He’s 81, runs marathons, lives in an old school bus on a mountain. But who is Dag Aabye? Brett Popplewell found out

An 81-year-old man who runs marathons, training every day through blizzards and heat, who lives in the mountains alone in an old yellow school bus. The details of Dag Aabye’s life intrigued writer Brett Popplewell, who was compelled to dig into his story. The result is “Outsider: An Old Man, a Mountain and the Search for a Hidden Past.” In this excerpt, readers get a sense of the enormity of Dag’s life, and the story they’re about to read.

The last of the Übermensch runs through the night, alone. He carries no identification, but the scars on his face, hands and body tell of an 80-year struggle to survive on the edge of society. He has been starved, abandoned and trapped in a foreign land for nearly 50 years, unable or unwilling to get back to the place that made him. Conceived in war, he is the aged, mangled remnant of a darker time. And yet he is innocent.

There is no light beyond the glow of his headlamp as he races past snow-covered hemlock, fir and pine. The sound of frozen dirt crunching beneath his feet dissipates as he nears the edge of a cliff wall. His are not the only tracks out here, but they are the only sign that a human has been here. He plants his feet in the snow next to the paw prints of a mountain lion that stalks this hillside. He knows she’s out there. He has seen her eyes watching from the shadows while he runs. But the innocent mind has no fear. Even when it should.

Fingers gnarled, arms bloodied, shoulder shattered, teeth broken, heels battered — the old man keeps driving his body forward, one boot drop at a time. He reaches out and wraps his clawed hand around the dormant trunk of an aspen and uses it to slingshot his body away from the cliff’s edge, and upwards, regaining the mountain lion’s trail as he makes for a frozen waterfall that few have ever seen. To those who have seen him, his age, coupled with his tattered boots, gloves and duct-taped jacket, project an image of vulnerability. His face, masked in a frosted beard, is chapped and weathered by decades of cold and sun. Long-haired and scraggly, he looks as ancient as a man would having lived in a school bus parked in a forest since the start of the 21st century. And yet buried within his aging frame is a strength that seems to keep him safe.

He steps onto a snow-covered log that fell over a rushing stream a long time ago. He extends his arms like a tightrope walker and uses the log as a natural bridge. It leads him over the stream and upwards to the source of the rushing water, a 10-metre waterfall that smashes over rocks before freezing along the banks of the stream. He reaches out and touches the cliff wall beside the falls, then marks his time on the watch that has been clocking this run. It has been 48 minutes since he left his camp in the dead of night on a quest for water.

He dips his hand into the runoff, draws it to his face and drinks. Then he turns back toward the camp he has kept hidden from society ever since he decided to disappear into these woods and run, endlessly, both away from, and toward, death.

In his later years, whenever he would wander out of his forested lair, run down a winding mountain road and re-enter civilization for food, drink or a phone call, the people who would see him would often stop what they were doing and stare with a mix of bewilderment, pity and awe as he chugged along in his tattered clothing. To those who had never heard of him, he was an odd-looking outcast who smelled of campfire and days-old sweat. But to those aware of his legend, he was a human curio. Later, when he was out of sight, they would tell how they had spotted the mythical mountain man who lived alone out of society’s reach. To them, he was like a sasquatch, elusive and wild. Hard to find and even harder to catch, though he moved slowly and had been running in and out of the Okanagan Valley for years.

In the stories often told he had been the greatest skier ever to have lived; a playboy stunt double for James Bond; a nomad and a modern-day Norseman who had travelled the world by land and sea. They said he had leapt from helicopters, triggered avalanches — only to outpace them on skis — and freefallen over cliffs before anyone else did that sort of thing. Once heralded as the world’s first extreme skier, he was now among the world’s oldest ultramarathon runners, a competitor who raced with a backpack full of boiled potatoes — which he consumed, midrace, for energy — and who possessed a supernatural capacity to push his body further and further as he aged. Some said he wandered into the forest because he lost millions of dollars. Others said he gave the fortune away to pursue a life of solitude, preferring to commune with bears rather than humans.

The stories were all somewhat true, but there were parts of his life that no one could ever fill in, especially the beginning. Those who knew him over the years never really knew where he had come from. He had always been an enigma, even to his family back in Norway. To them he was just a mysterious boy who showed up one day on a farm in the middle of a war. Not even his Canadian ex-wife, who spent more than 20 years trying to understand him, ever felt she knew who he was. He had four children in total, though he knew only three of them and was speaking to only one of them. He was loved by many over the years, but everyone who got close to him ultimately abandoned him or was abandoned by him. He was easy to love, but difficult to live with and even harder to understand. The many twists and turns of his life made his story seem too apocryphal to believe, even to his children. And yet, on some level, he was as natural and authentic as the forest in which he lived.

When confronted with questions about his origin, on those occasions when he would descend from the forest and run into a bar and attract the attention of a curious stranger, the old man would say little, declaring, in a soft, indecipherable European accent: “I was born in captivity. It was nature that set me free.”

The truth, however, was far darker than he ever let on.

The full nature of his lineage had been hidden by design, and what little he knew, he rarely discussed. He was the orphan of a distant war whose story traced to the pre-dawn darkness of April 9, 1940 — four months before his conception.

That April morning a thick fog rolled over the North Sea, concealing the masts and periscopes of the German navy cutting through the waves in the night. The future fathers of countless Norwegian-born children were in that fog, creeping toward Norway, along with the massive strength of Adolf Hitler’s navy.

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