Hermit Tales

Mention in last week’s “Fish tales” column of a haggard roadside hermit familiar to travelers earlier in my lifetime along Route 5 and 10 between Greenfield and South Deerfield drew additional anecdotal information from near and far that’s worth reporting.

The feedback started right off last Thursday morning, when waiting for me on my first email adventure was a comment from an angler who, like me, fished a section of Mill River containing the site of Deerfield’s first grist mill (1693) on Sawmill Plain, not far from Pekarski’s Sausage on Route 116. He said he, too, always did his best to skirt that peculiar roadside recluse who lived just downstream. The note came from Michigan, where South Deerfield native Scott Farrick, a faithful faraway reader and intermittent correspondent over the years, now resides.

The Michigan correspondent and another emailer who chimed in later corrected me on the hermit’s name as well. They grew up in his neighborhood and said it was Victor, not Henry Kisloski, as I had speculated. Henry Kisloski was Victor’s brother. They both apparently grew up on a Sawmill Plain farm near the brook.

Anyway, Farrick’s quick Thursday-morning note read: “Sure is/was a great little stretch of water to grow up on. We knew the ‘hermit’ as Victor Kisloski. We steered clear, too. One day, when we were kids, there he was at our front door, dressed as he always was, in 19th-century style, with that snow-white beard. We were freaked but my mom answered the door. As I recall he was as polite as could be, asking if the Clark family still lived there (they were long gone). Plus he had two stray dogs and was looking for the owner. Like you guessed, surely he was odd, but he surprised us that day with a glimpse that wasn’t so scary.”

Later that afternoon came another, longer email from Scott Healey, a Sawmill Plain lad and neighbor of Farrick’s who was about the same age and often fished for trout on the stream where I had honed my skills before they found their way there. Most interesting was that, without a clue that Scott Farrick had already touched base, Healey wrote: “My best friend Jim Jobst and I would fish that brook all the time, and it was tough going if the Farrick boys had been there first.”

Healey also recalled the hermit’s name as Victor, not Henry.

Like me, Healey and friends “loved the stretch of brook between Pekarski’s and Victor’s land, especially the (old mill) waterfall.”
Now that we’ve made this man Victor Kisloski a passing fancy, a little more on the man, who was still walking the highway between Greenfield and Deerfield after I married in 1979. Following the rush of email traffic last week, I queried my wife to see if she could remember me pointing the hermit out along the road. Yes, she vividly recalled him trudging along Routes 5 and 10 and even described his distinctive attire.

Healey, a neighbor who saw much more of the eccentric chap than me, offered additional insight, writing, “Victor would walk weekly or biweekly to Greenfield for food and supplies. He was basically self-sufficient, with his gardens and his brook. Real story — he did chase Jim and me up the trail behind his shack with a hatchet one day because we both had maple twigs strung with nice trout. Although he probably was just trying to scare us and having a lot of fun doing it, we were scared and had quite a tale to tell.”

Over time, Healey’s mother, in the holiday spirit, helped soothe her son’s fears of the man by giving him an entirely different view of a character who was easily misunderstand. “Yep,” wrote Healey, “this was the same man to whom I later delivered my mom’s homemade Christmas brownies and tollhouse cookies. When I finally got the nerve to knock on the door, scared, he would open it with big, happy eyes you could barely make out through his big beard. … He also once offered Jim and me some of his garden if we wanted to try our hand at growing food.”

Plus one other Healey anecdote about a man many southern Franklin County travelers recognized on the side of the road in the Sixties and Seventies, and probably earlier, before my time: “I once watched him (Jim and I were hiding in the woods) saw down a tree by himself with a two-man bucksaw. I’m telling you, Gary, this guy was tougher than a mountain goat.”

I wouldn’t question that depiction one iota. A person must be strong to be as “different” in a non-conformist way as he was.

And to think that all this new information about an old character from days of my distant past arose from one innocent little mention of fishing an old boyhood stream I was quite fond of, and where the presence of the hermit’s humble abode scared the bejesus out of us each time we passed.

Oh yeah. One more time: he was Victor, not brother Henry.

Sorry ’bout that.

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