The Hermit Of Dismal Key -- He Planned To Go Into His Shell To Survive Florida's Hurricane Andrew

DISMAL KEY, Fla. - Before the storm, he built a coffin-like "clamshell" of hinged plywood and two-by-eights away from his cabin on this island where he's been the only resident for five years.

The pine box would be a last refuge or a place for a hermit to die.

But as Hurricane Andrew bashed and tore trees all around, the old cabin bowed but didn't buckle and he never had to flee for the box. Afterward, he celebrated by playing a tape of Verdi's "Requiem" as his neighbors, the woodpeckers and butterflies, reappeared.

That's about it. Life goes on pretty much as it did before on this mile-long spit of oyster shells and mangroves, one of the so-called Ten Thousand Islands peppering Florida's southwest coastline. It's a long hour's boat ride to the nearest mainland fishing village.

With a machete to clear paths of branches, the human inhabitant of Dismal Key follows the lead of the golden orb spiders perfecting their web outside his door.

"They were doing a lot of repair work right away. They didn't have to wait for FEMA," said the man who calls himself Niranjan, laughing. ("It's a taken name," he said, not explaining.) FEMA is the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which he knew from portable radio broadcasts was working in other places hit by the hurricane.

The radio, the tape player and a few other conveniences give Niranjan a toehold in society, but the few people who know him describe him as a no-fooling, real-life hermit, the latest in a line who've occupied the cabin for decades.

One of those acquaintances is Pam Ball, a boat captain at a marina near Everglades City, who conducts nature cruises of the ragged coast and its waters that teem with manatees, dolphins and game fish.

She described Niranjan, whom she greeted as "Ni" during a visit last week, as a kind of caretaker of Dismal Key, cutting trails and making sure no visitors harm it.

"I mentioned to him once that it seemed nice, that I'd like to live on an island," she recalled. "He immediately said, `Well, there's not room for two on this island.' " She laughed.

During an interview on the porch of his two-room cabin, with netting and a few blasts of diesel fuel spray keeping away the mosquito swarms, the hermit told a little about his past in a "real world" he now shuns, about a wife who died, about his sketches of a sailboat he'd like to build someday, about life on Dismal Key.

"It's quiet," he said. "And I listen to it."

He reads. He meditates. He observes everything around his cabin: a spat between a bobcat couple, a big black vulture that squeezes into his birdbath "then tries to look proud," rattlesnakes, insects and exotic birds.

As he spoke a cuckoo issued a call, like something on the soundtrack of an old Tarzan movie, from the woods that embrace his house. The green-painted, tin-roofed cabin rests in a little notch at the top of a low rise.

He's not completely without human companionship.

He still goes to the mainland for groceries, because he doesn't want to hunt what little wildlife Dismal Key supports. "The critters out here have a pretty hard life," he said. "There isn't any fresh water except what falls from the sky." For them and himself, he collects rainwater in two cisterns. He takes in repair jobs for boat owners, generating a little income.

Boaters occasionally stray into the channel that passes his dock; those who stop are surprised to learn that the 50ish man who looks like a hermit, with shoulder-length graying brown hair and a beard, actually is one.

"I'm a sociopath. Is that the word?" he said, then corrected: "No, I'm not a -path," the suffix meaning suffering a disease.

During a visit that he could not have anticipated because he has no phone, he was friendly to a reporter and only held back when pressed on the most obvious question about his life here: Why?

He'd begin to talk about his old life - "I was a federal bureaucrat once upon a time; and I was a salesman" - but shift to a detailed discussion of the "wondrous" silvery wings of a butterfly.

He offered a little about his wife, who he said died of cancer; his 28-year-old son, living somewhere in New England (Niranjan is from Massachusetts), and his sister.

"Sometimes," the hermit said, "I think that if I was extremely fortunate I might think of something worthwhile to do on behalf of my co-inhabitants of the planet, but so far I haven't really thought of much."

He'd rather talk about his pine cabin.

It was built around 1935 and had been occupied by a succession of hermits. Their maintenance of it and the surrounding land - thickets on three sides and a trimmed front "lawn" dominated by a huge, now fractured, fig tree - allowed it to weather the blasts of Andrew and previous hurricanes.