The Suburban Woodsman—we’ll call him that, since he wants to remain anonymous—is not your typical homeless guy.

By a glance, in fact, you wouldn’t guess that he is homeless. For someone who lives in the woods, his hygiene is uncanny; certainly, he’s better groomed than the Phish-fetished trustafarians with whom he sometimes plays Hacky Sack in Market Square during the summer.

At 30 years old, he’s in good shape from riding his bike every day. It takes about 10 minutes of walking and 20 minutes of riding to get from his campsite by the Great Bog to downtown Portsmouth, a trip he takes at least once per day. And when the books at the Portsmouth Public Library no longer catch his interest, he often bikes or walks into Newington to hang out at Barnes and Noble.

Though the Suburban Woodsman spends much of his time working on his site, hanging out downtown and playing Final Fantasy on the Gameboy Advance his daughter gave him for Christmas, his favorite activity is reading. His conversations, like those of many bibliophiles, are often peppered with random and semi-relevant trivia on whatever topic is at hand. He claims to have read close to 2,000 books at the Portsmouth library alone—a figure that, even if overstated, clearly ranks him among the most literate travelers in town.

The tally, however, probably is an exaggeration. Many of the Suburban Woodsman’s more extravagant claims seem to consist of grains of truth veneered by implausibility.

“I woke up and a bear was chewing on my foot,” he told me during an interview in downtown Portsmouth. “I lit a match and it went away. It was through a sleeping bag, two blankets, but it was trying to eat my foot. … My foot didn’t get hurt. I got lucky.” A dull-toothed and massively pyrophobic man-eating bear? Embellishments aside, the demonstrable facts about his existence suffice to make him a quietly fascinating example of the unwatched fringes of Seacoast culture.

The Suburban Woodsman has been homeless since 1998, making camp at various times at four different spots within about 20 miles of downtown Portsmouth. His prior experience living outdoors didn’t extend beyond a tent in his parents’ backyard and his time in the Webelos, so he had to learn most of it by trial and error.

“The first site was literally just a pole leaned against a tree,” he said during an interview at his current site. “I leaned some sticks against it and tossed a tarpaulin on top. The roof eventually broke after a snowstorm.”

The Suburban Woodsman has taught himself a lot since then. His current site, which measures about 10 by 11 feet and 7 feet high, is nearly as big as some studio apartments. He describes it as “like a little room with no heat, no running water, one window.” All true, but for something that only took two weeks to set up, it’s quite impressive.

Inside, there’s a stone fireplace with an outlet for smoke, a bed made of sticks bundled together and topped by two foam mattresses, a shelf for miscellaneous belongings, and a corner for garbage, which he either burns (if it’s paper) or hauls downtown for disposal.

Though it’s a serviceable structure, it’s not perfect, even by the standards of life in the woods. The Suburban Woodsman characterizes the construction job as “half-assed,” and closer inspection reveals why: though the walls, made of an insulating layer of leaves and miscellaneous outdoor debris held in place by a grid of sticks, seem reasonably solid, the insulation is uneven and does not extend the full length of the walls. And while the roof appears to offer reliable protection from the weather, its main tarpaulin is covered in spots by smaller tarps, giving it the appearance of a haphazard patch job. This is the biggest site the Suburban Woodsman has constructed, but the last one, he says, was his best: done in a corncrib construction style, it was more like a log cabin than a tent or a shantytown shack.

No matter what sort of construction one chooses, some nuisances are inherent to living outside. During the couple of hours I was at the Suburban Woodsman’s site, three planes flew low overhead on their way to land at Pease.

“We’re right under the fucking flight path,” he says, telling me that they sometimes wake him up during the night. The planes are loud, but they’re not the only midnight intruders, and at least they’re not hungry.

“Deer—three’o’clock in the morning, they’ll stamp around and make a shitload of noise. You’ll have to throw rocks at them. I had a hawk, mice, that sort of shit.”

Worse than the animals are the trespassers, though fortunately they are rare.

“Someone was in my tent once, tried to kick me out,” he says. “On two occasions. The first time someone pulled my .22, which I probably shouldn’t have left there, but I had it decommissioned so there was no firing pin in it. So I chased them out with the gun. The next time someone pulled my own knife on me, which I’d left in the tent because it was junk.” Luckily, he says, he had no problem getting rid of either of the unwelcome guests. He’s had few confrontations with other people or with the police, he says, because he has set rules for himself about how to stay out of the way. “I’m so far out that it’s not a big problem, but some people will literally camp… you could throw a rock over their tent site into a house. They’re literally almost in people’s backyards, they’ve got a fire going, drinking beers. No respect. Those are the people the police chase.”

The Portsmouth Police Department does not have a ready estimate of how many people live in the city woods, although it’s certainly in the dozens, including the inhabitants of the infamous “tent city” near Cross Roads House on Route 1.

According to Officer David Ferland, camping is illegal within the city, though charges are not always pursued.

“It depends on the circumstances where we find the person at,” he says. “Sometimes there’s a medical emergency, sometimes there are trespassing issues, sometimes there are mental health issues. … That’s why we work with all these different outreach programs.” Area assistance programs include Cross Roads House, Seacoast Mental Health, Rockingham Community Action, and the city welfare office.

Most of the woods dwellers do not live as well as the Suburban Woodsman. On our way back downtown from his site, he showed me someone else’s abandoned shelter as a contrast to his own. It was not much more than a painful-looking plastic makeshift bed in a large, open-ended stone cattle crossing, offering almost no protection from the elements. Still, it might have been a tolerable place to stay during the right season if not for the way it had been treated: it was so filthy that I could only peek in from the edge. The entire ground, end to end, was covered in refuse piled almost a foot high; I wondered if the former inhabitants even bothered to step outside when they had to relieve themselves. According to the Suburban Woodsman, they probably hadn’t; before the area was recently flooded, he said, the stench was so great that you couldn’t walk anywhere near the openings without gagging.

That site is perhaps an extreme example of how poorly one can live outdoors, but it is not so atypical as one might like to think. Mental illnesses, substance abuse habits and sheer apathy often deter homeless people from carrying out the sort of planning which the Suburban Woodsman puts into his own living situation.

Though he was never enthusiastic about the prospect of living outdoors, he was not cornered into the decision by his own incapacities or character deficiencies. It was a choice, though one apparently inspired by an unfortunate and, to him, intolerable situation.

The saga of the Suburban Woodsman began in 1998. At the urging of her family, who he says belonged to the alien-and-cloning-obsessed Raelian cult, his ex-girlfriend had left him, taking their 4-month-old daughter with her. “Basically,” he says, “the woman took off, took the rent money, and I couldn’t pay the rent so I left.” He moved back in with his parents, but his relationship with them was a disaster. His ex-girlfriend had been granted full custody and was only minimally cooperative in helping him to see her. He finally quit his job following a dispute over child support that he says would have left him paying out his entire weekly paycheck. Thoroughly sick of the whole situation, carrying a backpack with a change of clothes, he headed into the woods.

One of the hardest things about the life he has chosen, he says, has been not being able to see his daughter as often as he’d like. For a while, there was an arrangement for weekend visits at his parents’ house, but it fell through. Now, he feels lucky when he is able to see her at all. “I haven’t seen her in almost a year and a half,” he says. “I worked last winter expecting to be able to see her for Christmas, and I didn’t. Been in a pissy mood ever since.”

Eight years after his self-imposed exile, the Suburban Woodsman says he’s making plans to return to civilization.

“I’d like to get my kid back, I’d like to do a whole bunch of stuff, but I ain’t gonna be able to do that here unless I get a really good-paying job. I’d like to go to school, too. I miss that. I’d probably study plumbing, it’s got the highest paying blue-collar jobs. Plumbing, electricity, whatever.”

It’ll be a slow process, and there are more immediate concerns: his current site is no good for the summer, since it would trap too much heat and would become infested with bugs. Before he can even consider pursuing work or school, he says he’ll need to spend some time setting up a new site, a more elaborate summer design featuring screen windows and less thickly insulated walls.

A couple of weeks after our conversations, I asked the Suburban Woodsman for some general thoughts on his time in the woods. Unfortunately, it was three o’clock in the afternoon—that is, early in the morning for him—and he was inarticulate for lack of coffee.

“The mosquitoes are coming out. It’s getting cold. I don’t know. Even the frickin’ chipmunks mistreat me, man. There’s some animal that shits on the trail every single night, right where I have to walk. Yeah, that’s a metaphor. Living in the woods sucks, but it’s better than living across the street from a bar.”

trial and error

Despite the expected discomforts and troubles of staying outdoors, the Suburban Woodsman doesn’t discourage the idea of living in the woods, though he does recommend that people have a backup plan.
“If you have a decent job and a couple hundred bucks to spare, and it’s something you want to try for say the summer, easy. You can save so much money. It’s just cash in your pocket.”

The obvious basics, of course, are food, water and shelter. The best way to get food, he says, is to find a place where you can get it free. Churches often give out food, and the Salvation Army is also an option. For those who can stomach it—the Suburban Woodsman won’t stoop to this—decent grub can often be found in dumpsters, since many foods are edible past their official expiration dates. It’s also possible to hunt or forage, but you need a license to hunt and you need to know what and what not to eat.

“Any of the water in rivers has beaver crap in it,” he says, so don’t drink it. His roof is set up to drain rainwater into two large buckets, which he uses for drinking and bathing. That’s the best setup, but failing that, the Suburban Woodsman recommends filling containers regularly from public water fountains.

For shelter, a plastic tarpaulin thrown over some branches works fine; you can keep cool in the summer by staying inside air conditioned public places or swimming, and you can keep warm in the winter by building a fire in a cleared area, carefully surrounded by stones to prevent it from spreading. It’s a good idea to stock up on thick blankets; the fire will be out by the time you wake up, so you’ll want to keep the heat in during the night.

It’s important to maintain good hygiene, he says, because if you present yourself well people will treat you decently—and human contact is essential.

“If you spend a month not talking to anyone, it’s like being in a hole in jail, it’ll mess you up for a bit. You’ll start talking to animals just to hear your own voice. Eventually you realize you’re starting to go insane and you need to speak to someone, even about the most mundane crap.”

Fortunately, hygiene isn’t too difficult.

“Soap, you can go to public bathrooms anywhere, walk into a store and use their bathroom. Bring a rag or a sponge, wash yourself off. Have a toothbrush, deodorant, razor,” he advises.

Of course, these things cost a bit of money, and the Suburban Woodsman never begs for money. I asked him how he ever manages to have cash on hand.

“I don’t usually. But Christmas, sometimes I’ll work under the table or get a regular job. … Two weeks ago, I think, I moved some stuff for Salvation Army, and I think the next day I worked for a friend of mine, just moving some wood around.”

That’s another good reason, he says, to present yourself well: if you need some spare cash, it’s not too hard to find an odd job if you don’t come across like a stinky vagrant.

Picking a site can be difficult, but it’s worth doing carefully, since you will probably put quite a bit of work into making it at all comfortable.

“Try to get it at least 250 yards from any houses,” advises the Suburban Woodsman. “Try to find a place where you can step off a road onto a path where no one really goes, circle around before you go there so it doesn’t look like a direct path. You can also try to find a hill to shield you from the wind, some deep brush.”

“Try to do some exercises,” he continues. “That’ll keep your spirits up. I have a punching bag, I do pull-ups and dips at the playground. The cops hate it.”

“Transportation—some type other than walking is really nice. You want to get fairly far away from houses. Use a bike. The cheapest place to get a bike is Wal-Mart, they’re like $50 or $60 bucks. Cross Roads will give you one if you ask for one, I think—I’m not sure about that.”

“Don’t be afraid to ask people if you need help for something. They’ll usually try to help you or point you in the right direction. Try to stay in good health. Vitamins, minerals, things like that. That’s pretty much it. Don’t smoke, my God, it’ll suck the money out of you like coffee.”