In July of 2018, authorities in Collier County, Florida, responded to a call about the body of an Appalachian Trail through-hiker discovered inside a small yellow tent in the Everglades, about 5 miles from the road. Officers couldn't find any identification, and examiners couldn't determine cause of death. His was one of thousands of unidentified bodies found each year, but something about his story captivated the internet, including former WIRED editor Nick Thompson. Maybe it was the fact that the 5' 8" man was found with plenty of food, but weighed only 83 pounds. Maybe it was the journal filled with programming language discovered with his body. Most likely, it was because of the pseudonym he gave to people he met on the trail before he died: Mostly Harmless.
This week's Classics revisits two stories Thompson told about Mostly Harmless. The first, published in November 2020, "A Nameless Hiker and the Case the Internet Can't Crack," recounted the story of the internet's determined efforts to bring an unnamed body home. The second, written two months later, "The Unsettling Truth About the 'Mostly Harmless' Hiker," was about a man with demons who took to the woods to escape them, and all the unanswered questions his death left behind. On Thursday, HBO Max released a documentary inspired by Thompson's reporting.
Thompson wrote about a man who was at first unknown and alone, then found but not missed—and he struggled to make sense of it all. Maybe, he wondered, if there was any meaning to extract at all, it was in all of the people, himself included, who spent hours on the internet examining everything from vehicles towed from a state park parking lot to bowling alleys in Newport News, Virginia.
That's where HBO Max picks up. Thompson is one of many figures featured in the 90-minute documentary, which is, of course, about Mostly Harmless, but at its core about the efforts expanded by people across the country who worked to identify him, for reasons that ranged from the personal to the totally inexplicable. In the end, it's a pretty classic story of strangers coming together to help one another. This week, I'd love to hear more stories about people helping each other out. Do you have a favorite docuseries about a crime-solving community effort? Did your own neighborhood band together to find a missing dog? It could be as simple as a few people helping to jumpstart a car in a grocery store parking lot. Send your story to me at samantha_spengler@wired.com or comment below the story.
Have a good weekend,
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