Sam 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?
More picks from Sam Anderson
Spirited Away to Miyazaki Land
“What happens when the surreal imagination of the world’s greatest living animator, Hayao Miyazaki, is turned into a theme park?”
I’ve Always Struggled With My Weight. Losing It Didn’t Mean Winning.
“A diet app helped me shed my extra Covid pounds — and reminded me that I’m still the same old me.”
Into the Belly of the Whale With Sjón
“His books dance — with light, quick steps, never breaking eye contact — all over the line between the mythic and the mundane.”
