“I find it wholesome to be alone the greater part of the time. To be in company, even with the best, is soon wearisome and dissipating. I love to be alone. I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Walden, or Life in the Woods
This 1912 photograph of Alma Pitlinzer, the allegedly spurned and jilted Cincinnati socialite who fled to the wilds of Topanga, shows her with bare feet, long, loose hair, men’s clothing, and a saw in hand, working on her homestead. The photo appeared in the June 3, 1912 issue of the San Francisco Examiner, and this appears to be the original source of the story, which appeared in newspapers all over the country. The problem with the “Hermit Girl of Topango” is that there do not appear to be any “Pitlinzers” in Cincinnati, Ohio, or in Topanga, or anywhere else. It’s possible the name is misspelled, or that it was changed to protect the woman’s identity. It’s also possible that this news item was pure invention, but there were plenty of women who came to the Santa Monica Mountains to make a life for themselves as homesteaders.
In June of 1912 a sensational news story about the “Woman Hermit of Topango Canyon” swept the nation.
“Like a chapter from a novel is the present career of Miss Alma Pitlinzer,” a handsome young woman who, wearing male attire, is living the life of the recluse, apart from all family and friends,” the San Francisco Examiner’s society pages proclaimed on June 6, 1912. According to the report, this homesteader turned her back on society after being jilted at the altar by her feckless fiance in Cincinnati, Ohio.
The article suggests the woman had a nervous breakdown—brain fever—and was sent to California to recover. While recuperating, she explored Topanga. She fell in love with the canyon, and bought a piece of land from one of the original Topanga homesteaders, identified only as “an elderly Mexican.”
The hermit then turned her energies to building a small cabin and clearing and farming her land. Seven years later, she had the misfortune of being identified by “a friend of her father’s” who “repeatedly urged her” to return home.
“‘I am living contentedly here next to nature,’ she replied. ‘Free from everyone, and I do not care to go back to the sham social life, where there is no real happiness. All I desire is to be let alone. Tell my people that I am happy and contented here in the mountains.’”
Instead of simply sharing the message with her family, this family friend appears to have brought it instead to the gossip columnists, turning Alma into a celebrity. The story appeared in numerous news publications.
The novelty here wasn’t that a woman owned a farm and worked the land—there were a number of well-documented women homesteaders in Topanga—it’s that she was a society belle, beautiful, young, and rich, and that she is described as violating societal norms. She wore her long hair down loose, she wore men’s work clothes and went barefoot. If she had been poor and middle-aged she would have been just an ordinary farm woman, not a figure of romance.
“Alma Pitlinzer” had an advantage over other hermits who unexpectedly found themselves in the spotlight. There are no “Pitlinzers” in Cincinnati or Topanga in any of the records of the time. There aren’t any of them anywhere. It seems likely that her name was misspelled or even changed to protect the woman’s real identity. It’s also possible that this story is a complete fabrication. We have only the word of the unnamed “family friend” as a source. But true, false, or a mix of the two, this headline underlines one of the key problems with being a hermit in Southern California: notoriety is often the undoing of those who seek to turn away from the word.
Tracking down hermits and imposing on them seems to be a long tradition. It’s one thing to find a place to be away from the world, and another to keep the world from beating a path to one’s cabin, cave or canyon.
Pioneering Nature Boy William Pester knew all about that. This German-born free thinker is credited with bringing the “naturmensch”—natural man—philosophy to California in the first decade of the twentieth century. Pester embraced a raw vegetarian diet, freedom from restrictive clothing, natural health and movement. He was a source of inspiration for the first generation of proto hippies—the Nature Boys—in the 1940s, and is also the inspiration for eden ahbez’s song “Nature Boy,” popularized by Nat King Cole.
In 1916, Pester made a home for himself in what was, in the beginning at least, the perfect hermitage for an anchorite: Tahquitz Canyon, on Cahuilla Indian land near Palm Springs. His notoriety as the “Hermit of Palm Springs” soon became his undoing.
Within a few years he was a major tourist attraction, visited by silent film star Rudolph Valentino and Western novelist Zane Gray, and hundreds of curiosity seekers who trekked out to the canyon in their Model T’s to see the celebrated hermit of Palm Springs. Eventually he was forced to move on.
It is unclear if eden ahbez (written in lowercase, because he believed that only the words “God” and “Infinity” should be capitalized) ever actually met Pester, but he embraced his lifestyle, including spending time in the same Palm Springs Canyon. He later lived outdoors in Topanga and on the beach in Malibu. He and his friends, including alternative lifestyle guru, actor, and writer Gypsy Boots, also followed Pester’s example. They lived outdoors in all weather, meditated, practiced disciplines like yoga, and ate a strictly vegetarian diet of raw fruits and vegetables.
Peter Howard wasn’t part of this group, but he shared some of the same philosophy. This solitary hermit was born in Ireland in 1878 and came to Hollywood right on time to work as a character actor in the early days of the film industry. He had a shack in the Hollywood Hills, and was a well-known sight, with his dogs and his donkey. Like Pester and his followers, Peter Howard ate only uncooked fruits and vegetables. He also became a tourist attraction, and scraped a living posing for snapshots with his animals.
In 1925, a Daily News article described how the hermit was abandoning Hollywood for “quieter haunts…far back in Topanga Canyon.” The story concludes that “civilization has been making the recluse too civilized for his own happiness…”
Peter, however, was “a gregarious hermit.” He had contempt for Hollywood and everything it stood for—calling it “Follywood”—but he also made his living there.
Howard was deeply religious. The philosophy he embraced was that of the Russian writer Leo Tolstoy—a sort of Christian anarchism that rejected materialism, church and state, in favor of compassion, love, voluntary poverty, and radical non violence.
“A man should be driven by spirit,” Howard told the Los Angeles Evening Citizen News in a 1961 interview.
Howard eventually built a shack near Lookout Mountain on a small parcel of land. He lived there with his animals for decades, but was living alone in a small apartment in Hollywood at the time of his death in 1969, no longer able to endure the hardships of his chosen lifestyle.
Warren D. Udell, the “Strange Hermit” of Malibu Canyon, was not gregarious. Udell built a small cabin deep in Malibu Canyon, as far away from his fellow men as he could get. He kept bees there and minded his own business. A sign posted at the entrance to the steep canyon where he lived encouraged others to leave him alone: “Mount Moriah, Climb No Higher. You’ve No Business Here.”
Unfortunately for Udell, his wealthy neighbors were not inclined to respect his privacy. According to the March 26, 1913 account in the Los Angeles Times, “several wealthy Los Angeles men, who have a hunting lodge near Calabasas, came upon the rude little cabin. Thirsty, they sought water, but were met with pistol barrels and given warning to depart.”
The story spread, and Udell began to attract “curious wanderers” who, instead of staying away, seemed to get a thrill from challenging the man, although they “always retreated before the hostile Udell’s guns.”
A year later, sheriff’s deputies posing as real estate investors tricked Udell into getting into their car, disarmed him, handcuffed him, and took him to county jail. He was sent to the Camarillo State Mental Hospital.
Udell eventually returned to his homestead. It remains wild and remote and is now part of Malibu Creek State Park. It has a special designation within the park that still retains its original homesteader’s name: Udell Gorge Nature Preserve.
Hermit Constantine Rodin (sometimes spelled Rodan) poses with his friend and advocate Judge Merrick. This photo, from the late 1940s, was featured in a Malibu Chamber of Commerce brochure about Malibu. Rodin fled the Russian army at the start of WWI and made his way to California, settling in Malibu some time before 1930. He lived quietly in a small cabin deep in what is now Solstice Canyon Park, did odd jobs for a living, and sought only peace and solitude. He seems to have been the rare hermit who not only found those things but was able to hold onto them.
The caption for this 1925 Daily News photo reads: “progress forces hermit to move.” The article that accompanied the story states that Peter Howard, the “Hollywood Hermit” was heading to Topanga Canyon, where “a man will not be troubled by steam shovels and can breathe good, fresh air.”
Malibu’s much-loved judge and historian John Merrick recounted befriending a less combative anchorite in the 1940s. Constantine Rodin (sometimes spelled Constantin Rodan), the hermit of Solstice Canyon, was a Russian refugee who fled to America at the start of the First World War. He found his way to Malibu sometime before 1930 and lived a long solitary life deep in Solstice Canyon. Rodan was a gentle soul who wanted only peace and solitude. When his home in the canyon burned in a wildfire, his neighbors helped build him a new one, and he had an advocate and friend in Judge Merrick for many years.
Longtime Topanga hermit Papa Gus also received kindness from his community. Gus arrived in the canyon in the 1950s. He was a familiar sight for more than thirty years, with his bushy beard, long overcoat and slouch hat. He lived in a remote camp atop Greenleaf Canyon with an impressive collection of old cars and junk and his beloved dogs.
Gus worked as a fire spotter for the county, and did odd jobs—he could fix anything, and often did. When the Renaissance Faire was held in Agoura Hills he worked there as a security guard. When he was gone for months in the summer it was because he was working the Northern Faire in the Bay Area. Gus knew a thousand stories about Topanga, although talking with him was a challenge because he was hearing impaired. In 1986, Gus died as he lived, alone on his mountain.
It’s a beguiling thought, isn’t it? The idea that one could set down the weight of the world, if only for a little while, and retreat to one’s own personal Walden Pond or Mount Moriah to commune with the bees when the world is too much with us. The lives of local hermits are a reminder that solitude can be both a blessing and a curse.
Alma Pitlinzer, if she was ever a real person, was every bit as much of an iconoclast as Bill Pester. Both discarded the restrictive norms of the day, but they couldn’t escape notoriety. Warren Udell struggled with mental health and persecution from the public and law enforcement. He was described as a “madman.” Peter Howard received better press than Udell, but was still forced to leave his mountain retreat. He died alone not in his hermitage in the hills but in a two-room apartment in Hollywood.
Papa Gus made the best of a life that contained both freedom and uncertainty. Nature Boy eden ahbez preached the gospel of living life as simply as possible and outside the constructs of Western culture, but he was featured in Newsweek, Life, and Time magazines, and signed a lucrative contract with RKO. The introspective Constantin Rodan appears to really have lived like a latter-day Thoreau, contemplating nature in his Malibu version of Walden Pond, but like the elusive Alma Pitlinzer, he left almost no trace behind, just a photo and a story.
The Hermit is the ninth card of the Major Arcana in the modern tarot deck. He symbolizes introspection, the search for wisdom, the path of enlightenment, and turning away worldly things. Reversed, he can represent concealment, loneliness, paranoia, isolation, and withdrawal. Illustrator Pamela Colman Smith created this iconic image of the Hermit for the 78-card Rider-Waite tarot deck first published in 1909.
In the tarot deck, the Hermit symbolizes solitude, contemplation, introspection. In literature and in stories, the hermit embodies wisdom, self-sacrifice, renunciation, mysticism and the search for enlightenment.
In the real world, the lines are blurred. Those who turn away from society but who possess wealth are reclusive and eccentric; the ones without receive less tolerant adjectives like indigent, crank, or insane. The hermits featured here all turned their backs on the world, seeking escape from heartbreak, war, or just the aggravations of the world, and then faced notoriety because of their decision. For these seekers of solitude, there was no mountain top remote enough, no canyon deep enough, no philosophy austere enough to fully silence the noise they sought to leave behind.
