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A Modern Hermit

Written by: James Chan

Article Overview: Jan Opdyke gave me her story of living alone as an entrepreneur, deep in the woods of Michigan. She not only poses as a model for a way to live and work, she also is the person who typed my Ph.D. dissertation back when we were classmates at The University of Michigan. The year was 1977. Without her help, I could not have gotten my doctoral degree on time.

A Modern Hermit

When I tried to get in touch with Jan Opdyke, it took me a while to reach her because she was camping out in the Michigan woods, hunting for morels. Jan~{!/~}s business is to prepare scholarly writing for publication. In her year, the morel season comes right after the dissertation season.

A great deal has been written in the last several years about how information and communications technologies decentralize things. People speak of the electronic cottage, a place where you can be away from it all, while still at the center of things. Most electronic cottages I~{!/~}ve heard of tend to be second houses clinging to the side of a mountain, from which a vacationing CEO can hurl an apr~{((~}s-ski thunderbolt.

Jan lives in a log cabin in Michigan, but her spirit is more Walden Pond than Aspen. She finds it odd that she would show up in a book called Entrepreneur, for several reasons. For one thing, her cabin is a single room. More importantly, her work, which she enjoys, supports a low-income, low-consumption lifestyle. She has no interest in expanding her business. Her goal is to ~{!0~}be in nature~{!1~} and achieve peace of mind. ~{!0~}I am happy, but poor,~{!1~} she says.

Yet I think she belongs in the book because she is actually living out a fantasy that many independent people entertain, at least from time to time. She has truly escaped the rat race and taken up a way of life that has rhythms very different from workaday existence.

Jan discovered her country retreat when she was working at the University of Michigan, in Ann Arbor. Recently divorced, she bought the remote cabin, which cost less than her car, so that she would have a place to get away from academic life, which she found rewarding but stressful. The three-hour drive to get to and from the cabin eventually proved stressful in itself. She would drive out on Friday night, and it would take her till Sunday afternoon to really relax, then it would be time to drive back to Ann Arbor. When her Jeep~{!/~}s odometer turned 100,000 miles, she decided to live differently.

In her job at the University of Michigan, she had established enough contacts at university presses and other scholarly publishers to feel confident that she could get enough assignments to live a simple life in the woods without starving or freezing to death.

~{!0~}I live in the kind of place where people go for a couple of weeks a year and indulge in dreams of packing it in and moving to the country,~{!1~} she says. ~{!0~}The reality is very different. Unlike being on vacation, the usual cares and responsibilities of life follow you here. Second, oohing and aahing over the landscape quickly gives way to the practicalities of dealing with it. There is much more physical labor involved with living here than living with the conveniences of the city.~{!1~}

Jan was surprised to find that she missed some aspects of the life she had left behind that she had scarcely considered before. One was the cachet of her old job and the distinguished people with whom she had worked. ~{!0~}I must have invested more in that prestige than I had thought, but I found myself throwing my previous position in the faces of people here who couldn~{!/~}t care less,~{!1~} she says.

She~{!/~}s over that now, she feels. Because she is a single woman living in a log cabin in the woods, ~{!0~}some people think I~{!/~}m kind of weird, a character. I guess that goes with the territory. I~{!/~}m a hermit at heart. I crave the contemplative life.~{!1~}

The other difficult adjustment~{!*~}even though it~{!/~}s part of the reason she moved to the woods~{!*~}was accepting how powerfully the environment sets her agenda there. ~{!0~}If you want to go to town on Tuesday and there~{!/~}s a snowstorm, you go Wednesday or Thursday,~{!1~} she says. ~{!0~}If you want to stay warm this winter, you get your firewood up now. Railing against it does no good. I find that when I begin to get frustrated or unhappy, it~{!/~}s because I~{!/~}m trying to control something uncontrollable. It took me a good two years to recognize this.~{!1~}

Such a life is something few people can sustain. I know that I would get restless after a few hours. Like friends who visit her in the cabin, I~{!/~}d begin to want to go to the movies or check out a mall.

For Jan, being on her own in this way holds enormous satisfactions. ~{!0~}Perhaps there are fewer distractions standing in the way of a direct confrontation with the infinite, questions of life and death and meaning,~{!1~} she speculates. ~{!0~}Perhaps one is more receptive. Here such questions seem to stare you in the face every day. I would happily grapple with them for the rest of my life.~{!1~}

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Article Tags: academic life, communications technologies, country retreat, electronic cottage, last several years, living out a fantasy, log cabin, michigan woods, morel season, morels, nature 1, odometer, opdyke, peace of mind, rat race, rhythms, side of a mountain, single room, thunderbolt, walden pond



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