Tad Jones Lived Alone in Nature, Until Nature Revolted The Lives They Lived Tad Jones in Santa Cruz, Calif., 1999. Windy Rhoads The Lives They Lived By Michael Paterniti I. He is 73, with a long, woolly beard, like someone’s version of Father Time. He lives in a hand-built shack with no electricity or running water, nearly eight miles up a forgotten dirt road in the Santa Cruz Mountains of California, a mile from a creek named for a long-ago settler — Waddell — who was killed by a grizzly bear. They call him a hermit, a holy man, the Unabomber. He couldn’t care less. On the night of Sunday, Aug. 16, 2020, a heat wave with temperatures well above 100 degrees brings a rolling cloud from the ocean as the old man sleeps under a canopy of redwood trees. When the lightning comes, it sizzles and snakes, consummates with dry earth.