Those who feel the need to call him anything call him White Stone. Two words, sometimes four, as in "crazy ol' White Stone." White had a loving mother given name but had seen no use to use it in the 80 plus years he lived apart from people. Stored away in a mental closet, unused and covered up by a lifetime's worth of saved bits and pieces of what he considered to have more more value, his given name grew dustier with each changing season until he could not recall it.
Once a gentle property owner discovered him kneeling motionless in his creek and asked him for his name. He knew White had plainly heard but saw no sign that White had moved or spoke or even noticed he was there. "Whitestone," he replied to no one in particular, his study of the pebble in the stream holding his attention was more important than his name.
Future fleeting glances were explained, "It's jest crazy ol' White Stone."
White exists in the now. He has no tags that people have to have to give them a sense of uniqueness, while binding them together beneath a common cloak. He marked none of his yesterdays or yearned for tomorrows. His birthdate was fastened to a page in a decayed family Bible. Cars were seldom seen for half his life and by then he saw no need for them, so no license needed. He never worked for money, and so, no Social Security card. He has no known residence, no visible means of support. His place of birth has faded in the Bible with its date. He has no beginning and no end.
He has no height that can be measured, short of stretching him, because he seldom stands. He usually squats, kneels, and often even lays, every place he stops, which can be anywhere. And when he moves he hunches along. He always seems to be hunting pennies on the ground. His weight too, is just as vague because his scrawny frame is draped with cable-lean muscles beneath his weathered skin.
His hair is no longer the thick flowing mane of even ten years ago. Now it's mostly white, which is another reason people say he got his name, and peppered with stands of black fighting to put off being white. His self administered haircuts, by feel, with whatever he has at hand, leave his hair looking more ravaged and pillaged than trimmed. His mutilated hair is the first thing people notice about him. It engrosses the viewer and distracts him from getting to the substance of the man. White's haircuts are so shocking to the eye they once sparked a fad that engulfed every teenager in four school districts. This so enraged the parents they forgot the do it yourself haircut financial savings and the fact, at least the kids didn't smear mud throughout their hair.
His beard is one of those that never seems to grow. A quarter inch of salt and pepper jut stiffly from his face. Like his hair, his beard also suffers from whatever edge he has at hand. He never uses a bathtub or a shower. In spite of his appearance, he smells of sun, fresh grasses and windblown trees from denning up where he happens to be when sleep calls. He smells like a potpourri some Rodeo Drive winsome society miss might pay premium prices for.
He always wears the same old clothes day after day. He has no other clothes because he feels he can only wear so many, and more clothes than you need end up owning you. He wears what he finds, or he can make from scraps of cloth and plants until it falls apart. His other suit, the one he wears when he wants to move freely about the forest and the brush, is simply a scant breechclout made from a skin he'd tanned, and he wore it at the ready beneath his public clothes. His feet are almost always bare, and their soles are nearly bullet proof. When it snows or freezes he wraps his feet with hides stuffed with grasses, newspapers or other handy things he finds and continues on.
His social skills consist of simply keeping out of people's way the best he can. His interaction with the females of his kind, who den up in the anchored giant huts in the places they called towns, could best be summed by a couple of lines from a Waddie Mitchell poem, "He never had too much to do with wimmin, for bashful an' shy was he. But then, he knowed that they was poison, so he always let them be." Long before the power lines appeared a voluptuous siren cast a spell on him and lured him to her den and bed with heavy stove-cooked meals. But his restlessness against the chains of domesticity she wanted him to wear, and a few of White's strange habits, such as retiring to the grass outside to sleep and invoking coyotes into eerie concerts with imitations of their howls caused her to lift her spell.
His eyes are eyes that seldom talk because they've seen worlds inside of worlds that few have seen. Worlds of interactive worlds where there are no rules, no rhyme, no reason, to those who've never ventured there. His eyes, expressionless, so light grey that at first glance, they appear to be pure white. Which is another reason people claim he's named.
He gives no sign that others are there as he goes about wisply. His hunching gait covers up the fluid gracefulness with which he really moves. He never stumbles or hesitates or has his pathway blocked. He moves among close obstacles and never feels their touch. The hidden gentleness of his step never leaves a sound. He walks among debris that may be scattered all around, and to the naked eye, and to the naked ear, he leaves no tracks, he leaves no sign that he had passed at all. To those around, the ease at which he travels is unnatural, an oddity. They can't put their finger on it but they know it, whatever "it" is, makes them ill at ease.
He has scars that are the result of youthfulness. Close examination of his forehead reveals the talon scars left by an owl who thought the coonskin cap White found was lunch. White had seen the owl hunting, and teased it by bouncing across the clearing, making the stuffed tail flop as briskly as he could. Distracted by a spider floating on a web, he stopped and knelt to watch. When he came to, he was laying back between his feet. He has a fist sized bumpy section on his left calf from when he and a sow bear with young tied a foot race to a tree after he slipped up on her and her cubs and slapped her on the butt. He assumed that he could beat her to the tree like he had done all the other bears before her. He was off by less than a stride.
His writing skills are marginal to the point his signature is an "X". His reading skills are only slightly better and require finger aid and silent, moving lips. Numbers beyond one are foreign to him, he's vaguely aware that they exist because he's heard people say, "I've seen it hundreds a times." His understanding of numerical relationships, such as ten flocks of geese seen ten times equals a hundred flocks, is non-existent. There are few instances where one does not serve him adequately. White's numbers are, lead goose, the next goose top, the goose behind the next goose top, and so on, in the flock that flew North-north East one sharp spring morning below the overhanging cloud that nearly touched the ground. Everything in White's world is different. He sees nothing that can be clumped together, each thing he sees is unique.
The short time he went to official school he was regularly whipped by the teacher for "daydreaming." He wasn't daydreaming, he was focused on a fly sitting on his desk, or the hair of the child ahead of him, comparing it to other hair he'd studied, or the grain pattern on the desk top, comparing textures, ring widths to other wood grains he'd stared at or the initials carved by others long before.
The other children, and most of their parents, said that he was "tetched." His father whipped him regularly because he dilly dallied through his chores. His curiosity about things seldom allowed him to finish any task he was assigned. Everywhere White Stone looked was a story waiting to be discovered, a mystery to be uncovered. He was touched alright. Touched with a sense of wonderment and unbridled curiosity about the world around him.
White Stone's voracious curiosity kept him longer and longer and took him further and further until one day he didn't return. No search was made. His parents, his five sisters and his six brothers knew they wouldn't see him again. White intended in his mind that he was going to go home to where the family was. He just kept getting delayed by the wonders where he was at at the moment, until he felt so at home wherever he was, he was home. While most boys were busy being boys White was busy being one with the worlds he explored.
His intimacy with his mother earth frees White from any need to work. His mother provides him with all his wants he only needs to take from the immense bounty before him. He knows how to slip into a pond and stalk a swimming goose or duck, how to pull fish from the water with his bare hands, how to ambush deer as they move along their trails from feeding to water. He even gathers road kill if he comes upon it before it starts to decay too much. But mostly he's a nuts and berries, roots and tubers man. Money is as foreign a concept to him as Algebra. He has no experience whatsoever with money beyond having seen it from time to time. If offered a choice between a hundred dollar bill and a carrot, White takes the carrot.
His favorite colors are those of the earth. He has a particular fondness for the hue of mud, especially when it closely matches with the colors of the season when the earth prepares for sleep. He liberally applies it to every bit of bare skin and to his beard and hair. He doesn't apply it evenly because nature never does. Streaked and mottled it blends his outline to the earth's own mud tones. He knows Day Glo tinted objects, Coca Cola red, and tin foil silver, are the colors of man and do not occur in nature.
He has no friends, best or otherwise. The closet thing to a friend was the weird fellow who did his best to follow him about for awhile during the time the beaver dam appeared and turned Alts Rapids to Alts Pool on Chisway creek. He watched White for hours at a time and pressured him with silly things like why the entrance to a hut should always face the east and how he knew a fish was where he reached and why he pounded his tinder with a rock, and then he wrote the answers in a note book.
The last White heard of him was when he got into his new '38 Ford Coupe and drove down the rutty firelane out of White's earshot. He changed his name from Ersatch Epsten and submitted his book, titled "Jon Voyager's Survival Method - The Art Of Surviving Anywhere On Nothing," to Cotswain, Cotswain, Cotswain & Shantz, Ltd. His book about his survival method made him very rich and courted by the postwar Pentagon Chiefs in Cold War early days as the pre-eminent authority on survival techniques.
When you live outside the envelope of expectations you make people uncomfortable. White makes people very uncomfortable because they aren't sure what he is going to do next. When he drops to his hands and knees and stares at a cigarette butt for hours, with his head changing angles as it moves up and down, observers think he's mentally unbalanced and about to go berserk. Some people intensely hate him and advocate his killing, some people avoid him like the plague because they're afraid his affliction will rub off. Some are simply annoyed by his presence and look down on him. He evokes dislike because he's different than anyone they know. There is safety in numbers among those of your own kind. White has no kind.
He had been threatened many times and ignored them all. His gaze appears to look beyond you even though you're bathed in it. Now that he is in the evening of his century, few would waste their energies on some one so old and scrawny. The few who would were always deterred by his gaze alone. It was a vibrational thing, the resolute certainty in his mind he would prevail in any test of combat, eliminated any need to actually have to do it. His confidence created waves of self doubt in his antagonists. There were some who forced themselves to go beyond their doubts. White used only the effort he had to use to end an attack and then immediately dismissed it from his mind.
White is finding it harder and harder to avoid contact with people. His life spans the change from remote mountain cabins to trendy tourist developments, from seeing humans every month or so to difficulty seeing around them. His life has run parallel to electronic devices being rich folks doo-dads to being children's momentary diversions. He'd started his quest for knowledge in pristine wilderness and ended up among the jumble of the concrete tracks that people made to keep their motor cars in line. He was the master of primitive efficient living in a grab up, use once, throw away, get another world. He knew the treasures he'd gathered studying nature and its ways in thousands upon thousands of jammed packed days were of value only to him. When he allowed himself the luxury of reflection, he scorned the wisdom of human kind that made them scurry to and fro possessing more and more until they were themselves possessed by the very things they sought.
The closet thing to what others call a hobby is unraveling the mysteries that have been in front of him all of his decades. What made that mark upon the earth, and how, and when, and why? What does that bug do all day and where does it go at night? Where is that bee going? That beaver chewing on that tree, he knew where it was two rains ago, when its gnaw marks were catalogued among the marks in White's mind. He knew most of the animals who lived with him outdoors as individuals, each ones unique characteristics memorized. Tracks told him kind, and weight and sex, and when and how fast they were made. They even told him appearances and the mental condition of the maker. A stride or two of tracks is all he needs to pick the track maker out of the crowd.
His pastime, if he has one, is reading all the stories that nature has arranged to be recorded on the ever changing canvas of her face. Nothing moves upon the face of the earth without leaving a track and White's pastime, actually White's obsession, is read the stories of the tracks.
His understanding of nature makes him fearless. He acknowledges that all must die and for every thing a season because he understands and accepts the relationship of things upon the earth and thus the need for such. Eventually, each must die that each must live, there is nothing wasted. There is no choice but to play a part. To White, the blending of one's self with the earth was nature's way. When all is examined, when all is said, when all is done, it is the only way.
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