The Man Who Kept the Schedule

For roughly thirty years, a man with no confirmed name walked a 365-mile loop through western Connecticut and eastern New York, completing each circuit in exactly 34 days. Residents along the route could predict his arrival within half an hour. The Hartford Times published a timetable of his stops in 1885, formatted like a railroad schedule.

He wore sixty pounds of handmade leather.

The suit was stitched from patches, each about the size of a dinner plate, and it creaked when he moved. Some claimed you could smell him before you saw him. He slept in caves and rock shelters, kept herb gardens at a few of them, and declined every offer of a bed. His grocery order never varied: one loaf of bread, a can of sardines, fancy crackers, a pie, two quarts of coffee, a gill of brandy, and a bottle of beer. He skipped meat on Fridays. Children left pennies for him along fence posts. He polished each one and handed it back.

One woman, Mary Chidsey, prepared meals for him for twenty-seven consecutive years. You do have to wonder what she made of the days he was late.

Ten Connecticut towns passed special ordinances exempting him from the state's anti-tramp law. He survived the Great Blizzard of 1888, delayed only four days. When hospitalized that same year, doctors pronounced him "sane except for an emotional affliction" and were warned not to let him near his suit. He escaped within minutes.

He died in 1889. His grave went unmarked for sixty-four years until someone added a false name in 1953. In 2011, researchers opened it to settle the question of his identity through DNA. They found coffin nails, an outline in the soil, and nothing else.

He had kept moving.