The Hermit of Kalalau
The son of a shopkeeper, Dr. Bernard Wheatley was born in the Virgin Islands in 1919, earned a medical degree, served in the U.S. Army and had practiced medicine in Sweden.
But nothing prepared him as a young man for the deaths of his wife and son in an automobile accident.
Eventually he recovered from his grief, but without his family, the way of life he’d known meant nothing to him.
He then perceived life anew, and in a revelation was convinced of humanity’s immortality. A religious conversion followed.
He abandoned medicine, gave away his possessions and sought a place where he might seek eternal truth.
In 1957 he found Kaua‘i, hiked into Kalalau Valley after seeing it once from the lookout at Koke‘e, and lived there alone, its only human inhabitant for many years, while he inquired into the fundamental nature of reality.
To survive, Wheatley ate taro and fruits he gathered and became skilled at catching wild goats for meat.
Infrequent hunters and fishermen gave him food.
His shelter was a cave facing the beach that he swept and kept immaculately clean.
Wheatley lived in harmony with the entities of the valley and he became deeply preoccupied with metaphysics, having written a several hundred page manuscript that included his commentaries on the essence of God.
When hippies came to Kalalau in the late-1960s with their hallucinogens and lifestyles at odds with his own, he finally left his once-solitary home.
A good friend of his said that he had dedicated his life to God, and Kalalau had been his test. By surviving there alone for so long, he had proven that God had taken care of him.
Dr. Bernard Wheatley died on Kaua‘i at 72 on December 3, 1991, and his ashes were scattered in Kalalau Valley.
