The simple life

Like Thoreau, Crawford Solomon rejects the complexities of modernity. But dig into his philosophy, and things start to get complicated. Remember Dr. Kevorkian?

By Jeff Klinkenberg
Published August 26, 2007

	Crawford Solomon lives in the woods east of Gainesville almost like an aboriginal. He is a philosopher who has written an unpublished book about his unorthodox Thoreuvian type life. Audio: Crawford Solomon
[Daniel Wallace | Times]

CITRA - A misfit named Crawford Solomon walks the walk. He can talk the talk - he has been known to bend ears - but he prefers action to pontificating.

His philosophy goes back at least three decades to when he was especially worried about the fate of the Earth. He was worried that we - the human race - were killing the planet. So he dropped out to live off the land.

He planned to follow the Henry David Thoreau plan: "Simplify, simplify, simplify!" So wrote the late New England transcendentalist, who sat in silent reverie in his doorway, sauntered through the woods, played his flute and jotted down big thoughts in a journal we know today as Walden.

Thoreau, too, was considered a misfit, a Harvard graduate blessed with talent and intelligence who chose not to pursue his fortune like normal men but to live among the pines and the woodchucks.

Thoreau built his one-room cabin in 1845 and stayed two years. He didn't have to give up electric appliances or modern plumbing because they didn't exist. Unmarried, Thoreau didn't have to plead with his wife to stay with him.

Solomon Crawford, who began his back-to-nature experiment around the time Neil Armstrong walked on the moon, gave up modernity as we know it. He built himself a modest hut near Orange Lake in north-central Florida, reading books by kerosene lantern and sleeping under mosquito netting.

As the rest of us shopped at Publix, he grew and killed his own food. He had no use for toilets, or, for that matter, toilet paper.

"The whole idea was to see what was possible to live without," he says. "We share this world with other living things and use more than our share of the resources."

He is 66 now, and his once-strong body, all sinew and grace, shudders with Parkinson's disease. He doesn't know how much time he has left. Of course, he never believed in clocks or calendars anyway.

Once, he lived in a Seminole Indian-inspired chickee. Now he inhabits a trailer where friends hope he will live out his days in relative comfort. His body's thermostat is on the fritz. The forlorn trailer has an air conditioner. "I hate living like this," he says. "I feel like a failure."

The old dropout has dropped back in. No surprise: He hates the 21st century.

- - -

Everybody calls him Crawford or "Craw." He has handsome blue eyes, a salt-and-pepper beard and leathery skin more reptilian than human.

His 40-foot trailer sits in the middle of a swamp near Orange Lake, minutes from Cross Creek, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings' former stomping grounds. Pity the paramedic who has to find the place. Craw lives a mile from the pavement, down a challenging sand road with deep ditches along the side.

Shuddering, he stands next to the trailer and grabs the front-door bannister to steady himself. It shudders, too. At least the racket keeps the snakes at bay. Sometimes moccasins coil on the steps.

His gnarled feet look prehistoric. "When I was a kid," he says, "doctors said you had to wear shoes. Otherwise you'd end up with hookworm." Craw never got hookworm. "People often are wrong about a lot of things we supposedly can't live without," he declares.

He had no use for dentists either, and once treated an abscess with fasting and orange juice. After three months of horrific pain he lost the tooth.

Wife No. 2 departed after that experiment. A few years ago, wife No. 3 said her farewells. Wife No. 1, with him when he began his back-to-earth experiment, left after he razed their modest one-room house and moved them into the chickee. Wife No. 1 says today, "I don't want to have anything to do with anything about him."

"I don't blame them," he says about his spouses. "I'm hard to live with."

- - -

At first he self-treated the Parkinson's with plants. Eventually he found a Gainesville doctor who prescribed modern pharmaceuticals. "It'll take a while for my medicine to take effect," he says, a bent figure in a dusty chair, "then I'll be okay for a bit."

He wants to talk about his book, Heaven on Earth: The Thoughts and Adventures of a Modern Misfit. It is not in bookstores but can be found - of all places - on the Internet. The ultimate low-tech guy, Solomon wrote his book in longhand. Friends put it online. A challenging read, it's at www.crawfordsolomon.com. At least it's free.

A memoir and philosophical treatise, it contains practical advice on building shelters and living without toilets. The squeamish should avoid the following sentence: He squats over a hole and cleans himself with water from a pitcher. His book is humble in spots and self-righteous in others.

In his opinion, here is what is wrong with the world: There are too many of us. Reduce population - dramatically - and everything else falls into place. Global warming? Gone. Poisons? Gone. Balance among living things is restored.

He believes in negative population growth. He believes governments eventually will need to regulate family size. He favors abortion, infanticide - killing sick and deformed babies - and physician-assisted suicide for ill and suffering people like himself.

"Do I have your attention?"

Yes, he has our attention.

He didn't practice what he preached. He has three grown children of his own, one by each wife. Zeba, his elder son, teaches yoga in Mount Dora. Daughter Ariel, now in California, belongs to that brass-knuckles environmental group Earth First. Adam, in Gainesville, is an auto mechanic.

"He wasn't like other dads," says Zeba, 35. "We'd go mullet fishing, duck hunting, sleep at night in the chickee, work in the garden."

Crawford Solomon is against what he calls "industrial farming" because he says mass-scale agriculture promotes population growth and poisons the environment. "In Florida, before the arrival of the Europeans, there were about 200,000, maybe 300,000 natives," he says. "They were hunter-gatherers, primarily, and that allowed them to live in harmony with their environment. We need to return to that kind of self-sustaining lifestyle."

Florida's population is 18-million. One study suggests it will double by 2060. The study, by the University of Florida's GeoPlan Center, doesn't say whether drinking water will disappear or whether panthers or even raccoons will survive in diminished wilderness.

Craw says the real world - the world of television watching, mall shopping, cell phone-toting modern citizens - is not real. The unreal world of endless materialism is "based on mythical lies" that spawn "ritual lies, a world in which image" is "ultimately everything, a grand symbolic soup symbolizing little more than nothingness."

A good friend sometimes asks the modern misfit: "Craw, what the hell are you talking about?"

- - -

Born in rural Jacksonville, Craw speaks in a majestic swamp-cabbage drawl. His paternal granddaddy was a Baptist preacher who spanked his grandson for reading the comics on Sunday. The old man wasn't all bad: He also introduced the boy to bass fishing in the St. Johns River.

Thoreau believed all children needed instruction in fishing and hunting as a way to understand nature. Craw learned about the fish and the birds and the plants and the way everything coexisted. After serving in Vietnam - he has nothing good to say about his military experience - he studied philosophy at the University of Florida but dropped out before he got his master's degree.

The brilliant Thoreau grew beans and made pencils when he needed an income. Craw became a fishing guide.

A pediatrician and Dartmouth College professor, Dr. Alan Rozycki, 67, was a steady client. He describes his friend as probably the most interesting person he has ever known.

"My three sons and I learned a lot about fishing from him," Rozycki says. "The highlight of our visits was always the moment when Crawford pulled the boat ashore and began picking plants for lunch. He'd also come up with grubs that he and my boys would eat. You know, before the writer Carl Hiaasen invented that roadkill-eating character Skink, Crawford was eating roadkill. I think possums and raccoons mostly, but probably deer and alligators."

In 1995, on one of those fishing trips, Rozycki was listening to one of Craw's sad lectures about the even sadder state of the world. Noting his friend's tremble, Rozycki said, "Craw, if you're ever going to write a book about your beliefs, you need to do it now. You don't have all the time in the world."

- - -

The medicine takes hold. Crawford can lead a tour of his land. "Watch out for snakes," he says, walking toward the chickee.

"I hate not sleeping in my chickee," he says, once inside. "I can't lie flat anymore because it feels like I'm suffocating. I loved hearing the frogs and the owls. Sometimes in the morning I'd hear a crunch and there were deer under the window."

When the sandhill cranes flew over, honking in the dusk, friends saw his eyes well with tears. When his father died, he never cried, and he didn't attend the funeral.

He shows off the trellis where he hopes to grow grapes. His tomatoes, squashes, green peppers and collards are in the ground. He can no longer eat solid food.

His caretaker, Suru Seliger, 56, prepares meals in the new Cuisinart. She purees his vegetables.

He kept the electric deep-freeze because "freezers use very little energy" but got rid of the refrigerator because "refrigerators waste energy." He built an icebox for perishables.

The great outdoors continues to be his toilet, though civilized visitors can use the bathroom if they don't mind sitting atop a bucket. A while back he tore out the porcelain throne.

Spiders dangle from silk strands over his living room hammock. Walking sticks are propped up against the window. A desktop computer that has never been online continues to atrophy. A guitar leans against the wall. When the medicine stops his trembling, he can play. Homemade songs include one he calls Poor-Mouth.

Richer we get, poorer we feel.

Run for the money. Beg, borrow and steal.

Then poor-mouth, poor-mouth.

- - -

He reads when able to concentrate. He has a shelf full of nature paperbacks but no longer reads Thoreau, who disappointed him by leaving the woods and moving back into town.

His new hero is Jack Kevorkian, the assisted suicide doctor who recently got out of prison.

After supper he watches a dusty 13-inch television. "The portal to insanity," he calls it. "The central nervous system for madmen out of control."

He is talking mainly about what he sees on public television.

"Well, there are some interesting things on," he allows. "Perhaps TV is going to be the Earth's salvation if we can use it to educate."

"Oh, Craw, television is pathetic!" his caretaker, Suru, blurts out.

Recently he watched his first episode of American Idol. He says he felt like an anthropologist "watching those pathetic dupes who thought they were about to realize the American dream."

- - -

When Thoreau was dying of tuberculosis, a friend asked if he had made peace with his maker. "One life at a time," Thoreau famously said. He died with the words "Moose" and "Indian" on his lips.

Crawford, a professed pagan, says he is in the process of putting his affairs in order. Burn him and scatter his ashes in the woods.

He says he doesn't feel sorry for himself. "Parkinson's is what it is. It's the way of the world. We live and we die."

He sleeps in a recumbent chair. He sits much of the day in the same recumbent chair. It's his command center. It's next to his desk.

There is not much to fear out in the swamp other than the snakes and the gators, but he locks the door anyway. He can't grab his shotgun from the chair - the shotgun leans behind a door - but his .357 magnum, his "Dirty Harry" revolver, is in the desk drawer, within reach, should he ever need it.

Jeff Klinkenberg can be reached at (727) 893-8727 or klink@sptimes.com.

ON">href="mailto:klink@sptimes.com" mce_href="mailto:klink@sptimes.com">klink@sptimes.com.

ON THE WEB

Song of Solomon

To hear Crawford Solomon's song Poor-Mouth, go to life.tampabay.com.

[Last modified August 24, 2007, 17:27:19]