Sometime in the 1850s or ’60s, at a terrible moment in U.S. history, a strange man seemed to sprout, out of nowhere, into the rocky landscape between New York City and Hartford. The word “strange” hardly captures his strangeness. He was rough and hairy, and he wandered around on back roads, sleeping in caves. Above all, he refused to explain himself. As one newspaper put it: “He is a mystery, and a very greasy and ill-odored one.” Other papers referred to him as “the animal” or (just throwing up their hands) “this uncouth and unkempt ‘What is it?’”

But the strangest thing about the stranger was his suit.

In summer and in winter, in every possible kind of weather, the man wore, from head to toe, an outrageous outfit he seems to have made himself: rough leather patches stitched together with long leather strips, like a quilt. It was stiff, awkward, stinky and brutally heavy. It looked like knight’s armor made out of baseball gloves. To anyone encountering him on a quiet country lane, he must have seemed almost unreal: a huge slab of brown, twice as wide as a normal man, his suit creaking and squeaking with every step.

In the years following the Civil War, the wandering stranger became an object of curiosity, then a frequent subject of the newspapers. People gave him a name: the Old Leatherman.

“I suppose that many of the readers of your valuable paper have heard of the ‘old leather man,’ ” wrote someone from Rye, N.Y., in 1870. “Hearing the reports about this singular recluse, I, in company with others, paid his haunts a visit.”

The Old Leatherman was a sort of real-life Northeastern Sasquatch. Curious citizens went plunging into the woods to investigate. What they found surprised them. The Old Leatherman’s caves were orderly, complete with primitive fireplaces, sleeping areas and stores of food (meat, hickory nuts). Under one slab of rock, he had dug out an apple cellar. In some forests, he kept well-tended gardens.

Month after month, people watched the Old Leatherman clomp past their farms and through their woods and right up the main streets of their tiny towns. At mealtimes, he would stop at sympathetic households — the same ones, over and over — to ask, with a grunt, for food. He rarely spoke, and when he did his words were clipped, strange. In the silence, rumors grew. People speculated that the Old Leatherman was French, or French Canadian, or Portuguese. They said that he couldn’t speak at all, or that he just couldn’t speak English, or that he spoke English perfectly but pretended not to. They said he came from a family in Hartford named Brown. They said he was immune to rattlesnake bites. The more he walked, the more fascinated people became. Year after year, the Old Leatherman was like a song stuck in the whole region’s head.

As residents compared notes, as newspaper coverage snowballed, some actual facts became clear. For one thing, it turned out that the Old Leatherman was traveling great distances. His network of caves spanned at least 100 miles. Also, his wanderings weren’t random — they were regular and repetitive. In an effort to map his route, people set up sting operations in the woods; they tailed him from town to town.

Finally, in the mid-1880s, people realized something astonishing: The Old Leatherman was walking in a giant loop, roughly 365 miles around. It stretched from the Hudson River in the west to the Connecticut River in the east, from mountains in the north to beaches in the south. Along the way, it passed through something like 50 towns. One full circuit usually took him 34 days. “His coming can be calculated with almost as much certainty as that of an eclipse,” one newspaper wrote. Another said, “So regular are his habits that it is often said that he is the only sure thing that farmers can depend upon in this age of uncertainty.”

Soon, the Old Leatherman became a full-blown media phenomenon. The Hartford Globe published a front-page article complete with a timetable of his travels. In small towns, people lined the streets to watch him pass. Schoolteachers let their students out of class to give him treats. A shop offered promotional Old Leatherman postcards. Artists produced woodcuts and paintings. Photographers hid cameras in doorways, or behind hanging laundry, to capture his image.

The Old Leatherman never sought the attention. If anything, he avoided it. He went out of his way to skirt the region’s big cities — Hartford, Bridgeport, New Haven — and if a homeowner got too inquisitive, he would walk away and never come back. Once, in Woodbury, Conn., someone presented the Old Leatherman with some recent articles about him. “He grunted over them,” the newspaper account read, “but showed no enthusiasm at finding himself famous.”

Who was he? Why was he doing this? People were obsessed. But try as they might, no one could figure it out. “One of the most noted philologists in the State spoke to him in a half-dozen different languages,” The New York Times reported in 1884. “He could get no reply but a guttural sound which meant nothing, and which was more animal than human in its character.”

In the absence of real information, people were happy to invent things. Theories emerged. The Old Leatherman, one man claimed, was disguising himself to evade police — he was “a fugitive from justice and a Negro.” Or he was a wealthy businessman, brought low by a fire, mourning the death of his fiancée.

In the end, one origin story conquered all the rest. It appeared in 1884, in The Waterbury Daily American, under the headline “The Mystery Solved.” Although it was fiction, it spread so far, so fast, that it came to be accepted as truth. In this version, the Old Leatherman was a Frenchman named Jules Bourglay. As a young man, he fell in love with the daughter of a wealthy leather merchant. But the merchant disapproved of the match, and so he issued a test: Jules could marry his daughter only if he joined the company and, over the course of one year, prove himself. Things went great until, near the end, Jules made a big investment — right before the market crashed. The company was ruined. The marriage was forbidden, and Jules, driven mad by grief, moved to America, where he stitched himself this suit of leather scraps and walked alone, in circles, for the rest of his life.

It was real potboiler, a simmering stew of classic 19th-century anxieties: class, economic bubbles, madness, immigration. And yet (and so?) people believed it. Eventually, the name Jules Bourglay would appear on the Old Leatherman’s gravestone.

In the meantime, year after year, namelessly trailing an ever-expanding cloud of stories, the Old Leatherman continued to walk.

Today, the Old Leatherman is one of those stories that you either really deeply know or have never heard of at all. I discovered it by accident, 14 years ago. I was having a perfectly normal day, minding my own business, reading a book about local caves, when suddenly this absolute MOLTEN CHUNK OF AMERICAN LORE leaped out of the pages and installed himself in my brain. The Old Leatherman hit me with almost religious force. He was a perfect little parable about something both universal and, to me, very personal: the tension between alienation and belonging, rejection and rejecting. Who gets to belong to a group? What are the smallest possible triggers for inclusion or exclusion? And what happens when someone flips that dynamic: when the individual is the one rejecting the group — rejecting, in fact, the whole society? But also refusing to go away?

To the people in my life (friends, family, editors) my infatuation with the Old Leatherman quickly became a running joke. More than once, my wife has banned me from discussing him in our house. I’ve had out-of-body experiences where I have watched myself droning on, unable to stop, making acquaintances late for trains. But what was I supposed to do? He struck me as a perfect existentialist hero: someone who spurned the false comforts of society, who stood, by choice, out in the cold harsh wind of reality, taking it full-blast in the face. The Old Leatherman was like Melville’s Bartleby the Scrivener, except that he refused to even say, “I would prefer not to.” This guy, I thought, had it all figured out. He managed to remain a part of things while holding himself apart.

In my private fantasy of myself, I was a spiritual descendant of the Old Leatherman. I, too, felt alienated from society. The world annoyed me — enraged me — in 10 million different ways. I spent my childhood pinging between Oregon and California, between apartments and houses, between stepparents. I have always been odd, anxious, introverted. I sometimes burst into tears at strange moments.

Lately, I have found myself thinking, more and more, of the Old Leatherman. The 21st century, unfortunately, turns out to be the perfect moment to be obsessed with his story. America keeps spasming, with increasing violence, in many of the same ways it spasmed in the 1800s. The Old Leatherman looped his loops during an era of assassination, insurrection, Civil War, impeachment, economic collapse and racial terror. He walked during the rise of Reconstruction and the crimes of “Redemption.” All around him, the landscape was being transformed: forests fell, church spires climbed, downtowns burned and rose again. He watched farms die and railroads boom and aqueducts stretch between cities. We have no idea what the Old Leatherman thought of any of this, or if he thought of it at all — and that is exactly the point. All we know is that he kept walking.

Every morning, as I struggled to metabolize the daily news, I found myself dreaming of dropping out of society, following in his footsteps, knocking on the doors he knocked on, sitting in the caves he sat in. In the same way other people fantasized about moving to Canada, I fantasized about walking the Old Leatherman’s loop.

But how? As a practical itinerary, the loop turned out to be tricky. It was regular but also elusive: a network of highways, country lanes, backwoods trails and railroad tracks that could shift, subtly, on his tiniest whim. (Once, when one of his regular households got a pet dog, the Old Leatherman never stopped there again.) As one of the great Old Leatherman researchers, Allison Albee, has put it: “All effort to tie directions he is said to have followed into a single, contiguous pattern seems utterly futile.” Nevertheless, I tried. I visited research archives, made long lists, studied hand-drawn maps. I tapped into the knowledge of other Old Leatherman obsessives — a scattered group of amateur enthusiasts who have been stockpiling data points for 150 years. I spoke with Steve Grant, a journalist who walked the Old Leatherman’s loop for The Hartford Courant in 1993. (Grant told me, with a real sense of loss, that most of his maps are gone: years ago, some other Old Leatherman-o-phile borrowed them and never gave them back.) I pored over an online cave guide compiled by Lee-Stuart Evans, an outdoorsy Englishman transplanted to Connecticut, and basically wore out my copy of Dan W. DeLuca’s heroically thorough book “The Old Leather Man: Historical Accounts of a Connecticut and New York Legend.”

Eventually I cobbled together what I thought was a reasonable outline of the loop. It was a bizarre travel itinerary — as if someone closed their eyes and drew, with a shaky hand, the most random possible cross-section of small Northeastern towns. There are once-bustling river ports (Ossining, Old Saybrook) and former manufacturing centers (Bristol, Terryville, Plymouth) and destination antique-shopping towns (Woodbury). You could live 1,000 very full lives and never think about any of these places.

But that was also its appeal. There is nothing obvious about this route. The Old Leatherman was giving me an excuse to step outside my own life — to look at old American places, firsthand, slowly, to think about how they had changed. To walk around like a weirdo, knocking randomly on doors, talking to people whom I had no business talking to.

I just needed the right inspiration to start.

I started walking on Nov. 6, 2024. For months, I realized, I had been living inside of screens, vibrating on poisonous frequencies, and now the inside of my skull was itching and all human language felt like packing peanuts in my mouth. I had a very strong impulse to move. So I grabbed a backpack and drove down to the Old Leatherman’s grave.

The cemetery is just off the Hudson River, in Ossining, N.Y., on a street called Revolutionary Road. It is, by American standards, ancient: the headstones are thin, with fancy font and odd spellings (“In Memmory”) and little carved pictures full of feeling. The memorial to the Old Leatherman is a big rock with a plaque. My plan was to start at the end of his journey and move clockwise, unspooling the story of his life. I stood there, for a good long meditative while. And then, like the Old Leatherman, I walked.

I walked north, toward downtown Ossining. The day was strangely warm — 80 degrees. People’s yards were full of leftover Halloween decorations: giant skeletons, the Grim Reaper, demon pumpkins. It was leaf season, so I tromped next to, and sometimes on top of, huge piles of crispy golden-brown leaves. All the green life of the year, dead, heaped up on the side of the road. I passed a historic tavern where George Washington might have slept. I found a $10 bill on the sidewalk. In people’s yards, I saw a Gadsden flag (“Don’t Tread on Me”) and a United States flag so tattered it looked as if it had been through the Civil War.

For the next several months, off and on, I walked.

Day by day, I would load my backpack with hard-boiled eggs and gas-station snacks, then trudge up roads toward the points of interest on my map.

From Ossining, I went to Briarcliff Manor, where one of the Old Leatherman’s caves still sits tucked into the middle of a neighborhood, near a dead-end sign. Then to Chappaqua, where the Clintons live. In Lewisboro, I walked past a house where the Old Leatherman used to knock on the drain pipe so the owner would give him coffee and sandwiches. (I knocked; no one was home.) I passed a house where the Old Leatherman felt so comfortable that he used to go inside to eat when the weather was bad — until, one calamitous day, the family brought out a watermelon and set it on the table, and the Old Leatherman stood up and walked out and never stopped at their house again.

I walked 13 miles one day, 15 miles another day. Eighteen miles. Twenty miles.

In Woodbury, I walked to the site of Alexander Gordon Sr.’s tannery, where the Old Leatherman used to stop to collect leather scraps and drink from the water trough and where he once allowed Gordon to oil up his suit. (It is now a liquor store.)

Very slowly, clockwise, I crawled around the loop on my big giant map.

I have to say: right away, walking made me feel better. Every morning, when I stepped onto the road, I got a little less angry. It’s easy to hate the world when it’s just an abstraction that lives in your phone. It’s harder when you are out there in it, really looking, interacting. Tiny moments felt hugely healing. On the edge of Ossining, a woman at a gas station called out, asking if I would help her with something — and I was sure it was going to be some kind of scam, but it turned out she just couldn’t figure out how to get her gas cap back on, and I helped her, and she said, “Thank you for your kindness.”

I felt relieved to be living in reality again, following the small rhythm of my legs over the big rhythm of the landscape, noticing the world, the houses under the clouds. Block by block, mile by mile, I felt my soul begin to unclench — like one of those mattresses that are shipped, supercompressed, in a tiny box. Stepping into the world opened the box. Step by step, as the days and weeks passed, I felt my crushed soul stretching out to find its dimensions, expanding to fill the huge space of the whole expanding universe.

I marveled, again and again, at the way the past and present sit on top of each other. I walked past 18th-century mansions with electric gates and private basketball courts. I saw decrepit houses that looked held together more by air than by wood. I ate a Ben & Jerry’s ice cream cone while sitting on a rock where George Washington once allegedly ate his dinner. One day I stood staring, fascinated, at a decrepit brick house built in 1790, its windows broken in a way that made it look somehow like the embodiment of the fall of the American empire — and as I stood there a Cybertruck drove by.

On some days, the walking was heartbreakingly lovely. The names of certain roads still make me sigh. Wood Road, Gage Road, Spring Lake Road, Judds Bridge Road. Huge territories felt like outdoor museums: curated collections of old stone walls, curving gently and rising with the land. The wide quiet beauty of old New England. I spent many hours alone with birds. I watched a giant woodpecker, perched on a thin rotten tree, pecking so hard that the whole tree shook and swayed, pumping its red head until giant chunks of bark flew off, and it seemed as if the woodpecker was about to peck the whole thing apart and go plunging to the ground. Hawks screamed at me for invading their space, or they glided silently over my head, staring down. I startled probably 10,000 squirrels — and as they shot off through the dry leaves, they were so disproportionately loud that sometimes I thought they were bears.

I had plenty of bad times too. There were days so cold my hands stung, even in gloves, inside my coat pockets, and the wind whipped up tornadoes of snow, and I could feel my mustache hairs freezing and crunching in the steam from my nose. Other days, just as cold, I was sweating so hard I had to take off my coat and hat. I was reminded, over and over, that the modern world is not made for walking. I spent many miles trudging, on high alert, up traffic-y highways without shoulders. Cars came screaming around corners. I found myself tightrope-walking along the tops of cliffs, clinging like a goat to the sides of hills, teetering on old stone walls. I stepped over all kinds of roadkill: a freshly pressed groundhog, a pancaked hawk. A pickup truck, speeding, passed so close that I felt a rush of wind, and at the last second a German shepherd shot its head out the window, barking and snapping, actually trying to bite me. One car whipped around a blind turn so suddenly that I went leaping over a guardrail, bashing my shin — it left a swollen knot that’s still there. That same day, fighting my way through roadside trees, clinging to a different guardrail for balance, I sliced the heel of my hand open on a nasty piece of metal.

It became clear to me, very quickly, that — despite my fascination and my fantasies — I am not the Old Leatherman. I never slept in a cave. In fact, it turns out that I’m afraid of caves. Every time I found one, I would stand outside it for a few minutes, trying to peer in from a distance, and then I would throw rocks and sticks in to scare out any wild animals — and only then, cautiously, holding my breath, would I creep inside.

Instead, I slept in hotels. Or I just went home. I would walk all day and then, exhausted, order an Uber back to wherever I’d started — usually a shopping center where I’d parked my car. The ride was always humiliating: in 10 or 15 minutes, it rewound the walk that had taken me all day. It turned out that I was much more a creature of society than I liked to admit. I would walk for a couple of days and then have to go home for a dentist appointment. Things wouldn’t stop coming up. I took breaks from the loop because my daughter was visiting for Christmas, because I got a nasty head cold, because my beloved wiener dog, Walnut, suddenly lost the use of his back legs and we thought he was about to die. (He got better.) One evening, at the end of a particularly grueling 20-mile walk, my wife picked me up in front of a public library, and we went out for Thai food. She liked to call me “the Old Pleatherman.”

Yet over many weeks, after maybe 100 miles of walking, my domestication started to wear off. One night, I came home after a few days on the road, after not changing my clothes, and everyone in the house stiffened. My smell was as if I’d brought a whole other person home with me, someone none of us had met before.

One Tuesday, in mid-January, I reached a man-made lake the Old Leatherman never would have seen. In his time, it was a river winding through a town — until they dammed it, two years after his death, to provide drinking water for New York City. Today it is the East Branch Reservoir; when its surface is low, you can still see the old foundations of flooded buildings. I walked on its shore, over honeycombs of dried mud. The water was frozen. Way out in the distance, on the surface, I noticed tiny shapes moving. Ice fishermen. I stepped out, cautiously, arms spread, and stood watching a man drill a fresh hole in the ice with a bright orange augur.

When he was done, I asked him if he’d ever heard of the Old Leatherman.

Of course, he said. Everyone knew about the Old Leatherman. Used to walk around and sleep in caves. Back in those days, the man said, that kind of lifestyle wasn’t so unusual: People were more comfortable outside. In fact, he told me, even when he was young, growing up right near this reservoir, there were people who lived like that. One of them slept in the woods near his family’s house — an alcoholic, friendly and harmless. He remembers going out, as a kid, to give the man bacon.

On my walks, this kind of conversation was surprisingly common. I would ask people about the Old Leatherman, and they would end up telling me about some other figure who once lived on the fringes of society. One woman told me about a guy named Footsie who used to walk around Watertown, Conn., back in her father’s time. Several people mentioned the tragic life of Sarah Bishop, a young American who was kidnapped, during the Revolutionary War, by British pirates — only to escape and live the rest of her life alone in a mountain cave. I heard about mythic figures — the Witch of Good Hill, the Green Lady of Burlington — some of whom still haunt the places where they died.

Haunting, I think, is a nice metaphor for the social dynamics here. An in-group is haunted, more or less permanently, by the people it chooses to exclude. They hang around like obtrusive thoughts. And in the Old Leatherman’s time, New England was a deeply haunted place. After the Civil War, especially during the depression of the 1870s, there was a widespread public panic about “tramps”: unemployed men roaming by the thousands, begging, hopping trains, looking for work. The rhetoric in the newspapers (“robbery, incendiarism, intimidation, rape and murder”) will sound familiar to modern readers. In Bristol, a writer declared that the solution was vigilante violence: “A trusty weapon in every house and a disposition to use it on very slight provocation.” Eventually, Connecticut passed a strict anti-tramp law mandating the appointment of “special constables” to hunt vagrants down, promising $5 bounties for warrantless arrests resulting in conviction.

In this atmosphere, even the Old Leatherman was suspect. Early in his wanderings, people locked their doors when he passed. Mothers used him as a kind of boogeyman to make their children behave. But although he looked terrifying, people quickly came to understand that he was harmless. He never stole, never created chaos, never accosted anyone. Even when he was actively harassed — when a group of children surrounded him in the street, shouting insults, or when two rowdy men bullied him, forcing him to drink alcohol — the Old Leatherman didn’t fight back. He just got away as quickly as he could. “He was quiet and inoffensive,” said a man who saw him regularly near Waterbury, “and when a person came along driving a lively horse, he would get out of the way, so that his odd appearance might not frighten the horse.”

Soon, all across Old Leatherman territory, a communal instinct kicked in. Residents didn’t just tolerate him; they protected him. They took pride in his visits. They made special food to prepare for his arrival. Mothers scolded children for staring at him in the street. One boy, out for a hike, found an Old Leatherman cave unoccupied and used the wood inside to make a fire. When he got home, his mother made him go back, in the dark, to replenish the wood. She didn’t want the Old Leatherman to get cold.

The townspeople regarded the Old Leatherman with a mix of closeness and distance, familiarity and alienation. He was the insider’s outsider. He didn’t belong, but he was accepted. Wherever he went, he created a circle of civility. His loop tied together otherwise disparate communities like beads on a string. The tramp laws, curiously, didn’t seem to apply to him. By tramping so openly, he seemed to transcend the category. He was his own special category. He was the Old Leatherman.

Maybe my favorite incident in the Old Leatherman story happened in a small town called Shrub Oak. He had multiple admirers there. One family, the Irelands, kept a special bowl and spoon just to feed him. Down the street, at Darrow’s grocery store, the owner kept notes in his account book about the Old Leatherman’s trips through town. In February 1885, when the Old Leatherman didn’t show up on schedule, the people of Shrub Oak were worried. The weather had been terrible — weeks of subfreezing temperatures. Brutal rain. A group went out to check his cave, in the woods near the ruins of a saw mill. It was empty.

So it was a relief when — on Thursday, Feb. 19 — Darrow, standing in his store, saw the Old Leatherman clomping up the street. He was several days late and seemed to be in a hurry, trying to make up for lost time.

Darrow called out. He motioned to the Old Leatherman to come inside — and, against all odds, for reasons no one could fathom, the Old Leatherman did. He sat down next to the fire. Mr. Darrow gave him some cheese and crackers and, as he watched the Old Leatherman eat, decided to try something.

He took out a pencil and a piece of paper.

“I am old,” Darrow said — and he wrote down his age.

Then he passed the paper and pencil to the Old Leatherman.

“How old are you?” he asked.

People had been trying, and failing, for many years, to pry information out of the Old Leatherman. Sometimes he grunted, or muttered a few words in what some people claimed was French. Mostly, he just turned and walked away. But this time, according to the shopkeeper, he didn’t.

The Old Leatherman took the pencil and pressed it to the paper. In large, crooked strokes, he wrote a string of numbers: “15342.”

A few days later, The Peekskill Blade printed a facsimile of this odd answer, just as the Old Leatherman wrote it. What did it mean? There were debates. Some thought the Old Leatherman must have been writing his birthday, in the European style: “15/3/42” — or March 15, 1842. (This would have made him 42 years old.) Some, drunk on the mythology of the Old Leatherman, took it at face value, as evidence that he was 15,342 years old. Decades later, the researcher Allison Albee offered this speculation: “One guess being as good as another, perhaps the Leather Man, understanding neither the question nor the meaning of Mr. Darrow’s figures, showed his own peculiar method of writing one, two, three, four, five.” Or maybe it was some kind of inscrutable code.

This, to me, is the perfect Old Leatherman story: an absurdly specific data point with no clear explanation. We know plenty of facts about him: his height (roughly 5-foot-7), the weight of his suit (60 pounds), the length of his homemade hatchet blade (9¼ inches). And yet the man himself was, is, and probably always will be a mystery. This is what I love, what keeps me circling back to him, over and over. The Old Leatherman is an engine of infinite interpretations — a story about stories. He gave us so little, and in doing so he gave us so much. In the 19th century, he was a perfect blank screen onto which society could project its fears and fantasies. And he remains so today. This is the real Old Leatherman’s loop, the one that we all walk, every second, on every level, eternally: the loop between reality and meaning, what we know and what we imagine.

The Old Leatherman’s last loop came in March 1889.

For months, it had been clear that something was wrong. The Old Leatherman was sick. In the later photos, you can see it: his bottom lip is swollen, marred by a “raw sore.” This was almost definitely mouth cancer, almost definitely from the tobacco that he liked to either chew or to smoke in his homemade pipe. (The Old Leatherman would often stoop down in front of post offices and general stores to pick up cigarette butts people had thrown in the dirt.) When he ate, he covered the sore with a special patch of leather. One house he stopped at for breakfast belonged to a doctor, and the Old Leatherman allowed him to examine his lip. The doctor gave him some ointment.

But things got worse. The sore deepened into a hole that eventually ate away half of the Old Leatherman’s jaw. He could hardly eat. He had to soak his food in coffee, then drink it, and some of it would come pouring right through his face. His walking got slower and slower. He began to lose weight. Still, he kept going.

Finally, people along his loop decided to try something drastic. In Middletown, Conn., residents set up a sort of sting operation. When the Old Leatherman stopped for a meal, as he always did, at the house of Amy Guy, she sent a messenger two miles up the road to his next stop, the Fisher house. When the Old Leatherman showed up there, he encountered a group of strangers: the police chief, the town physician, representatives of the Connecticut Humane Society. They “arrested” him, benevolently, and got him into a carriage. According to one of the Fishers: “He went with no reluctance and seemed to understand why — though the conversation was carried on by signs mostly.”

The Old Leatherman was driven to the Hartford Hospital. Maybe the doctors there could save his life, or at least ease his suffering. But he refused to stay. Soon after he was dropped off, the Old Leatherman walked out. He went right back to his loop.

A week later, in very bad shape, he showed up for dinner at the Barnard house, in North Haven, 30 miles from Hartford. He was muddy and wet. They managed to coax him inside, next to the fire. They offered him an apple, but he just pointed to his lip and shook his head. Instead, he drank six large bowls of coffee-soaked food: bread, cake, pie. “He was told to sit and warm himself as long as he liked,” The Hartford Times reported later. “He simply pointed up the road, and with an expressive gesture indicated that he must go.”

That was in December. In mid-March, the Old Leatherman was seen heading in the direction of Ossining. He was so weak, by this point, that he had to sit and rest every couple hundred feet. Eventually, he disappeared into the woods, in the direction of one of his caves.

Some days later, on March 24, a carpenter took his wife to see something interesting: a rock shelter on a local farm. Inside, face down, they found the Old Leatherman. His coat was off. He was only wearing one boot. They thought at first he was sleeping. He was dead.

In Ossining, the Old Leatherman’s body was put into a pine box and buried in an unmarked grave in a cemetery outside town.

His famous suit, meanwhile, went on to live a life of its own. It was made to sit upright in a chair and displayed in the window of a cigar shop downtown. Crowds came to stand in the street and stare. Eventually it traveled to New York City, where it was displayed in at least two different museums.

Around his loop, in the days after his death, people searched the Old Leatherman’s caves and dug holes in the woods, inspired by rumors of buried treasure. No one reported finding any. The Old Leatherman left behind a leather backpack, a leather pouch, one leather glove, some homemade pipes, a few simple tools and, according to the coroner, “two books … made of brown paper and full of figures and hieroglyphics, which could not be deciphered.” No one knows what these were (journals? maps?), and they do not seem to have survived. His suit, people think, was most likely destroyed in a fire on Coney Island.

When the Old Leatherman died, the answers to his mystery died with him. The world moved on. Years later, someone stuck a metal pipe in the grass to mark what they thought was the spot of his grave. In the 1950s, that pipe was replaced with a formal headstone identifying him, falsely, as Jules Bourglay. At the ceremony, a young American girl, dressed in period costume, stood next to a French flag.

In 2011, the Old Leatherman was finally given a proper memorial: the stone with the plaque where I started my loop. During this process, the gravesite was moved deeper into the cemetery, away from the road — which gave archaeologists one more crack at the mystery. The plan was to exhume the Old Leatherman’s body and perform DNA analysis — a plan that went on, despite community protests that included a website called “Leave the Leatherman Alone.”

In the end, the protest wasn’t necessary, because the archaeologists found the perfect thing. The Old Leatherman was gone. It’s possible that he, and his coffin, had already decomposed. Or that, because the grave was originally unmarked, the headstone had been put in the wrong place. Thematically, it’s tempting to think that his body is still there, somewhere, eternally out of reach — that he is even maybe buried under the road.

Someone once asked me what I would say to the Old Leatherman if I could meet him. I thought about it for a minute. “Nothing,” I said. That still feels like the right answer. I would just stand there with him, silently, in alienated communion.

That’s what I felt whenever I sat inside one of the Old Leatherman’s caves. I was an intruder but also at home. My body was filling the same pocket of rock that he once filled, and the very fact that I was there meant that the Old Leatherman was not. My presence guaranteed his absence. I was like a hermit crab moving into another crab’s shell. But it also seemed as if he were still there, faintly, just vibrating on a different frequency — as if we were sitting in each other’s laps across a distance of 150 years. We were alone, together. Sort of like two patches of leather woven into different parts of the same suit.

This paradox is one of the things that fascinates me most about the Old Leatherman. It is the black hole, you could say, at the center of his loop. He removed himself from society, obviously and dramatically. In doing so, he opted out of the normal things — he never gossiped, never ate in a restaurant, never mailed a letter, never blew out birthday candles. But he also never fully left. He didn’t become a true hermit and disappear forever into the deep woods. Day after day, the Old Leatherman put himself right in the middle of all the things he refused to engage in. He walked main roads, passed by schools and shops and town halls. And so he remained this bizarre in-between thing: an ever-present absence. A visible invisibility. A speck of isolation injected into the heart of society.

I felt this paradox most strongly in one of the earliest caves I visited, in the town of Bedford Hills, N.Y. The cave sits directly behind a combination gas station/Dunkin’ Donuts, near the intersection of two major traffic arteries: Interstate-684 and the Saw Mill River Parkway. If you know where to look, you can see its opening from the parking lot: a gash of black halfway up the hill. To get to it, you have to look like a weirdo for about 10 seconds: Walk past the parked cars, hop on top of a retaining wall and squeeze between some decorative shrubs. But then you are all alone. You have entered the Old Leatherman’s world. No one will see you fighting your way up the steep slope, which is covered in dead leaves and thorny vines and rotting logs, and which is so steep that I lost my footing multiple times and once actually fell and skidded down so hard that my pants filled up with dirt and I lost my cellphone. (I found my phone, later, perfectly wedged in the crook of a tree.)

The cave, after all that struggle, felt like a refuge. Its inside was cool and damp. Crickets lived on the ceiling. Although it was deep enough to disappear into, with a slight right turn at the back — I found myself drawn, most powerfully, to its opening: that switchpoint between worlds, where the light stops and the darkness begins. I sat on a rock at the mouth of the cave and looked at the world outside. Commuters were streaming by, at high speeds, north and south. Down below, the gas station looked like a theater set. I watched people coming and going, performing the mundane little dramas of everyday life. A man walked out double-fisting coffee cups. A woman in exercise gear walked her dog. I saw a fender-bender, and I watched the drivers argue. Eventually a policeman came. His arms were covered with tattoos. The driver of a beige station wagon methodically squeegeed his windshield. It started raining, lightly, and people hurried into the store, looking for shelter.

From the cave, I watched for well over an hour. And what struck me was: No one had any idea I was there. No one ever looked up. Why would they? I might as well have been sitting in the middle of the 19th century. I was gone. Finally, as the sun slid down the sky, I slid back down the hill, and — covered with dirt, with rocks in my pockets — I walked off.