The Stranger in the Woods

by Michael Finkel

  Instead, he affiliated himself with a school of thought. He practiced Stoicism, the Greek philosophy, descended from Socratic ideas, founded in the third century B.C. Stoics felt that self-control and harmonious existence with nature constituted a virtuous life, and that one must endure hardship without complaint. Passion must be subject to reason; emotions lead one astray. “There was no one to complain to in the woods, so I did not complain,” Knight said.

  In the absence of a deity, Knight seemed to have venerated Socrates. The philosopher, born in 469 B.C., was not himself a hermit but advocated the lifestyle. Socrates may have concluded that his most valuable possession was his leisure. “Beware the barrenness of a busy life” is a quote commonly attributed to him. He walked everywhere barefoot, and ate only the poorest quality meats. Nothing appeared to bother him. Socrates was sentenced to death, facilitated by a cup of hemlock tea, for impiety and heretical teaching. One becomes free, Socrates seems to have taught, not by fulfilling all desires but by eliminating desire.

  When Knight faced life-threatening challenges in the forest, he chose not to express emotion, instead maintaining the dispassionate equanimity of a Stoic. At no point, he emphasized, did he pray to a higher power. With one exception. When the worst of a Maine winter struck, all rules were suspended. “Once you get below negative twenty, you purposely don’t think. It’s like there’s no atheists in a foxhole. Same with negative twenty. That’s when you do have religion. You do pray. You pray for warmth.”

  All of Knight’s survival tactics were focused on winter. Each year, just as the cabins were shutting down for the season, often with food left behind in the pantry, Knight embarked on an intensified streak of all-night raids. “It was my busiest time. Harvest time. A very ancient instinct. Though not one usually associated with crime.”

  His first goal was to get fat. This was a life-or-death necessity. Every mammal in his forest, mouse to moose, had the same basic plan. He gorged himself on sugar and alcohol—it was the quickest way to gain weight, and he liked the feeling of inebriation. The bottles he stole were the signs of a man who’d never once, as he admitted, sat at a bar: Allen’s Coffee Flavored Brandy, Seagram’s Escapes Strawberry Daiquiri, Parrot Bay Coconut Rum, and something called Whipped Chocolate Valley Vines, a liquefied blend of chocolate, whipped cream, and red wine.

  He filled plastic totes with nonperishable food. He took warm clothes and sleeping bags. And he stockpiled propane, hauling the potbellied white tanks from barbecue grills all around North and Little North Ponds. The tanks were vital—not for cooking (cold food still nourishes) or heat (burning gas in a tent can create enough carbon monoxide to kill you) but for melting snow to make drinking water. It was a fuel-intensive task; Knight required ten tanks per winter. When each tank was finished, he buried it near his site. He never returned an empty.

  The supply-gathering process was a race against the weather. With the first significant snowfall of the season, typically in November, all operations shut down. It is impossible to move through snow without making tracks, and Knight was obsessive about not leaving a print. So for the next six months, until the spring thaw in April, he rarely strayed from his clearing in the woods. Ideally, he wouldn’t depart from his camp at all the entire winter.

  To combat the cold, Knight groomed his beard to winter length—about an inch: thick enough to insulate his face, thin enough to prevent ice buildup. For most of the summer, using stolen shaving cream, he’d remain clean-shaven, to stay cool, except during the height of mosquito season, when a heavy scruff served as a natural insect repellent. The blackflies can swarm so thickly in central Maine that you can’t breathe without inhaling some; every forearm slap leaves your fingers sticky with your own blood. Many North Pond locals find peak insect season more challenging than the severest cold snap.

  Once the bugs subsided, Knight would shave again, until the blustery season in late fall—facial hair also offers good protection from the wind. As for the hair on his head, he kept it simple: several times a year, he’d shave himself bald, using scissors and a disposable razor. While he lived in the woods, Knight never once appeared classically hermitlike, hirsute and disheveled, and only while he was in jail and no longer a hermit did he begin to look exactly like one. It was his idea of a practical joke.

  It’s natural to assume that Knight just slept all the time during the cold season, a human hibernation, but this is wrong. “It is dangerous to sleep too long in winter,” he said. It was essential for him to know precisely how cold it was, his brain demanded it, so he always kept three thermometers in camp: one mercury, one digital, one spring-loaded. He couldn’t trust just a single thermometer, and preferred a consensus.

  When frigid weather descended, he went to sleep at seven-thirty p.m. He’d cocoon himself in multiple layers of sleeping bags and cinch a tie-down strap near his feet to prevent the covers from slipping off. If he needed to pee, it was too cumbersome to undo his bedding, so he used a wide-mouthed jug with a good lid. No matter what he tried, he couldn’t keep his feet warm. “Thick socks. Multiple socks. Boot liners. Thin socks, thinking it was better to have my feet together, using the mitten theory. I never found a perfect solution.” Still, he did not lose a toe or a finger to frostbite. Once in bed, he’d sleep six and a half hours, and arise at two a.m.

  That way, at the depth of cold, he was awake. At extreme temperatures, it didn’t matter how well wrapped he was—if he remained in bed much longer, condensation from his body could freeze his sleeping bag. His core temperature would plunge, and the paralyzing lethargy of an extreme chill would begin to creep over him, starting at his feet and hands, then moving like an invading army to his heart. “If you try and sleep through that kind of cold, you might never wake up.”

  The first thing he’d do at two a.m. was light his stove and start melting snow. To get his blood circulating, he’d walk the perimeter of his camp. “Out of the tent. Turn left. Fifteen paces. Turn left. Eight paces. To my winter toilet. Do my business. Twenty paces back. A big triangle. Around again. And again. I like to pace.” He’d air out his sleeping bags, wicking away moisture. He did this every bitter-cold night for a quarter century. If it had snowed he’d shovel his site, pushing the snow to the camp’s perimeter, where it accumulated in great frozen mounds, walling him in.

  His feet never seemed to fully thaw, but as long as he had a fresh pair of socks, this wasn’t really a problem. It is more important to be dry than warm. By dawn, he’d have his day’s water supply. No matter how tempted he was to crawl back into his covers, he resisted. He had complete self-control. Naps were not permitted in his ideology, as they ruined his ability to achieve deep, rejuvenating sleep.

  He sometimes felt disconcertingly exposed during winter. Few people were around, but with the leaves gone, the chances increased that his camp might be spotted. He had an alarm system—no one could walk silently in Knight’s woods, except Knight, so there’d always be warning of an approach—and also an escape plan. If a person came near, Knight’s idea was to avoid confrontation by moving deeper into the woods.

  A short distance from his camp, Knight kept what he called his upper cache. Buried in the ground, so well camouflaged with twigs and leaves that you could walk right over it and never know, were two metal garbage bins and one plastic tote. They contained camping gear and winter clothes, enough so that if someone found his site, Knight could instantly abandon it and start anew. His commitment to isolation was absolute.

  19

  Knight was sensitive about being thought of as insane. “The idea of crazy has been attached to me,” he acknowledged. “I understand I’ve made an unusual lifestyle choice. But the label ‘crazy’ bothers me. Annoys me. Because it prevents response.” When someone asks if you’re crazy, Knight lamented, you can either say yes, which makes you crazy, or you can say no, which makes you sound defensive, as if you fear that you really are crazy. There’s no good answer.

  If anything, Knight thought of himself, in the grand tra
dition of Stoicism, as the opposite of crazy—as entirely clearheaded and rational. When he learned that the bundles of magazines buried at his site were regarded by some locals as an eccentric habit, he was infuriated. Everything he did in the woods, he said, had a reason. “People don’t comprehend the reasons. They only see craziness and absurdness. I had a strategy, a long-term plan. They don’t comprehend because I’m not there to explain it.” Those bundles were a sensible recycling of reading material into floorboards.

  It’s possible that Knight believed he was one of the few sane people left. He was confounded by the idea that passing the prime of your life in a cubicle, spending hours a day at a computer, in exchange for money, was considered acceptable, but relaxing in a tent in the woods was disturbed. Observing the trees was indolent; cutting them down was enterprising. What did Knight do for a living? He lived for a living.

  Knight insisted that his escape should not be interpreted as a critique of modern life. “I wasn’t consciously judging society or myself. I just chose a different path.” Yet he’d seen enough of the world from his perch in the trees to be repulsed by the quantity of stuff people bought while the planet was casually poisoned, everyone hypnotized into apathy by “a bunch of candy-colored fluff” on a billion and one little screens. Knight observed modern life and recoiled from its banality.

  Carl Jung said that only an introvert could see “the unfathomable stupidity of man.” Friedrich Nietzsche wrote, “Wherever is the crowd is a common denominator of stench.” Knight’s best friend, Thoreau, believed that all societies, no matter how well intentioned, pervert their citizens. Sartre wrote, “Hell is other people.”

  Maybe the operative question, Knight implied, wasn’t why someone would leave society but why anyone would want to stay. “The whole world is rushing headlong like a swelling torrent,” a recluse once told Confucius. “Wouldn’t you be better off following those who flee the world altogether?” The Indian writer Jiddu Krishnamurti has been quoted as saying, “It is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.”

  The Hermitary website, a digital storehouse of everything hermit-related, posted a series of essays by a modern solitude seeker—he described himself as a homeless wanderer—who used only the initial S. as a pen name. “Human society has been mostly an immoral violent bedlam,” he wrote. There’s an endless cycle of crime, corruption, disease, and environmental degradation. The answer to consumption is always more consumption, and society lacks any mechanism for finding a balance between humans and nature. At our core, we are really just beasts. S.’s conclusion was stark: “Living and participating in society is madness and criminal.” Unless you are a hermit, in a state of permanent retreat from all others, he wrote, you are in some ways guilty of destroying the planet.

  After his arrest, Knight was examined by a forensic psychologist hired by the state of Maine to evaluate his mental health. Court documents show that the state considered Knight to have “complete competency.” The state also offered three diagnoses: Asperger’s disorder, depression, or possible schizoid personality disorder.

  No surprise with the Asperger’s. For a while, every smart and shy eccentric from Bobby Fischer to Bill Gates was hastily fitted with this label, and many were more or less believably retrofitted, including Isaac Newton, Edgar Allan Poe, Michelangelo, and Virginia Woolf. Newton had great trouble forming friendships and probably remained celibate. In Poe’s poem Alone he wrote that “all I lov’d—I lov’d alone.” Michelangelo is said to have written, “I have no friends of any sort and I don’t want any.” Woolf killed herself.

  Asperger’s disorder, once considered a subtype of autism, was named after the Austrian pediatrician Hans Asperger, a pioneer, in the 1940s, in identifying and describing autism. Unlike other early researchers, according to the neurologist and author Oliver Sacks, Asperger felt that autistic people could have beneficial talents, especially what he called a “particular originality of thought” that was often beautiful and pure, unfiltered by culture or discretion, unafraid to grasp at extremely unconventional ideas. Nearly every autistic person that Sacks observed appeared happiest when alone. The word “autism” is derived from autos, the Greek word for “self.”

  “The cure for Asperger’s syndrome is very simple,” wrote Tony Attwood, a psychologist and Asperger’s expert who lives in Australia. The solution is to leave the person alone. “You cannot have a social deficit when you are alone. You cannot have a communication problem when you are alone. All the diagnostic criteria dissolve in solitude.”

  Officially, Asperger’s disorder no longer exists as a diagnostic category. The diagnosis, having been inconsistently applied, was replaced, with clarified criteria, in the fifth edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders; Asperger’s is now grouped under the umbrella term autism spectrum disorder, or ASD.

  It was unclear if Knight really did have ASD. A half dozen autism experts and clinical psychologists reviewed Knight’s story. All of them said that it was impossible to make an accurate diagnosis without meeting the patient, but they agreed to comment. Thomas W. Frazier, the director of the Center for Autism at the Cleveland Clinic, felt it was “pretty obvious” that Knight had autisic traits, especially his lack of eye contact, his sensory touchiness, and his absence of friends. Autism has a genetic component, and Knight’s family, so private and quiet, could possess what’s known as a broad autism phenotype.

  The South African neuroscientist Henry Markram, whose son is on the autism spectrum, has explained the disorder with what he calls the “intense world” theory—motions, sounds, and lights that most of us naturally disregard feel to an autistic person like an endless assault, their life a permanent visit to Times Square. Autistic people take in too much and learn too fast, overwhelmed not only by their own emotions but by the emotions of others. Looking at a person’s face is like staring at a strobe light; a squeaky bedspring could sound like fingernails scraping across a blackboard. To remain stable, Markram believed, you’d have to regulate your life to the fullest extent possible, developing a rigorous focus on detail and repetition.

  Oliver Sacks wrote that autistic people, as an adaptation to an “uninhibited barrage of sensation,” often needed to create a world of their own, one that was calm and orderly. Some autistic people fashioned this world between their ears, but Knight built it amid the trees.

  And yet according to Stephen M. Edelson, the executive director of the Autism Research Institute, in San Diego, Knight’s behavior, however autistic-seeming, did not rise to the level of autism spectrum disorder. Edelson believed that given the opportunity to meet with Knight, few experienced doctors would deem him autistic. Knight’s ability to plan and coordinate his life, to survive for so long completely on his own without therapy or treatment, is extremely uncharacteristic of an autistic person.

  Catherine Lord, a professor of psychology at Weill Cornell Medicine, in New York, said that even the most autistic adult or child she’d ever encountered usually had someone in their lives they would like to be around. Many autistic people desire contact and hugs but don’t know when it’s appropriate. “For every autistic trait he has,” said Peter Deri, a clinical psychologist in private practice in New York, “he has traits that are the antithesis. Autistic people don’t steal. They’re not criminals.” Knight exhibited none of the repetitive movements or recurrent speech patterns typical of those with ASD.

  Another idea proffered by the state psychologist who did examine Knight was schizoid personality disorder. This is not the same thing as schizophrenia, in which people characteristically lose contact with reality and often experience hallucinations and delusional thinking. Schizoid personality is similar to autism in that people with either disorder rarely have close relationships and tend to be logical thinkers. Those with autism, however, often want friends but find human social interaction too incomprehensible. People with schizoid personality disorder prefer to be solitary. They lack any general interest to be
with others, even sexually. They know the social rules but have decided not to follow them; they are indifferent to everyone else. Jill Hooley, the head of the clinical psychology program at Harvard University, felt that Knight’s behavior was consistent with many of the features of schizoid personality disorder.

  There are good arguments why Knight both could and could not be diagnosed with schizoid personality disorder. The evidence showed that he was apathetic to people, in a schizoid way, but his inability to interact naturally with others and his hypersensitivity to sensory changes seemed classically autistic. “The temptation to label Knight is so great,” said Peter Deri. “Was he depressed? Was he schizoid? Bipolar? Are there Aspergian traits?”

  Maybe there’s a brain abnormality—a damaged amygdala, a shortage of oxytocin, an imbalance of endorphins. Stephen M. Edelson suggested several syndromes before giving up and quipping, “I diagnose him as a hermit.”

  “Nothing makes complete sense,” said Deri. “The complexity of this guy is so puzzling, you could go anywhere diagnostically. There has to be grandiosity to go through with a plan like that, it is so exceptional. Knight is like a Rorschach card. He really is an object for everyone to project onto.”

  Knight expressed little interest in his diagnosis. “I only learned about Asperger’s here in jail. It’s just a label slapped on a set of behaviors.” He admitted that therapy might benefit him, but was adamant that any disorder assigned to him not be used as an excuse for his crimes. He said he was taking no medications.

  “I don’t want to be in the position of victim. It’s not my nature. There’s not much, from what I’ve read, that I can do about my diagnosis. I don’t think I’ll be a spokesman for the Asperger’s telethon. Do they still do telethons? I hate Jerry Lewis.”