The Stranger in the Woods: The Extraordinary Story of the Last True Hermit

Solitude bestows an increase in something valuable. I can't dismiss that idea. Solitude increased my perception. But here’s the tricky thing: when I applied my increased perception to myself, I lost my identity. There was no audience, no one to perform for. There was no need to define myself...My desires dropped away. I didn't long for anything. I didn't even have a name. To put it romantically, I was completely free.

In the winter of 2013, after twenty-seven years of living alone in the Maine woods, Christopher Thomas Knight – known to the local seasonal residents (whom he had been burglarising for nearly three decades) as the North Pond Hermit – was finally apprehended as he raided the food stores of a summer camp for the disabled. Far away in Montana, former New York Times columnist Michael Finkel was intrigued by the story, and as he was disappointed by Knight's refusal to talk with the journalists who flocked to the county jail where he was being held, Finkel began a purportedly nonprofessional correspondence with the inmate. In his first letter, Finkel explained the circumstances under which he had been fired from the NYT, and that's when I recognised him as the man Jonah Hill portrayed in the film True Story: about the time that Finkel, fresh from his dismissal, began a nonprofessional correspondence with an incarcerated accused murderer who had been using his own name as an alias; a correspondence which then led to a scoop, a book, and a Hollywood movie. Back to the present: After a few letters were exchanged and the reclusive Knight told Finkel that he desired no more contact, the former journo, naturally, caught a flight to Maine. Over the next four months, Knight granted Finkel nine one-hour interviews – during which it doesn't seem that Knight revealed all that much about his experience or motivations – and once his court case was resolved, Finkel wrote it all up for an article in GQ. The Stranger in the Woods is Finkel's attempt to stretch and pad this article out to book length. The bottom line: Everything interesting or valuable that Finkel learned is in that article (including most every quote straight from Knight's own mouth) and the reading experience isn't improved upon by the stretching and padding; five star article becomes a three star book.

I hate to make this about Finkel, but I was consistently annoyed by his jarring metaphors:

• Maine itself, the cork atop a small fizz of states crowding the American Northeast, contains vast realms of uninhabited woodlands.

• Knight perched at the edge of the woods and meticulously observed the families of North Pond, quiet breakfasts to dinner parties, visitors to vacancies, cars up and down the road, like some Jane Goodall of the human race.

• Sound waves vibrate a tiny chain of bones – the hammer, anvil, and stirrup, the old-time hardware store of the middle ear – and these physical vibrations are converted to electrical signals that are fired directly into the auditory cortex of the brain.

And I didn't find much value in Finkel stating that “experts and clinical psychologists” informed him that they couldn't diagnose Knight properly for signs of mental illness or a possible position on the Autism Spectrum without actually meeting him, but he did find some who would make educated guesses based on his story (concluding that Knight showed everything from signs of autistic behaviour to a schizoid personality disorder; but to what purpose include conjecture other than to increase page count?) Finkel obviously did a lot of research into the history and experience of hermits and anchorites and other solitaries (both intentional and not), and much of what he found in the literature was included (whether or not it actually illuminated Knight's experience). On solitude:

“I become a transparent eyeball,” wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson in “Nature”. “I am nothing; I see all.” Lord Byron called it, “The feeling infinite'; Jack Kerouac, in Desolation Angels, “the one mind of infinity”. The French Catholic priest Charles de Foucauld, who spent fifteen years living in the Sahara Desert, said that in solitude, “one empties completely the small houses of one's soul”. Merton wrote that “the true solitary does not seek himself, but loses himself.”

I was interested in everything that Knight himself had to say: that he never once slept indoors, spoke out loud to himself or kept a pet (only showing concern for a shelf mushroom attached to a tree at his permanent campsite, which he watched grow from the size of a watch face to a dinner plate over the years, and which Knight feared might have been destroyed by the police's eventual dismantling of the site; it was fine); that he encountered another person only once over the years – a hiker with whom he exchanged “Hi”s; that he felt great shame that he was forced to steal in order to survive. I was intrigued that Knight constantly took books and had developed firm literary tastes:

Robert Frost received a thumbs down – “I'm glad his reputation is starting to fade” – and Knight said that when he ran out of toilet paper, he sometimes tore pages from John Grisham novels. He mentioned that he didn't like Jack Kerouac either, but this wasn't quite true. “I don't like people who like Jack Kerouac,” he clarified.

His favourite book was The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich (“concise” and “as impressive as any novel”) and the only book he abandoned was Ulysses (he declined to be “intellectually bullied into finishing it”; but I wonder if an isolated hermit can be bullied into anything, even “intellectually”?). He referred to Thoreau as a “dilettante”, so later, Finkel ironically refers to the writer as “Knight's best friend Thoreau”. Knight developed respect for the classical music he listened to on the radio but never grew out of his love for Classic Rock (“They will be playing Lynyrd Skynyrd songs in a thousand years”). But all of this interesting stuff is in the article (and as a bonus, the article has pictures while the book does not).

After the events reported in the article, Finkel flew out to Maine again to surprise Knight at his mother's house. They spoke once, briefly, and no one else in the Knight family – people who are so insular that they never even reported the twenty-year-old Chris as missing back in 1987 – wanted anything to do with the reporter. Community reaction to the capture of the legendary hermit was split: some admired his woodscraft and believed he should be allowed to return to the wild, others had felt terrorised by his 1000+ break-ins over the years and thought that his punishment had been too lenient. Knight himself comes off as sad and ruined, and I really don't think that Finkel did him any favours with this book; despite the hype, I don't think I did myself any favours by reading it.