December 29, 1998, Tuesday

A Nantucket Hermit Is Pulled From His Shell; Discovery of Subterranean Home May End Man's Quest for Serenity and a Simple Life

Pamela Ferdinand, Special to The Washington Post

NANTUCKET, Mass.

Tucked away in an island wilderness of bayberry bushes and pine trees, Thomas Johnson's front door lies hidden beneath a twisted mat of dead twigs and fallen leaves.

Brushing aside the natural camouflage, he opens a wooden hatch and descends a built-in ladder, legs first, hand under hand, until he feels the stone floor of his home eight feet below. Three cedar-paneled rooms contain a queen-sized bed, stove and pantry, and the dreams of a latter-day Thoreau who went to the woods to soothe his soul.

For a decade, Johnson has lived underground in one of the most charming and desirable corners of New England, this island off the Cape Cod coast where inhabitants pay a premium for beachside mansions and gray-shingled cottages along cobblestone streets.

He calls it his "self-help" cocoon, a spiritual retreat for a man uneasy in society. Johnson said in a recent interview that his underground days have appeared to be numbered since November, when a local deer hunter stumbled on a black stovepipe sticking out of the earth and discovered his home. A subsequent police investigation and charges of health code violations led to eviction proceedings by the Boy Scouts, who own the land on which Johnson built his home. The process could take up to 90 days.

In the meantime, the 38-year-old hermit has emerged as a folk hero and eccentric renegade in a tiny community where traditions of Quaker asceticism and Yankee ingenuity combine with intense respect for the law.

"This is my church. This is my factory. This is my school," said Johnson, during a lengthy interview aired repeatedly on Nantucket television. "It's more than an experiment. It's an adventure in lifestyle. It's a rebel creation."

Islanders long heard rumors of an "underground man," and some of Johnson's friends have even visited him over the years. But they kept their lips sealed. The wider community learned of the secret habitat only after Jack Hallett Sr., a local builder and hunter, discovered it while trying to locate a deer stand.

"I was down on my hands and knees, crawling under a real low branch, when I came upon it," said Hallett, a 50-year-old father of three who has lived on the island for years. "I opened the hatch and thought, 'Oh my God.' "

Hallett left a footprint to let Johnson know he had been there. The next morning, he brought back a friend, a part-time police officer. Johnson answered their knock, freshly showered and so shaken by the strangers' arrival that his trembling hands sloshed coffee out of the cup he held, Hallett said. Realizing his time was up, Johnson invited them in.

What Hallett saw amazed him: A wonder of craftsmanship, planned and constructed in five weeks for less than $ 150. "Absolutely gorgeous," he recalled.

The structure, whose main room measures 8 feet by 8 feet, stays dry and warm because it is wrapped in a rubber membrane and layers of insulation. Two inches of topsoil and sand cover the roof, and there is no running water, electricity or piped-in gas.

Johnson cooks on a small stone stove built on top of a Hibachi with a single burner. He sleeps in another room on a day bunk or a queen-sized bed that pulls down loft-style from the ceiling, and he showers in the kitchen using a plastic tube attached to a water jug. Transom windows in dug-out spaces, similar to those in basements, provide light and ventilation, and a chemical toilet takes the place of modern plumbing.

"I wouldn't consider myself a survivalist or survival nut, but I'm a survivor," Johnson said on the television program. "I consider myself a fort builder. That's something I never grew out of."

He told Brian MacQuarrie of the Boston Globe: "I can hear the heartbeat of the island here."

In fact, Johnson has built homes for himself in the sky and in the earth for more than two decades, including a stone dwelling in the Catskills and a treehouse in Hawaii, among others. A second home in Nantucket, a log cabin, recently was discovered on public land and may be dismantled.

Publicity apparently forced the hand of Nantucket officials, who were otherwise inclined to let Johnson stay, and of the Boy Scouts, now seeking to evict a man whose outdoor skills could easily merit an Eagle Scout badge.

"If nobody was the wiser, he would have been able to stay there," said Nantucket Police Chief Randy Norris. "Now the town knows about it and has to do something. It sets a precedent, and the next thing you know, we're going to have a dozen of them."

Johnson hardly looks the part of a man who lives in an underground cabin. Clean-shaven and tidy in khakis and buttoned-down shirts, he has had girlfriends, frequents local establishments and earns a healthy living as a carpenter. Friends describe him as an intelligent man with simple tastes, a volatile temperament and a hilarious knack for imitating accents. But he also is intensely private and introspective, they say, and can seem inconspicuous, even at 6 feet 4.

"He's the kind of guy who could be standing here and you wouldn't see him," said Rick Kotalac, a friend and former employer who owns Brant Point Marine. "He moves kind of slow and meticulous and gets things done."

Raised in a Catholic, upper-middle-class household, Johnson grew up in Binghamton, N.Y., with four sisters and two brothers. When he was 20, his father, a city judge, died in his arms. He stayed behind to comfort his mother and attend community college, but his life took a turn for the worse.

Drug involvement led him to Italy, where he was arrested for smuggling heroin in 1983. After serving 2 1/2 years in prison, he escaped house arrest and fled the country in October 1985, according to the Italian consulate in Boston. An arrest warrant was issued but extradition is unlikely, officials said.

Nantucket had captured his imagination during visits in the late 1970s and '80s, so Johnson returned to the former whaling port to settle into his kind of ideal existence: a solitary life. A life where he did not have to conform or become what he calls a "social cardboard facsimile" of his real identity. Where he could commune with nature and face his inner demons to "get right" with himself.

He wanted to be away from people, consumerism and corporations, away from the sounds of slamming doors and refrigerators clicking in the middle of the night, he said in a recent interview. Alone underground, he rode out hurricanes, endured five-day rainstorms and shoveled out from beneath inches of snow.

"The stupidest question I get is: Am I lonely?" he said, his hazel eyes clouding with tears, a freckled hand nursing a pint of dark beer at a local pub swathed in Christmas decorations. "Of course, I'm lonely."

All this has made for plentiful gossip and sharply divided opinions around such places as the lunch counter at Congdon's Pharmacy on Main Street. "The guy sounds a little loose upstairs," "It's ingenious," goes the talk, "How'd he get the stuff in there?" and "Did you see the size of that hole?"

"It makes sense," said Mark Mattoon, 37, a bartender. "I always thought an underground house would be a good thing."

Many locals agree, saying Johnson should be left in peace. With seasonal rentals averaging $ 2,000 to $ 5,000 per week, they half-joke that earthbound homes could solve the island's severe affordable-housing crisis.

Yet others resent Johnson's tax-free existence and protest that he stole -- in his own words, "liberated" -- some materials to build his home. Court records show that he has twice been charged on Nantucket with assault and battery in the past decade.

Some here have seen his calm demeanor turn to raging storm, as it did on a recent weekday.

One moment, he was interrupting a lunchtime interview at the local pub to give a Christmas card to a woman eating alone at a nearby table. "To a shy friend," he scribbled, signing the card, "Dug Underwood." Silent for a moment after handing her the sentimental message, he wiped tears from his eyes.

The next instant, he was lighting a Camel cigarette and rambling on, regurgitating pithy thoughts he has woven together over the years on life, the pitfalls of love and the wonders of nature.

And the next, he was bolting upright and screaming at his interviewer in a fury.

"That's the real Tom," observed one diner who has witnessed similar rants, as the "underground man" headed out the door.

For a decade, Thomas Johnson, 38, has lived in his "self-help" cocoon, a three-room home built eight feet underground. Thomas Johnson descends into his home, which was discovered in November by a deer hunter who came across a stovepipe sticking out the ground. He has been charged with health code violations and could be evicted.