection.
Maybe the real loop isn’t the one the Old Leatherman walked, but the one we all trace — between presence and absence, attention and escape, alienation and belonging. The circle that opens every time we step outside, put our feet on the ground, and ask the world to remind us we are still here.
Not entirely. But enough.
Read the article: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/09/magazine/old-leatherman-walk-new-york-connecticut.html