The Stranger in the Woods

by Michael Finkel

  He then seemed concerned that he was now being too unfriendly. “I wince at the rudeness of this reply but think it better to be clear and honest rather than polite. Tempted to say ‘nothing personal,’ but handwritten letters are always personal, whatever their content.” He ended with: “It was kind of you to write. Thank you.” He did not sign his name.

  I wrote back promptly, and mail-ordered for him a couple of Kiplings (The Man Who Would Be King and Captains Courageous). Knight had said in his letter that because he didn’t know me, he would write only “innocuous content.” This seemed an invitation to become less of a stranger, so I filled five pages with personal anecdotes about my family, along with an account of one of my now-infrequent wilderness escapes: the summer solstice had recently occurred around the same time as the so-called supermoon, the year’s full moon that is closest to Earth, and I had observed this celestial coupling while camping with a friend amid the mountains of Montana.

  Also, I disclosed to Knight that I was a flawed journalist. In 2001, while writing a magazine article about child labor, I wove various interviews together to create a composite character, a storytelling method that is against the rules of journalism. I was caught for my deception, and soon banned from writing for some publications, and for a while I felt isolated and shunned in professional circles. Maybe the admission that I was a sinner within my profession, while Knight was a confessed thief, unable to live in solitude without pilfering from others, would engender a sense of connection—both of us striving, and failing, to achieve lofty ideals.

  I was heartened to find his next letter in the mail. It wasn’t my misdeed but the camping trip that had struck a chord. He began his three-page note with a description of one of his attempts to practice speaking. He had approached a half dozen of his fellow inmates, many of whom were young and hardened, and tried to initiate a conversation. The topic he had chosen to discuss with them was the pleasing synchronicity of the summer solstice and the supermoon. “I thought it of at least trivial interest,” he wrote. “Apparently not. You should have seen the blank looks I got.”

  Many of the people he attempted to talk with simply nodded and smiled and thought him “stupid or crazy.” Or they just stared at him unabashedly, as if he were some oddity on display. Then my letter arrived and he saw that, by serendipity, I’d mentioned the very same topic. He described himself as “startled,” and from this point forward his writing was no longer innocuous but instead as candid and poignant as a diary entry.

  He felt tormented by jail, locked in his cage with another inmate. “You asked how I sleep. Little and uneasy. I am nearly always tired and nervous.” But, he added, in his staccato, almost songlike style, he deserved to be imprisoned. “I stole. I was a thief. I repeatedly stole over many years. I knew it was wrong. Knew it was wrong, felt guilty about it every time, yet continued to do it.”

  In his next letter, and the one after, he said he found “relief and release” by imagining the woods just beyond the cinder-block walls. He mentioned, in lyrical writing, the growing wildflowers: black-eyed Susans, lady’s slippers, clover, even dandelions (though he found these “more interesting dead”). He could almost hear the “song of salt and fat frying” as he cooked on his camp stove. Mostly, he just wished for quiet—“all the quiet I can take, consume, eat, dine upon, savor, relish, feast.” Rather than becoming gradually more accustomed to jail, to being around other people, Knight was deteriorating. In the woods, he said, he’d always carefully maintained his facial hair, but now he stopped shaving. “Use my beard,” he wrote, “as a jail calendar.”

  Several more times, he attempted to converse with other inmates. He could “fumble forth” with a few hesitant words, but every subject—music, movies, television—was lost on him, as was all modern slang. He only occasionally used a contraction, and never a swearword. “You talk like a book,” one inmate teased him. The guards and jail authorities, Knight noted, approached him with “pity and a small smile,” and everyone seemed to ask him the same question: Do you know who the president is? He did know; he’d regularly listened to the news on a radio while he lived in the woods. “This is their test for me,” he wrote. “Always tempted to give a really absurd response. Don’t, but tempted.”

  Soon he essentially stopped talking. “I am retreating into silence as a defensive mode,” he mentioned. Eventually, he was down to uttering just five words, and only to guards: yes; no; please; thank you. “I am surprised,” he wrote, “by the amount of respect this garners me. That silence intimidates puzzles me. Silence is to me normal, comfortable.” Later he added, “I will admit to feeling a little contempt for those who can’t keep quiet.”

  He shared only brief details about his time in the woods, but what he did reveal was harrowing. Some years, he made it clear, he barely survived the winter. In one letter, he said that to get through difficult times, he tried meditating. “I didn’t meditate every day, month, season in the woods. Just when death was near. Death in the form of too little food or too much cold for too long.” Meditation worked, he concluded: “I am alive and sane, at least I think I’m sane.” Again there was no formal closing. His letters simply ended, sometimes in mid-thought.

  He returned to the theme of sanity in a following letter: “When I came out of the woods they applied the hermit label to me. Strange idea to me. I had never thought of myself as a hermit. Then I got worried. For I knew with the label hermit comes the idea of crazy. See the ugly little joke.”

  Even worse, he feared that his time in jail would only prove correct those who thought him insane. His legal proceedings were mired in delays, and after four months in jail Knight had no clue what punishment awaited. A sentence of a dozen or more years was possible. “Stress levels sky high,” he wrote. “Give me a number. How long? Months? Years? How long in prison for me? Tell me the worst. How long?”

  The uncertainty wore on him. The conditions in jail—the handcuffs, the noise, the filth, the crowding—mangled his senses. It’s likely that, if one must be incarcerated in the United States, a jail in central Maine would be among the more tolerable spots, but to Knight it was torture. “Bedlam” is how he referred to the place. It never got dark in jail; at eleven p.m., the lights merely became a little duller. “I suspect,” he noted, “more damage has been done to my sanity in jail, in months; than years, decades, in the woods.”

  Finally, he decided that he could not even write. “For a while writing relieved stress for me. No longer.” He sent one last, crushing letter, the fifth he’d mailed me over the course of eight weeks; in it, he seemed at the verge of breakdown. “Still tired. More tired. Tireder, tiredest, tired ad nauseum, tired infinitium.”

  And that was it. He ceased writing. I mailed him three letters over the next three weeks—“How are you holding up?” I worried—but no wobbly-addressed white envelopes appeared in my mailbox. I reread his final letter, hoping to unearth some subliminal message. I did not. But the closing lines clutched at me. For the only time in our summer-long correspondence, he had signed his name. Despite the exhaustion and the tension, the last words he’d penned were wry and self-mocking: “Your friendly neighborhood Hermit, Christopher Knight.”

  9

  Augusta, Maine, is picturesque but a little melancholy, the downtown streets empty, the factories along the Kennebec River that once produced broom handles and headstones and shoes now giant brick skeletons. The jail was built in 1858. The original structure, a small granite fortress, has become the sheriff’s department offices, and Knight was incarcerated in the attached addition, a three-story slab of pale gray cinder blocks.

  Visiting hours begin most evenings at six forty-five. I arrived early and passed through two sets of metal doors on the ground floor, into the jail’s waiting room. I stood at a narrow desk before a mirrored window made of one-way glass, wondering if I needed to press a button to get a person’s attention. A sign beside a giant pump dispenser of hand sanitizer instructed visitors to use some before entering the facility
.

  “Who you here to see?” squawked an amplified voice from the other side of the glass.

  “Christopher Knight.”

  “Relationship?”

  “Friend,” I answered, unconfidently. He didn’t know I was here, and I had doubts that he would agree to a visit. His letters had hinted at great suffering and greater fortitude, as well as a singular story untold, and once it had become clear that he was no longer writing, I’d taken a chance and flown east, Montana to Maine.

  A metal drawer popped open, and identification was demanded. I deposited my driver’s license, and the drawer snapped shut. When the license was returned, I sat on a bench in the waiting room, buzzing and slamming sounds reverberating through the dirty white walls.

  An elderly couple checked in, followed by a man who answered “I’m his father” to the relationship question, then sat down clutching a bag of underwear as if it were a lifeline. Underwear, in its original packaging, is one of the few items you can give to an inmate at the Kennebec County jail. Then came a woman with two young girls in matching pink dresses. The girls looked as though they had chicken pox, but the mother explained, to no one in particular, that it was just mosquito bites. “We live way out in the woods,” she added. This reminded me to ask Knight, if I did see him, how he had coped with insects, which can be savage in the northern forests. Even Henry David Thoreau, not known for kvetching, wrote in The Maine Woods that he was “seriously molested” by bugs.

  Eventually a baby-faced corrections officer appeared, carrying a handheld metal detector. He called out a name, and the elderly couple stood. The officer worked the detector, unlocked a maroon door labeled VISITING 1, and shut it behind them. Then he sent the man with the underwear into VISITING 2.

  There were three visiting rooms, and when a third name was announced and the woman and children rose, I was dismayed. But then the officer reopened VISITING 2, ushered the group in, and called, “Knight.”

  I was wanded front and back, thankful that the small notebook and pen stashed in my pocket weren’t confiscated. The officer unlocked VISITING 3—a sign on the door warned that if you left for any reason, you’d be prohibited from returning—and I stepped inside and the door closed behind me, and I was rattled with nerves. My eyes adjusted to the dimmer light, and there, in the tiny booth, sealed off behind a thick pane of shatterproof plastic, sitting on a stool, was Christopher Knight.

  Rarely in my life have I witnessed someone less pleased to see me. His thin lips were pulled into a downturned scowl; his eyes did not rise to meet mine. I sat across from him, also on a stool with a black wooden top. I placed my notebook on the metal desk bolted to the wall below the plastic window. There was no acknowledgment of my presence, not the merest nod. He gazed someplace beyond my left shoulder, nearly motionless. He was wearing a dull green overlaundered jail uniform several sizes too big.

  A black phone receiver hung on the wall, and I picked it up. He picked his up—the first movement I saw him make. There was a bit of recorded legal boilerplate, warning that the conversation might be monitored, and then the lines opened.

  I spoke first. “Nice to meet you, Chris.”

  He didn’t respond. He just sat there, stone-faced, his balding head shining like a snowfield beneath the fluorescent lights, his beard—his jail calendar, one hundred and forty days in—a mess of curls, most brown, some red, a few gray. He had on metal-framed bifocals, different from the glasses he’d worn forever in the woods. His broad forehead and pointy beard gave his face a triangular appearance, like a yield sign. He looked a little bit like the Russian writer Leo Tolstoy. He was skinny.

  The only picture I’d seen of Knight before coming was his mug shot, in which he was clean-shaven and slightly frowning, wearing his old clunky glasses, his eyes behind them heavy-lidded and dull after the exhaustion and stress of his arrest. The man in front of me now appeared no more welcoming, but there was a clear sense of alertness and energy. He might not be looking at me, but he was surely observing, though I didn’t know if he’d speak even a single word.

  Knight had mentioned repeatedly in his letters that he felt at ease in silence. I looked at him not looking at me. He had pale, boiled-potato-colored skin and a sharp nose. His shoulders drooped, his posture curled inward, defensive. Maybe a minute passed.

  This was all I could endure. “The constant banging and buzzing in here,” I said, “must be so jarring compared with the sounds of nature.” He shifted his eyes to me—a minor victory—then glanced away. His eyes were light brown, and rather small. He scarcely had any eyebrows. My comment hung in the air.

  Then he spoke, or at least his mouth moved. His first words were inaudible. He was holding the phone’s mouthpiece too low, below his chin. It had been decades since he’d regularly used a phone; he was out of practice. I indicated with my hand that he needed to move it up. He did, then repeated his pronouncement.

  “It’s jail,” he said, and nothing else. Silence once more.

  There were so many questions to ask him, but they all seemed wrong—too prying, too personal. I tried an innocuous one: “What season did you like best when you were living in the woods?”

  Knight paused, apparently laboring to create a response. “I take each season as it comes,” he said, his scowl reappearing. His voice was raspy, each word a distinct entity—overenunciated, unnaturally spaced, absent of elisions. Just a procession of nearly toneless sounds, with a hint of the stretched vowels of a Down East accent.

  I plowed awkwardly on. “Have you made any friends in jail?”

  “No,” he said.

  I shouldn’t have come. He didn’t want me there; I didn’t feel comfortable being there. But the jail had granted me a one-hour visit, and I resolved to stay. I settled atop my stool, feeling hyperaware of all my gestures, my facial expressions, my breathing. No one could out-silence Knight, but I at least wanted to make an effort. The lights in the room were flickery, and a couple of ceiling tiles were missing. Knight’s right leg, I saw through the scratched window, was bouncing rapidly. The floor on the visitor’s side of the booth was covered in pale red industrial carpeting; his side, blue.

  He had written in one of his letters that meeting people often made his “skin crawl,” and indeed he was scratching his forearms. He had a nebulous brown birthmark on the back of his freckled right hand; a few stray wisps of hair coiled up from his crown like snakes being charmed. Someone had graffitied “let me out” in black ink on one of the walls, and another person had scratched “187” onto the door, which is a slang term for murder, based on the California penal code.

  My patience was rewarded. First, after a couple of minutes, his leg settled down. He quit scratching. And then, as if he’d finally found equilibrium with his surroundings, Knight began to come to life.

  “Some people want me to be this warm and fuzzy person,” he said. “All filled with friendly hermit wisdom. Just spouting off fortune-cookie lines from my hermit home.”

  Everything he said was clear, though extremely soft. I had to plug my non-phone ear with my finger to hear him. His gestures were minimal. But his words, when he deigned to share them, could be imaginative and entertaining. And caustic.

  “Your hermit home—like under a bridge?” I said, trying to play along.

  He embarked on an achingly long blink. “You’re thinking of a troll.”

  I laughed, and his face moved in the direction of a smile. We had made a connection, or at least the awkwardness of our introduction had softened. We began to converse somewhat normally, though never at a rapid clip. Knight seemed to weigh the precision of every word he used, careful as a poet. Even his handwritten letters had gone through at least one rough draft, he said, mostly to remove unnecessary insults. Only necessary ones remained.

  He explained about the lack of eye contact. “I’m not used to seeing people’s faces. There’s too much information there. Aren’t you aware of it? Too much, too fast.” Following his cue, I looked over his shoulder while he
stared over mine. We maintained this arrangement for much of the visit. “I don’t like people touching me,” he added. He was able to endure the occasional pat-downs by guards, and that was all. “You’re not a hugger,” he asked, “are you?”

  I admitted that I do at times participate in embraces.

  “I’m glad this is between us,” he said, tapping on the window. “If there was a set of blinds here, I’d close them.” The jail authorities had given him the option of a contact visit, but he’d chosen this style instead. “I prefer a meeting of the minds rather than a touching of bodies. I like my distance.”

  Knight seemed to say exactly what he was thinking, raw and true, unfiltered by the safety net of social niceties. There was no little-white-lie mechanism in him—the one that deems the meal at a dinner party delicious no matter the taste, the one that keeps the gears of human interaction well oiled. “I’m not sorry about being rude if it gets to the point quicker,” he said.

  Here’s what he had written in a letter about an author photo of mine he’d seen in the sample packet of writing I’d mailed him: “You look particularly nerdy. Next time have your wife pick the picture.” When I mentioned during the visit that my son’s name is Beckett, he said, “Ugh. Terrible. Why did you name him that? He’s going to hate you when he gets older.”

  He said that when he was told I’d come to the jail, his first instinct was to turn down the visit. But we’d already formed an epistolary relationship, and my presence might allow him to practice holding a conversation, a skill that had so far eluded him in jail. Also I’d simply shown up—I don’t think any other journalist had, including the documentary crew—and he knew I lived far away. It would have been rude of him, he felt, to refuse my visit, so he’d accepted it, and then was rude to my face.

  Knight could seem prickly—he is prickly—but he also said that since his capture, he’d found himself emotionally overwhelmed at unexpected moments. “Like TV commercials have made me teary. It’s not a good thing in jail to have people see you crying.”