Stranger in the Woods

Finkel, Michael. The Stranger in the Woods: The Extraordinary Story of the Last True Hermit. New York: Vintage 2018. Print

First Sentences:

The trees are mostly skinny where the hermit lives, but they're tangled over giant boulders with deadfall everywhere like pick-up sticks...

At dark, the place seems impenetrable. This is when the hermit moves. 



Description:

We've all spent a few hours without speaking with another person, maybe even had a few days in complete silence, alone without any human contact. For Christopher Knight, the focus of Michael Finkel's The Stranger in the Woods: The Extraordinary Story of the Last True Hermit, that number of silent, isolated days adds up to twenty-seven years without conversation or human contact. The only word he said in all that time was "Hi" to a stranger hiking by Knight's hidden campsite isolated in the Maine woods. Yes, and it's all true.

Author Finkel unravels Knight's story in this fascinating book. We meet Knight on one of his midnight forays to a nearby lakeside community where he regularly breaks into vacation homes or a camp kitchen for food and other supplies. For years, the legend of "The Hermit" has run throughout the homeowners, but no one has ever seen a hermit or even any footprints. But most homeowners have experienced multiple break-ins while away for the week or season. They have lost batteries, books, small propane tanks, food, kitchenware, clothes, and even mattresses. Some took to hanging bags of supplies outside their doors with notes for an intruder to just take these supplies without breaking windows or doors, but the bags were never touched.

So who is Christopher Knight, this true life hermit? He is a man who disappeared into the woods in 1986 and only emerged after he was caught in the opening pages of this book. His story is very slowly unraveled through reluctant interviews by the author, of homeowner victims, local law enforcement, and interviews Knight was loathe to give. His family vehemently refused all interview requests.

The dividing line between himself and the forest, Knight said, seemed to dissolve. His isolation felt more like a communion. 'My desires dropped away. I didn't long for anything.'....Knight simply existed, for the most part, in the perpetual now.

This brilliant book covers the few details that have emerged about Knight and his isolated life. Knight reveals that one day he just drove away from his home in Maine until he ran out of gas, got out of his car, left his keys, and started walking through the woods. He had no tent, food, or other equipment, simply following a completely spontaneous impulse that, once begun, he decided to never reverse by contacting family, friends or anyone else. 

He settled into a makeshift camp hidden behind huge boulders in the thick woods only minutes from a lakeside community of weekend vacation homes. He burglarized these homes "forty times a year" over the twenty-seven years. That's over 1,000 break-ins, possibly the largest number of heists on record.

Each page has more fascinating details about Knight's daily life while living away from society. Organizing raids on houses, memorizing the woods so he wouldn't need a flashlight or leave footprints, carefully selecting which books to steal (military history was his favorite), and coming close to death from the cold winters or when food ran short.

He remained in his small nylon tent [stolen]...and did not once in all those winters light a fire. Smoke might give his campsite away. Each autumn...he stockpiled food at his camp, then didn't leave for five or six months.

But doubters wondered about Knight's story. What about illness or injury? Wouldn't food stored in a campsite attract wild animals? How could he speak so easily after his capture when he had not used his vocal cords for years? And what about spending brutal, subzero winters in Maine?

I just couldn't put this down. Knight is such as intelligent, odd survivalist who just wants to be left alone apart from society, and figured out a way to do it. The book balances the backstory of Knight's early life and daily existence in the woods with his philosophy and adaptation after his capture to his new life outside of the woods in the world that requires interaction with other people, noise, lights, and questions. Knight is a unique man well worth reading about.

In the forest, Knight never snapped a photo, had not guests over for dinner, and did not write a sentence. His back was fully turned to the world....There was not a clear why. Something he couldn't quite feel had tugged him away from the world with the persistence of gravity....Christopher Knight was a true hermit.

Happy reading. 

Fred

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If this book interests you, be sure to check out:

Rock, Peter. My Abandonment.   

A Vietnam vet with PTSD lives with his daughter in the woods of a public park, surviving unnoticed, invisible for years until they are discovered and forced to enter the outside world. (previously reviewed here)