E-Mail This Article to a Friend DEPT. OF ADVENTURE SEEKERS How to find a volcano hermit over the phone BY CAMILLE DODERO

Jake Halpern once discovered a hardy hermit holed up on an active Hawaiian volcano simply by imagining that such a man existed. A few years ago, the 28-year-old Yale grad was researching Braving Home: Dispatches from the Underwater Town, the Lava-Side Inn, and Other Extreme Locales (Houghton Mifflin), his book about people living dangerously. His elderly grandmother told him about Kilauea, a rambunctious volcano and helicopter-tour attraction she’d once flown over while sightseeing in the Aloha State. "There’s got to be a guy living there," the Buffalo native remembers thinking. "There’s always one guy."

A particularly fastidious former New Republic fact checker hired in wake of notorious falsifier Stephen Glass's misdeeds, Halpern was well-suited for the task of finding out if such a creature existed. A fusillade of long-distance phone calls from Boston revealed that there was one guy, a 50-year-old ascetic named Jack Thompson, who ran a mostly vacant bed-and-breakfast in a landscape encircled by slowly encroaching lava. But since the volcano dweller didn’t deal much with the outside world, no one Halpern could contact from his Cambridge residence knew if Thompson’s house was still standing. So, without ever having spoken to Thompson, Halpern flew to Hawaii to see if his dodgy domicile still existed. It did and Thompson was still there, but at first he didn’t exactly warm to his surprise visitor. "Jack was the trickiest," recalls Halpern over a plate of pad Thai. "I essentially had to go there and get him to take me in and be agreeable to doing this. Otherwise, there was nobody else."

Halpern’s never been the kind of fella to hesitate before arriving somewhere unannounced. "My dad has described me as the person who would show up at your house at seven o’clock at dinnertime and be absolutely certain you’re going to be delighted that I’m there," says the Yale grad, laughing sheepishly. But that’s just the sort of attribute necessary to a tenderfoot journalist writing something like Braving Home, five profiles of folks who’ve chosen to remain in precarious settings, despite having opportunities to leave. Simply by showing up in Princeville, a North Carolina town located on a floodplain that had been submerged in 20 feet of water, Halpern found Thad Knight, a septuagenarian citizen who refuses to leave even though the settlement’s perpetual flooding would likely return. Halpern also imagined a person in Malibu who’d never retreated from the wild fires that sporadically blaze through the sunny celebrity haven — and with more coast-to-coast cold-calling, he learned about 83-year-old Millie Decker, a self-professed hillbilly who refused to leave her canyon ranch during an untamed fire. "You’re humbled when you find these people," Halpern says, "Because you realize that life is crazier and more wild than you’d ever imagine."

Braving Home is Halpern’s first-person account of his travels living with each of his five subjects for two weeks. And while the book’s a collection of his version of their stories, it’s also a sort of travelogue scribbled by a young reporter who spent two and a half years crisscrossing the country chasing down ideas and writing them up. Though this may sound dreamy, Halpern’s the first to admit that his journeys weren’t as romantic as he’d envisioned. "I thought that doing this was going to be a way to avoid the cubicle life," he says. "It was going to be a way to prolong my youth, and it was going to be this crazy, wild adventure. But I think the reality was that nothing made me more adult and grown-up and professional than doing this. When you go to these places to write about them, you don’t go with a sense of pure adventure that you do [when you’re on vacation] — you worry about whether you’re going to get the story and whether you’re going to remember and writing everything down. People think, ‘Oh, you’ve led a great life.’ And it is, I’m not complaining at all — but really, it is a lot of work."

It was even work to stay alert to the eccentricities of the situation and not to be desensitized after two weeks living there. Like when Halpern spent two weeks with Babs Reynolds, a saucy former bartender living in a bunker buried in the snowy mountains of Whittier, Alaska. "Every once in a while, you get so inured to the absurdities of their lives that you stop writing stuff down because bizarre stuff starts becoming normal. I was in Whittier and someone would be like, ‘I can’t take the dog outside because the eagles will pick up the dog.’ And you’re like, ‘Yeah, you better not.’ And then the next day, you’re like, ‘Wait — what do you mean the eagles will pick up the dog?’"

Jake Halpern will read from Braving Home: Dispatches from the Underwater Town, the Lava-Side Inn, and Other Extreme Locales on Wednesday, September 10, at 7:30 p.m., at Newtonville Books, 296 Walnut Street, Newtonville. Call (617) 244-6619.