USA TODAY International Edition
‘ Stranger in the Woods’ details hermit’s tale
Try as it might, book can’t quite pin down lost soul
Christopher Knight made good on the fantasy many of us nurture at some point in our lives. He turned his back on social norms, on his job, his family, his few friends, and disappeared into the central Maine woods.
There he subsisted alone for more than two decades, pilfering food and goods from nearby seasonal cabins with such survivalist skill that he passed, unseen, into local legend — the North Pond Hermit, a longsought, long- feared phantom.
The Stranger in the Woods ( Knopf, 191 pp., eeeE) is Michael Finkel’s intriguing account of Knight’s capture and confessions, and while it amasses the inventive details of Knight’s solitary life, it can’t quite explain the man himself. Knight is opaque — more than a loner, hardly a lunatic. Finkel discerns he’s no Thoreau seeking wisdom in Walden Pond solitude, nor is he anything like Lao- Tzu, China’s sixth- century “protester hermit” who poeticized “the pleasures of forsaking society and living in harmony with the seasons.”
In the course of several jailhouse interviews with Finkel while he awaits trial for an astonishing 1,080 burglaries over the course of 27 years, Knight shows himself to be a highly intelligent, unapologetic, yet gentle man with a vague sense of superiority. His boyhood in Albion, Maine, revolved around gruff, hardworking parents and siblings, with no particular trauma. Finkel’s due diligence leads him to behavioral health experts who posit that Knight may fit somewhere on the autism spectrum, but the analysis is inconclusive.
Devoid of ambitions and affections, he walked away from his job as an alarm system installer in 1986, and made for the forest on the outskirts of Albion, vanishing until 2013. As the Hermit methodically broke into a North Pond cabin and helped himself to the canned food, propane, batteries and clothing he required — he never stole valuables, sentimental objects, and never ransacked — the police finally collared him. The Maine courts were kind, and released him to his remaining family.
Remarkably, Knight dwelled within earshot of hikers and vacationers, yet avoided human contact after finding an all- but- invisible clearing in a boulder- strewn part of the forest. He rigged a spacious A- frame tent, made flooring from bound stacks of old National Geographic magazines, and survived the worst of the Maine winter shivering beneath blankets. He read books and listened to the radio.
Finkel established something of a bond with Knight in the course of his visits, and by the book’s end he reveals to Finkel a certain ineffable sadness, but little more. He has no use for the world he must re- enter, “and is certain he is not going to fit in.”
Still, Finkel speculates and ruminates, concluding that Knight’s retreat — if he’d managed to sustain it until he died — might have been a lesson in existential purity and perfection, a rare disappearance into egoless silence. Yet lacking the passion or psychopathy of a compelling literary character, Knight seems but a flickering candle, a willfully lost soul.