NR | 1h 19m | Documentary| 2022
Award-Winning
Winner of the audience award at the recent Glasgow Film Festival, “The Hermit of Treig” is a beautifully filmed, heartfelt, and provocative documentary about Ken Smith, who’s spent the last 40 years living off the grid in a log cabin he built himself. He’s the singular inhabitant of a rather large copse of trees that stands on the otherwise rather barren rim of Loch Treig, in Lochaber, in the Scottish Highlands.
Ken’s decision to live alone transpired after he found out that his parents had passed away while he was on an almost 22,000-mile trek across Canada’s Yukon Territory (about which he’s written a book titled “The Way of the Hermit”). When he learned the news, his grief was staggering to the point that he took to wandering the UK.
The Day-to-Day
We follow this modern-day Robinson Crusoe as he demonstrates various log cabin survival techniques: gardening, fishing, doing laundry in his outdoor bathtub, tapping sap from birch trees for birch beer, as well as the 27-mile (one way) hike into town to send and receive mail. That’s no small feat for a 74-year-old. Ken also vints wine. His homegrown wine cellar tallies some 80 gallons of homemade wine that he hopes will fuel a rousing party at his wake.We eventually learn that, as a young man, he’d had a hyperviolent run-in with some skinheads at a disco. They left him for dead, with five holes in his skull. He therefore keeps obsessive notes and diaries and meticulously tracks and photo-documents everything he does. Caught between having had his memory violently tampered with and the early stages of dementia starting to blossom, his main focus in life appears to be an attempt to remember as much of life as possible before it all goes away.
Footage is shown of the first log cabin he built, which was a real DIY work of art. Tragically, it burned to the ground while he was out and about. He built a second one. That one stayed up.
Ken owns a radio for weather forecasts, a wristwatch, and a few cameras. As luck would have it, a friend gifted him a GPS beacon in 2019, just days before he suffered a stroke. He sent an SOS, which first pinged a station in Houston, Texas, and then relayed to local Scottish responders. Emergency personnel choppered in to Loch Treig and flew Smith to a hospital, where he recovered until he was deemed well enough to return to his cabin.
When presented with the choice of civilization and a more comfortable materialistic existence, or remaining in his cabin in the copse, it’s a no-brainer that Ken’s going back to Walden Pond, er, Loch Treig. It brings to mind a Henry David Thoreau quote: “I would rather sit on a pumpkin, and have it all to myself, than be crowded on a velvet cushion.”
Life Lessons
Debuting film director Lizzie MacKenzie spent seven years getting to know Ken before he allowed her to commence filming. She gently coaxes out his history: “Was there ever a romance?” The young Ken was ruggedly handsome. With a painterly eye, MacKenzie documents his challenges of living in the wild. Her cinematography captures a long series of beautiful shots, any of which would make exceptional still-life paintings. The film also has a great soundtrack comprising Scottish music-influenced folk music, very similar to Alexi Murdoch’s song “Some Day Soon.”
He also touches on a couple of other spiritual things: He likes to speak kindly to his yellow roses and rub their petals a bit, because he knows plants have emotions. When he had a stroke and prayed to God while lying in the snow, he suddenly felt a great calm and inner peace. After the stroke and the accompanying head injury, he has an unusual symptom: When he closes his eyes, he sees static-y zigzag-y waves and lines, like on a TV screen except in bright colors. This is something that apparently can happen when third-eye visions commence.
I might have to read his book, as I’m a fan of wilderness writer Farley Mowat, survivalist-author Tom Brown Jr., and fly-fisherman and author John Gierach. Here’s a fun excerpt from Ken’s book I found:
“Pine martens might look heavenly but they are a highly destructive, astonishingly intelligent, and very powerful menace of the most supreme order of mustelids. This spring they have already turned one of my barns inside out on their rampage for food. I say they are Beauty and the Beast rolled into one devilish creature. They drive me hopping mad.”
Ultimately, I was struck by his imperviousness to loneliness and his delight in the simple things of nature. “The Hermit of Treig” is reminiscent of a quote by another of Ken Smith’s kindred spirits:
“You are wrong if you think joy emanates only or principally from human relationships. God has placed it all around us. It is everything and anything we might experience. We just have to have the courage to turn against out habitual lifestyle and engage in unconventional living.”—Christopher McCandless, adventurer
The road less traveled is how all spiritual seekers start their journey. Ken Smith would appear to be a deeply religious man, but as a stoic Scotsman, he doesn’t wear his faith on his sleeve and prefers to worship in the cathedrals of the wilderness rather than the cathedrals of man. I prefer both, especially after having recently discovered that when scientists magnified cross-sections of human DNA strands (as opposed to looking at them lengthwise), they were revealed to be the exact patterns depicted in various famous rose windows of the great European cathedrals. How did Christian monks know about things like that in the 15th century? Art imitates life. As McCandless says, God is everywhere, always.
