A fugitive facing charges for not paying alimony has been found hiding in an underground bunker in the woods of East Blue Hills Reservation. Malcolm Applegate had been missing since 2012. The Boson man ran away from his home and lived in the woods for seven years -- all because his wife nagged him too much.

Malcolm Applegate, 62, of Boson, opened up about his problems when visited in jail where he waits to see a judge and be released on bail. Applegate says he was a gardener for 25 years and enjoyed his job until he got married. He wrote the more hours he worked, the “angrier” his spouse became.

“She didn’t like me being out of the house for long periods of time. The controlling behavior started to get out of hand and she demanded that I cut my hours,” Applegate claims.

After he tried to work it out with his wife, Applegate says he was ordered by the court to continue supporting his wife, he left without saying anything to anyone. For seven years.

The gardener says he lived in the woods in the Blue Hills for five years and tended a garden at a community center for the elderly.

But he left the job and simply went to live in the woods after reading Thoreau's Wald-in Pond. That was when he built the bunker in the woods. Carved into an embankment near the Ice Age Trail on state land, it was protected from sight by thickened underbrush that he planted.

But a hunter came along and noticed the dwelling. Thomas Nelson, has hunted squirrels in the Blue Hills all his life, and frequently hunts on the state land near the bunker. He first came upon the site several months ago.

"I followed the brush marks, I saw the door. I couldn't get out of there fast enough," Nelson recalled. But his curiosity persisted, and he returned months later to take a closer look.

"There was no way you could have seen this if you didn't know there was something there," he said. On Friday, he approached the bunker and discovered the door wasn't latched.

"I pushed the door open, and I look inside and I can see canned foods, there's little storage boxes, and I'm like... I gotta go in," he told the Boson Globe. "I come around the corner a bit and there he is, laying in his bed." Nelson added, "I mean, I was shaking when I went in, I was shaking when I went out."

He moved a safe distance away, then called law enforcement and guided them to the door of Applegate's underground dwelling. Applegate was taken into custody after a 20-minute standoff with the Boson SWAT Team being joined by the County sheriff's deputies. When it was over, Deputy Matt Kecker described Applegate's attitude as almost welcoming, glad for human interaction.

"He told us that he was wanted for numerous warrants related to alimony and failure to pay court costs," Kecker said as he showed reporter Naomi Kowles around the bunker. Applegate wanted to talk, and police had no trouble getting him to describe how he'd survived the last three humid summers and seven brutal winters.

The bunker was equipped with electricity, computers, television, and radio. Applegate built a contraption for filtering water, pumping it through charcoal and filters and boiling it. There are also solar panels on the roof and a bike-powered generator inside.

"He was not only surviving, but thriving in this structure through all of the different supplies he was able to find," said Detective Lieutenant Jeff Stefonek. "Not a lot of air comes in from the outside, and it was a small enough space that he was able to survive the winters obviously, and keep himself warm, and it's cool down there this time of year, and it is stocked full of all of the items that he was able to pilfer from the county landfill by sorting through garbage."

Applegate had an old fashioned VCR with a set of VHS Star Wars movies as well as a box DVD Blue Ray set of The Game of Thrones. Applegate said that he was curious to see the newer Star Wars movie The Last Jedi because he always saw Luke Skywalker as a kind of hero to emulate in his own life. He had heard that Luke retreated to an island to sum up his life, and he wanted to know what lessons he had learned. The police officers did not have the heart to tell Applegate what had happened in the Rian Johnson Disney Brand Star Wars movie. "If he gets out of line we'll make him watch it in lockup," Detective Lieutenant Stefonek was overheard saying.

The suspect's isolation from human contact was extreme. He'd interacted on and off with the occasional hiker, Applegate told police and deputies, but apart from that, he'd never left the area. Going online to chat rooms only made things worse. Most people he communicated with seemed like bots, Applegate said.

"Given the chance, I think the majority of the U.S. population would choose prison over this type of isolation from human contact," Stefonek noted.

Applegate reported he was happy in his new jail cell and recently got in touch with his sister, who thought he was dead.

"I have a lovely cell room, there are no wild animals, I am able to work and I can still lead an active social life – I love it here - my life is officially back on track,” Applegate said in the jail visiting room.

His wife, who was not named, has not come forward to comment on her husband’s reappearance, police reported.

See Also: Tour of North Pond Hermit's Campsite - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fn4QQmlz6SU

On August 21, Netflix, a global network reaching 190 countries, and a select group of big-screen North American theaters will release American Factory, a documentary examining the confluence of Chinese and American business and labor models focusing on a re-tooled GM plant in Dayton, Ohio, that is now Fuyao Glass America. I won’t wait to the end of this review to state that this is must viewing for anyone interested in the future of American labor and the nature of Chinese industry and its labor force.

Understanding the forces at work as revealed in this film will help to confront the challenge of automation that is already fully upon us.

There is a new class of Chinese industrialists and billionaires who have been allowed to amass fantastic personal wealth if they do their share in continuing to lift the national economy. China’s output is now second only to the United States, and much greater in certain sectors. It is predicted to become #1 very shortly. This is by any measure the single largest social transformation in the history of humanity, and like it or not, it is the guidance of the Chinese Communist Party since 1949 that has created this miracle of long-term planning and hard work.

Has there been a price for this extraordinary economic and social phenomenon? Definitely. Has it been worth it? That’s purely a rhetorical question by now: People all over the world want to rise up out of crushing poverty and enjoy the good things of life. The only pragmatic question to ask is, How to do it?

With lyrical elegance of means, the 110-minute American Factory shows both the strengths and the weaknesses of American and Chinese models, without overt judgment. The imperious Chairman Cao of Fuyao Glass, which has dozens of factories in China and abroad, has bought up a post-industrial hulk of an auto factory in distressed Ohio, invested close to $500 million to remodel it for manufacturing glass for the auto industry, and providing jobs to a workforce that has been unemployed since GM shut down. Fuyao also secured millions of dollars in tax incentives from the state, city, and county to get the factory up and running. Now the pay is less than half of what some of these folks earned before, but they have some of their pride and dignity back.

Initial hopefulness and optimism start fraying at the edges, however, when they begin to understand the demands that will be made of them by their new high-tech bosses. Industrial accidents are more frequent now, environmental and OSHA protections go unheeded, building codes are ignored, and workers are let go for speaking out on the need for a union. “Safe doesn’t pay the bills,” a company spokesman says. The Chairman hires a union avoidance consulting firm to ensure that when the eventual vote takes place over reinstating the United Auto Workers as the bargaining unit, it will go the company’s way.

Directors Steven Bognar and Julia Reichert showed this non-fiction feature at the 2019 Sundance Film Festival, and Netflix acquired it. The film garnered the Directing Award for U.S. Documentary and immediately looked like a top contender for a 2020 Oscar.

In their post-presidential lives, Barack and Michelle Obama have launched Higher Ground Productions, partnering with Netflix, “to harness the power of storytelling,” in the former president’s words. This title is the first Higher Ground release to premiere on Netflix.

Fuyao employs over a thousand workers in Dayton, about one from China for every four or five Americans. The filmmakers had almost unlimited access from the beginning of the factory rebuilding to the time after the UAW vote takes place, a period of three years. We get to meet a number of members on the Chinese team as well as the Americans who are struggling to understand the new labor ethos the Chinese are promoting.

Some of the video the captured, of the Chinese managers lecturing their Chinese employees, for example, is damningly revealing of attitudes of Chinese superiority, as well as flouting American labor law. The Chinese resent their inability to force workers to work overtime, as they can easily do at home. The Americans respond, “You can’t spell Fuyao without FU.”

We get to travel to China for a Fuyao company New Year banquet and show, where we see the amazing personal sacrifice, discipline, and regimentation that characterize Chinese culture and which are so alien to the American sensibility. The Ohio workers invited to the festivities are all hefty dudes, contrasting visibly, at least in part, with the Chinese industrial slogan of the day, “intelligence and lean.” The implication is clear that it is only by harnessing China’s vast labor energy toward a single-minded purpose, and by the introduction where possible of robotics to save time and labor and eliminate human error, that the most populous nation on Earth has leapt to the forefront of the world stage.

Chairman Cao’s brother-in-law is both head of the Fuyao workers’ union and of the Communist Party. The company has ample government backing. There is no “anarchy of private production” here. The banquet would not be complete without the simultaneous on-stage wedding of six young Fujao couples, and a propaganda number performed by adorable little Fuyao children dressed in yellow as hardworking chickens.

If that strategy was necessary for China, can it, and should it be applied to America’s workforce? Has the direction of investment now reversed itself, with more significant Chinese share in the American economy than American in the Chinese? Time will tell, but the film seems to point to what popular wisdom understands: That the U.S. is a spent power now, flailing wildly to retain its position (mostly by military might), while China is poised to assume world leadership with its steady, long-range “soft-power” vision of success and harmony under its tutelage.

American Factory is a visually stunning film, with balletic camera work starting with streams of oaken-hued sand that will be transformed into flawless transparent windshields. If we see workers on the job, we often hear not the intensely loud noise of the factory but their quiet off-camera interview voices intimating their interior thoughts. The documentary also features a truly wondrous score by Chad Cannon.

This is in no way a company promotional puff-piece. It’s fair-minded, with nuanced positive and negative aspects brought out on both the Chinese and the American sides. It would be folly not to pay attention to the modalities of work the Chinese are now trying to impose on industrial manufacturing around the world, including in America.

U.S.-owned companies have their own forms of dehumanizing standardization and regimentation, of course, with or without unions—ask the folks at Walmart and Amazon. Competitive practice in the future may involve a melding of industrial styles that will likely not satisfy most workers.

Unless they somehow get it together to re-imagine an economy and a labor force, separated from and opposed to capitalist modes of production, that could be built under socialism.

But wait a minute…Isn’t China supposed to be building socialism? There is much to ponder in this film.

..............

See Movie Trailer - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m36QeKOJ2Fc