Many families eventually decided to reinforce their cabins. They installed alarm systems, motion lights, stronger windows, sturdier doors. Some spent thousands of dollars. A new phrase joined the lexicon of the lakes—“hermit-proofing”—and an unfamiliar tinge of distrust settled over the community. Families that never locked their doors began locking them. Two cousins, who own nearby cabins, each thought the other was taking his propane. Several people blamed themselves for constantly misplacing items and half-jokingly worried that they were beginning to lose their minds. One man suspected his own son of burglary.
The mattress-and-backpack couple decided that every time they left their cabin, even for an hour, they had to latch all the windows and set the bolt, no matter how stuffy it got inside. At the end of summer, one man returned from the hardware store with fifty sheets of plywood and a Makita screw gun, and used every one of his thousand screws to entomb his cabin for winter.
The thousand screws worked, but nothing else did. Gone from other cabins were pillows and blankets, toilet paper and coffee filters, plastic coolers and Game Boys. Some families were burglarized so frequently that they learned the hermit’s tastes: peanut butter rather than tuna fish, Bud over Bud Light, briefs not boxers. He had a major sweet tooth. One kid lost all his Halloween candy; the Pine Tree Camp was short an industrial-sized tub of fudge.
Early in the lake season, before Memorial Day, there was usually a rash of break-ins, then another flurry late, after Labor Day. Otherwise it was always midweek, particularly on a rainy night. None of the full-time residents ever seemed to be victimized, and he didn’t steal food items that had already been opened. One family had a running joke—“He won’t date the skinny girl”—because no matter how many times their liquor cabinet was raided, he never touched the Skinnygirl margarita drink.
Ten years passed. It was the same story: almost no one could stop him, and the police couldn’t catch him. He seemed to haunt the forest. Families returned from a quick trip into town wondering if they were going to encounter a burglar. They feared he was waiting in the woods, watching. He searched your cupboards and rummaged through your drawers. Every walk to the woodpile provoked a goose-bumpy feeling that someone was lurking behind a tree. All the normal night sounds became the noises of an intruder. A few friends quietly discussed putting rat poison in food and leaving bear traps in the leaves, though they never went through with these ideas.
Others said it was obvious that the hermit was harmless—just let him have your spatula and milk crates. He was hardly more trouble than the seasonal houseflies. Maine has always been a quirky place, stocked with odd characters, and now North Pond had its own folklore of a mysterious hermit. At least two kids wrote school papers about the legend.
But then the crimes became more brazen. One family loaded frozen chickens in a freezer for a party and lost them all at once. At a North Pond home owners’ meeting in 2004, nearly fifteen years into the mystery, the hundred people present were asked who had suffered break-ins. At least seventy-five raised their hands.
Then, at last, there was seemingly a breakthrough. As the price and size of motion-sensing security cameras decreased, several families installed them. At one cabin, where the camera was hidden in a smoke detector, there was success: the hermit was captured on film, peering into a refrigerator. The images were confusing. The thief’s face wasn’t in focus, but they appeared to show a clean, well-dressed man who was neither emaciated nor bearded—highly unlikely to have been roughing it in the woods. He didn’t appear nimble, or strong, or even outdoorsy. “Mr. Ordinary,” one person called him. It was probable, people deduced, that this so-called hermit had been a neighbor all along.
No matter. With these first photos, and then others, the police were confident that capture was imminent. The images were hung in shops, post offices, town halls. A couple of officers went from cabin to cabin. Maddeningly, nobody could identify the man pictured, and the burglaries continued.
Another decade elapsed. The break-ins at Pine Tree increased in both frequency and quantity of goods stolen. By this point, a quarter century in, the whole thing was absurd. There was the Loch Ness monster, the Himalayan yeti, and the North Pond hermit. One man, desperate for an answer, spent fourteen nights over the course of two summers hiding in his cabin, in the dark, holding a .357 Magnum and waiting for the hermit to break in. No luck.
The general consensus was that the original thief must be retired or dead and the latest break-ins were copycat crimes. Maybe there was a second generation of that teenage gang, or a third. Kids who’d grown up with the hermit now had kids of their own. Most people resigned themselves to the idea that this was the way it would be; you’d just replace your boat battery and propane tank each summer, and go about your life. The couple who’d lost the backpack and mattress was now missing a new pair of Lands’ End blue jeans—thirty-eight-inch waist, with a brown leather belt.
Finally, the most unexpected thing of all happened. The Loch Ness monster didn’t emerge from the lake; the yeti wasn’t caught strolling around Mount Everest. There are no little green men from Mars. But the North Pond hermit, it turns out, was real. When he was captured by Sergeant Hughes, he was wearing Lands’ End jeans, size thirty-eight, cinched with a brown leather belt.
6
Christopher Knight was arrested, charged with burglary and theft, and transported to the Kennebec County Correctional Facility, in the state capital of Augusta. For the first time in nearly ten thousand nights, he slept indoors.
The Kennebec Journal broke the story, and the news elicited some strong and curious reactions. The jail was inundated with letters and phone calls and visitors; “a circus,” Chief Deputy Sheriff Ryan Reardon called it. A carpenter from Georgia volunteered to repair any cabin Knight had damaged. A woman wanted to propose marriage. One person offered Knight land to live on, rent-free, while another pledged a room in his house.
People sent checks and cash. A poet sought biographical details. According to Chief Deputy Sheriff Reardon, two men, one from New York and another from New Hampshire, arrived at the jail with $5,000 in cash, Knight’s total bail. Knight was soon deemed a flight risk, and his bail was raised to $250,000.
Five songs were recorded: “We Don’t Know the North Pond Hermit,” “The Hermit of North Pond,” “The North Pond Hermit,” “A Hermit’s Voice,” and “North Pond Hermit”—bluegrass, folk, alt-rock, dirge, ballad. Big G’s Deli, an iconic Maine eatery, offered a roast beef, pastrami, and onion ring sandwich called the Hermit, advertised as containing “all locally stolen ingredients.” A Dutch artist created a series of oil paintings based on Knight’s story and showed them in a gallery in Germany.
Hundreds of journalists, across the United States and the world, attempted to contact him. The New York Times compared him to Boo Radley, the recluse in To Kill a Mockingbird. TV talk shows solicited his presence. A documentary film team arrived in town.
Every coffee shop and barroom in central Maine, it seemed, was host to a hermit debate. In many cultures hermits have long been considered founts of wisdom, explorers of life’s great mysteries. In others they’re seen as cursed by the devil. What did Knight wish to tell us? What secrets had he uncovered? Or was he just crazy? What punishment, if any, should he receive? How had he survived? Was his story even true? And if so, why would a man remove himself so profoundly from society? The Kennebec County district attorney, Maeghan Maloney, said that Knight, who apparently wished to spend his entire life anonymous, had become “the most famous person in the state of Maine.”
Knight himself, the hub of the commotion, resumed his silence. He did not issue a single word publicly. He accepted no offers—no bail, no wife, no poem, no cash. The five hundred or so dollars sent to him were placed in a restitution fund for victims of his thefts. Before his arrest the hermit had seemed completely inexplicable, but to most people his capture only enhanced the puzzle. The truth felt stranger than the myth.
7
I learned about
Christopher Knight while scanning the news on my phone one morning, amid the din and spilled orange juice of my children. The story grabbed me. I’ve slept hundreds of nights in the wild, most of them before my wife and I had three babies in three years, an experience that bestows various blessings, though not one permitting much quiet time in the forest. I wasn’t jealous of Knight’s feat—the no-campfire rule is too brutal—but I did feel some degree of respect and a great deal of astonishment.
I like being alone. My preferred exercise is solo long-distance running, and my job, as a journalist and writer, is often asocial. When life becomes overwhelming, my first thought—my fantasy—is to head for the woods. My house is a testament to runaway consumerism, but what I crave most is simplicity and freedom. Once, when my kids were all in diapers and the chaos and sleeplessness had turned poisonous, I did quit the world, albeit briefly and formally, and with the grudging consent of my wife. I fled to India and enrolled in a ten-day silent retreat, hoping that a large dose of alone time would settle my nerves.
It didn’t. The retreat was secular, though heavy on meditation—we were taught an ancient style of self-contemplation known as Vipassana—and I found it grueling. It was more monastic than eremitic, with hundreds of other attendees, but we were not allowed to talk or gesture or make eye contact. The desire to socialize never left me, and simply sitting still was a physical struggle. Still, the ten days were enough for me to see, as if peering over the edge of a well, that silence could be mystical, and that if you dared, diving fully into your inner depths might be both profound and disturbing.
I didn’t dare—scrutinizing oneself that candidly seemed to require bravery and fortitude I didn’t possess, as well as a tremendous amount of free time. But I never stopped thinking about what might reside down there, what insights, what truth. There were people at the retreat in India who had completed months of silent withdrawal, and the calmness and placidity they radiated made me envious. Knight had seemingly surpassed all boundaries, plunging to the bottom of the well, to the mysterious deep.
Then there was the matter of books. Knight clearly loved to read. He stole, according to news reports, a lot of science fiction and spy novels and best sellers and even Harlequin romances—whatever was available in the cabins of North Pond—but one person also lost a finance textbook, a scholarly World War II tome, and James Joyce’s Ulysses. During his arrest, Knight mentioned his admiration for Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. Crusoe lived on his island almost exactly as long as Knight lived in the woods, though he had his man Friday for several years. Also, the story’s fictitious. Maeghan Maloney, the local DA, said that Knight was now reading Gulliver’s Travels in jail.
Two of life’s greatest pleasures, by my reckoning, are camping and reading—most gloriously, both at once. The hermit appeared to have the same passions on an exponentially grander scale. I thought about Knight as I vacuumed the breakfast crumbs, and I thought about him as I paid bills in my office. I worried that someone with no immunity to our lifestyle, physically or mentally, was now being exposed to all our germs. And more than anything, I was eager to hear what he’d reveal.
Nothing, it turned out. The reporters moved on to other matters, and the documentary team packed up and went home. My mind still swirled, my curiosity kindled. Two months after his arrest, in the late-evening calm of a house filled with sleepers, I sat at my desk and harnessed my thoughts. I took out a yellow pad of lined paper and a smooth-rolling pen.
“Dear Mr. Knight,” I began. “I’m writing to you from western Montana, where I have lived for nearly twenty-five years. I’ve read a few newspaper stories about you, and I felt strongly compelled to write you a letter.”
Everything I’d learned about him, I continued, had only triggered more questions. I added that I was an avid outdoorsman and that we were both in the same middle-aged part of life—I was forty-four years old, three years younger than him. I informed Knight that I was a journalist, and I photocopied a few of my recent magazine articles, including a piece on a hunter-gatherer tribe in remote East Africa whose isolation I thought might appeal to him. I mentioned my love of books and divulged that Ernest Hemingway was one of my favorites.
“I hope you are coping okay in your new situation,” I wrote in the final paragraph of the two-and-a-half-page letter. “And I hope, too, that your legal situation is resolved in as gentle a manner as possible.” I signed off, “Yours, Mike.”
8
A white envelope arrived in my mailbox a week later, the address printed in blue ink with wobbly block letters. The return address read “Chris Knight.” A rubber-stamped message on the back delivered a warning: “This correspondence is forwarded from the Kennebec County Jail. Contents have not been evaluated.”
Inside the envelope was a single sheet of paper, folded in thirds. Smoothing it flat on my desk, I saw it was from the article I’d mailed him about the tribe known as the Hadza, who live in the Rift Valley of Tanzania. The story had appeared in National Geographic, and I’d included color copies of the photographs along with my text.
Knight had returned one of the images, a portrait of a Hadza elder named Onwas. The article mentioned that Onwas was about sixty years old and had lived his entire life in the bush, camping with an extended family of two dozen. Onwas did not keep track of years, only seasons and moons. He lived with just a handful of possessions, enjoyed abundant leisure time, and represented one of the final links to the deepest root of the human family tree.
Our genus, Homo, arose two and a half million years ago, and for more than ninety-nine percent of human existence, we all lived like Onwas, in small bands of nomadic hunter-gatherers. Though the groups may have been tight-knit and communal, nearly everyone, anthropologists conjecture, spent significant parts of their lives surrounded by quiet, either alone or with a few others, foraging for edible plants and stalking prey in the wild. This is who we truly are.
The agricultural revolution began twelve thousand years ago, in the Fertile Crescent of the Middle East, and the planet was swiftly reorganized into villages and cities and nations, and soon the average person spent virtually no time alone at all. To a thin but steady stream of people, this was unacceptable, so they escaped. Recorded history extends back five thousand years, and for as long as humans have been writing, we have been writing about hermits. It’s a primal fascination. Chinese texts etched on animal bones, as well as the clay tablets containing the Epic of Gilgamesh, a poem from Mesopotamia dating to around 2000 B.C., refer to shamans or wild men residing alone in the woods.
People have sought out solitary existences at all times across all cultures, some revered and some despised. Confucius, who died in 479 B.C., seems to have spoken in praise of hermits—some, he said, as recorded by his disciples, had achieved great virtue. In the third and fourth centuries A.D., thousands of hermits, devout Christians known as the Desert Fathers and Desert Mothers, moved into the limestone caves on both banks of the Nile River in Egypt. The nineteenth century brought Thoreau; the twentieth, the Unabomber.
None of these hermits remained secluded as long as Knight did, at least not without significant help from assistants, or without being corralled into a monastery or convent, which is what happened to the Desert Fathers and Mothers. There might have existed—or, it’s possible, currently exist—hermits more completely hidden than Knight, but if so, they have never been found. Capturing Knight was the human equivalent of netting a giant squid. His seclusion was not pure, he was a thief, but he persisted for twenty-seven years while speaking a total of one word and never touching anyone else. Christopher Knight, you could argue, is the most solitary known person in all of human history.
Mailing me the photo of Onwas seemed Knight’s way of sending a shrewdly opaque message, hinting at admiration for someone else who’d spent his life away from modern society, expressed without using a single word. Then I turned the page over and saw that Knight had written on the back. The note was brief—three paragraphs, two hundred and seventy-t
hree words, the lines crowded together as if for warmth. Still, it contained some of the first statements Knight had shared with anyone in the world.
“Received your letter, obviously,” he opened, without salutation. His use of the word “obviously”—droll, patronizing—elicited a smile. He was replying to my letter, he explained, in the hope that writing back would provide some relief from the “stress and boredom” of his incarceration. Also, he didn’t feel comfortable speaking: “My vocal, verbal skills have become rather rusty and slow.” He apologized for his sloppy penmanship; a regular pen can be used as a weapon, so he was permitted only one with a bendable rubber casing in jail.
Knight was shy about everything, it seemed, except literary criticism. He wrote that he felt “rather lukewarm” about Ernest Hemingway. He was partial to history and biography, he said, though he was presently interested in Rudyard Kipling, preferably his “lesser known works.” Here he added, as if clarifying why he stole so many potboilers, that he would read just about anything when the alternative was nothing.
He was aware of the commotion his arrest had stirred—all the letters that were mailed to him were duly delivered to his cell, though the majority of them were, he noted, “crazy, creepy, just plain strange.” He had selected mine to answer, he implied, because it wasn’t particularly creepy, and because he’d sensed something pleasing in the words I’d chosen to use. As if catching himself getting a little friendly, he abruptly wrote that he didn’t wish to reveal anything more.
The Stranger in the Woods Page 3
