Author William O’Hern appears to have a few goals in his new work, “Adirondack Wilds.”

First and foremost, he shares insights into the life of legendary self-styled hermit Noah John Rondeau. He also gets to rhapsodize about his own love of the mountains. And it’s a paean of sorts to his marriage and his desire to have his wife Bette accompany him on these jaunts to places Rondeau once frequented.

For the most part, he succeeds on all three counts.

Noah John Rondeau has already become well ensconced into the folklore of the North Country. Those who haven’t heard stories about him from firsthand (or at least secondhand) observers have likely learned of him at the Adirondack Museum in Blue Mountain Lake. There, a life-sized wooden sculpture memorializes him. Right alongside stands a tepee of notched logs. Each year Rondeau would build a few, then turn them into the next winter’s wood supply.

Rondeau reigned as the self-proclaimed “Mayor of Cold River,” population: one. In this very remote stretch of wilderness (does it help to know it’s 13 miles from Coreys?), he built a tiny city. The “Town Hall” served as his home. Just across stood the “Hall of Records,” part storage facility, part guest house. When you’re the only resident of such a broad swath of forest, you don’t need much more to assure your comfort and privacy. Lumber companies, having cut the logs they wanted on the land they owned, gave him permission to stay.

Noah John may have been reclusive, but he was no misanthrope. There seemed to be nothing he loved more than visitors. More than a few befriended him and came by regularly. Although Rondeau was hesitant to ask for assistance, his “inner circle” (one of whom turns out to have been my family doctor during my childhood) often left supplies in hidden caches.

The hermit kept a diary, written in his own code. He wrote poems, dashed off an occasional letter to an editor, and played the violin – not necessarily well. But subsistence activities filled most of his days – hunting, fishing, raising vegetables:

“Spring arrives about March 21 by the calendar, but the calendar doesn’t mean much in Cold River country. The last of April generally sweeps the snow away and I start planting my garden. The ground is poor; the altitude high and the season is so short that the 4th of July doesn’t come ’til the 15th of August sometimes. But I manage to cultivate a few flowers, and more important, to raise the potatoes, turnips, and carrots which go with the fall venison to carry me through the winter.”

When he got lost, he handled it with equanimity:

“I took me two weeks to go back and find out where I had been. And that’s better than Columbus ever did when he came here. He didn’t know where he was going and when he got here he didn’t know where he was and when he got back home he didn’t know where he had been.”

In 1947, Rondeau was invited to attend a sportsman’s show in New York City. He quickly grew to enjoy his sudden celebrity, becoming a regular on that circuit. Isolation didn’t suppress an entrepreneurial spirit. Soon he was adding to his meager living by selling autographed postcards and handmade souvenirs. He built a replica of his “city” along Route 3 to attract tourists. Later, he played the lead role at Santa’s Workshop by Whiteface Mountain.

Rondeau eventually had to give up his long-term seclusion. He was realistic about the limits associated with advancing age, but his decision was also hastened by the impact of the famous “big blowdown of 1950.” From then until his death, Rondeau lived “outside.”

I would have appreciated more detail on Rondeau’s early life and on his decision to leave the mainstream for a wilderness existence. At times, the text becomes repetitious. Knowing that the author has written two other books on Rondeau, and plans to do at least a couple more, I wonder if he might perhaps combine and condense to good effect.

Nonetheless, the writer is an avuncular narrator, mixing descriptions of landscape with vignettes of personalities. Ultimately he offers a profile of a singular personality in Rondeau, offering plenty of the hermit’s wisdom and homespun philosophy. Along the way, O’Hern also pays tribute to the restorative value of wilderness. I suspect I would find him a very pleasant companion for a sojourn in the woods.

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This review reflects the individual view of the reviewer, not the views of the Adirondack Center for Writing or the Enterprise.