20
The cabin owners of North Pond, a majority of them, arrived at a very different diagnosis. Knight was not just a thief, they said, but also a fraud.
“No way he’s telling the truth,” declared Fred King, who once had a sugar bowl stolen from his place, after which, for years, his friends called him Sugar Bowl. “Can I use a swear word?” asked King, gruff and polite at once, a very Maine trait. “There is no fucking way this guy was a hermit. I’m an outdoorsman, and I’m just telling you, flat out, no way. I’m a thousand percent sure. In winter, it’s subzero all the time. I think a family member helped him, or another person took him in. Or he broke into a vacant place and stayed all winter.”
Some people refused to accept that Knight had never once required medical care. Food stored in the woods, others noted, inevitably attracts raccoons and coyotes, which will tear your camp apart. And how was it possible, a couple of locals asked, that Knight could speak so well, that his vocal cords still functioned and he’d retained such an extensive vocabulary, if he really hadn’t used his voice for so long? One resident pointed out that there was a road called Knight Court not far from his site, and a Knight family, likely relatives of Chris’s, had lived there forever. They must have provided assistance. Also, if Knight had really been out there, the Great Ice Storm of 1998 would surely have frozen him.
“Everything that came from his camp stunk,” said Steve Treadwell, the Pine Tree employee who’d observed the police interrogation of Knight and the dismantling of his site. “But he was clean-smelling. He didn’t live in the woods. His story doesn’t pass the smell test. Literally.”
Dozens of North Pond summer residents offered their opinions about Knight, and about eighty percent of them insisted that he was lying, such an overwhelming preponderance that the only proper thing to do was ask Knight directly. Did he truly spend twenty-seven years alone in the woods? Or did he have assistance, or pass the winter in a cabin, or at least use someone’s bathroom?
When questioned, Knight was adamant and a little angry. Other than the one time he stayed in a home, during the first few weeks of his escape, he never again slept inside. “I had no help from anybody, ever.” He was not in touch with his family, he did not take a shower, nap in a bed, or lounge on someone’s sofa even for a minute. The first time he used an actual toilet in a quarter century was in the Kennebec County jail. When he was driven to the jail in the back of a squad car, it was the first time he’d ridden in an automobile since abandoning the Brat. “I’m a thief. I induced fear. People have a right to be angry. But I have not lied.”
Knight seemed entirely honest, practically incapable of lying, a notion that several other people supported. Diane Vance said that much of her job as state trooper consisted of sorting through lies people fed her, but with Knight she had no questions. “Unequivocally,” she said, “I believe him.” Sergeant Hughes felt the same: “There’s no doubt in my mind he’s lived out there the whole time.”
There was not a morsel of convincing evidence that Knight had ever spent an evening away from the woods, minus the one occasion he admitted to—an admission that itself was a sign of his precise honesty. He said he didn’t need medical care because he wasn’t exposed to germs. He kept his food sealed in plastic totes and remained in camp nearly all the time; most large animals won’t approach when a human is present.
At the time of his arrest, after a long winter, he was down to a single set of unsoiled clothes—he was due for a laundry day. Even in the cold, he kept himself clean with sponge baths, preferably using a large yellow car-wash sponge, if he could steal one, and he frequently took shower gel and deodorant. He could speak so well because vocal cords do not, in fact, curl up and die with disuse, and speaking in complex sentences isn’t about the mouth, it comes from the brain, which in Knight’s case was fully operational, albeit idiosyncratic. Knight had no idea that a family of Knights lived nearby, and anyway they’re not related; his surname is common in central Maine.
He wished there had been more Great Ice Storms. “Ice is nearly liquid. You don’t have liquid in serious cold, in killing cold. It was twenty-eight degrees during that storm. In a car, driving, it was serious. For me, it was a novelty. Actually, it helped. It put a thick layer of ice over the snow, and I could walk around without leaving tracks.”
Most of the North Pond locals, when they were informed that Knight’s story was undoubtedly true, did not change their minds. They were convinced that Knight was running some bizarre con, and that all who believed him had fallen into his trap. They didn’t reject his story mildly; they rejected it venomously. A few seemed less angry about having their goods stolen than the fact that Knight’s tale was accepted by anyone. They couldn’t get their heads around Knight. It was as if he’d insisted that he could flap his arms and fly. His story was both true and unbelievable at the same time, an unsettling merger.
The locals were rattled because Knight’s feat went against all that felt natural, was antithetical to nearly everything one learns. In the Bible, in chapter 2 of Genesis, Adam’s aloneness is the first thing God finds objectionable: “And the Lord God said, It is not good that the man should be alone.”
One reason there are virtually no more devout Christian solitaries—and haven’t been since the 1700s—is that they frightened the ecclesiastical authorities. Hermits were unsupervised thinkers, pondering life and death and God, and the church, with its ingrained schedules and rote memorization, did not approve of many hermits’ ideas. Thomas Aquinas, the thirteenth-century Italian priest, said hermits could be subversive to obedience and stability, and that it was better to keep such people in monasteries, subject to regulations and routine.
“The solitary is necessarily a man who does what he wants to do,” wrote Thomas Merton, an American Trappist monk who died in 1968. “In fact, he has nothing else to do. That is why his vocation is both dangerous and despised.”
I began asking cabin owners—and, later, many others—to estimate the longest time they’d ever spent without human interaction. By this I meant not seeing anyone or communicating in any way, including phone, e-mail, or text messages. Just time by one’s self, unconnected, though reading or listening to the radio or watching TV alone was okay.
Nine out of ten people, often after a contemplative pause, realized that they had never passed a single day in solitude. Usually it was no more than a handful of waking hours. My father has lived seventy-three years but hasn’t tried a dozen hours alone. I once embarked on a three-day solo wilderness trip but encountered a pair of hikers and stopped to chat, so my record is around forty-eight hours. A few accomplished explorers I know have gone a week. To meet someone who’s finished a month would be extraordinary.
Chris Knight, with his thousands upon thousands of days alone, was an unfathomable outlier. His feat goes so far beyond anyone else’s physical or mental limit that it rearranges our notion of the possible. But the truth is that Knight was out there every one of those winters, and what he did in the cold was both prosaic and profound.
He suffered. When he ran out of propane and food, he often became “cold, cold, really cold.” Such cold is often called mind-numbing, but he was aware of it always. He called it “physical, emotional, psychological pain.” His body fat was eaten from within, his stomach begged. He sensed the nearness of death. Yet he refused to light a fire or leave a traceable footprint.
When the situation passed some point of dire, he monitored the weather reports on the radio and waited for a snowstorm to approach. With the exception of a few year-round homes, which Knight never touched, the area was mostly deserted in winter, and he knew which seasonal cabins likely still had food. With the last of his energy he’d slog through the forest, cut across the frozen pond, hit one of these cabins, and return as the flakes started to fall, erasing his tracks.
He could not always maintain an impassive neutrality. Sometimes a tiny thing wormed into the deep spot where he’d stashed his emotions. Once, as he was liste
ning to the radio, a blizzard swirling around him, the school closures were announced. His old high school was mentioned. Just a moment on the radio, but it brought back a flood of memories. And Knight felt his chest clench with melancholy. How had his life come to this?
He occasionally missed his family. “I suppose a more subtle answer would be I missed some of my family to a certain degree,” he allowed. For long stretches, family didn’t exist in his thoughts. Then a memory would be triggered and they’d be alive in his head. He missed his sister, Susanna, the most. She’s the sibling closest in age to Knight, a year younger, and has Down syndrome. “She was the one I spent most of my childhood with,” he said.
There were times, he admitted, when he wept, but he provided no further details. Sporadically, especially during the first decade, the idea of quitting his seclusion entered his mind. He had a system in place. He kept a whistle in his tent, and if he ever became too weak to move, he knew that if he blew on it in sustained sequences of three, the high-pitched sounds would carry across the water and help might eventually come.
After a while, though, he resolved that he wouldn’t use the whistle. He made a firm decision that he was not going to voluntarily emerge from the trees. Civilization was three minutes away, but he never went except to steal. “I was prepared to die out there,” he said.
21
A thousand poets sing of solitude—“let me live, unseen, unknown,” yearned Alexander Pope—but far more people curse it. The difference between bliss and distress generally seems to be whether solitude is chosen or involuntary. Forced isolation is one of the oldest known punishments. Banishment was widely used during the Roman Empire (the poet Ovid was exiled from Rome in A.D. 8, possibly for writing obscene verse), and for centuries a severe penalty on the high seas was marooning, in which an offending sailor was deposited on an uninhabited island, sometimes with a Bible and a bottle of rum. Most such men were never heard from again. Even now, when a Jehovah’s Witness is disfellowshipped for breaking church doctrine, every member of the religion is forbidden from speaking to the sinner.
The worst nonlethal punishment in the United States penal system is solitary confinement. It’s a “hell all to yourself,” said Robert Stark, who has spent years in solitary at the Louisiana State Penitentiary, serving time for murder. Thomas Silverstein killed a prison guard in 1983 and since then (except for one week during a prison riot) has been locked alone in a concrete and steel box, during which he has never once felt an affectionate touch. It feels as if he’s been “buried alive,” Silverstein wrote, “for an entire lifetime.”
Todd Ashker, who was isolated in a windowless supermax cell for about twenty-five years, described his situation as “a continuous silent screaming.” John Catanzarite spent nearly fourteen years in solitary in a California prison and said that when he started to lose his sanity he was glad, because it might release him from the horror of reality.
After ten days in solitary confinement, many prisoners display clear signs of mental harm, and one study showed that about a third will eventually develop active psychosis. There are at least eighty thousand such inmates in America. The United Nations has determined that holding a person in isolation for more than fifteen days is cruel and inhuman punishment.
“It’s an awful thing, solitary,” wrote John McCain, who spent more than five years as a prisoner of war in Vietnam, two of them alone, before he became a U.S. senator. “It crushes your spirit,” McCain added. “The onset of despair is immediate.” A large majority of men, and twenty-five percent of women, a University of Virginia study found, would rather subject themselves to mild electric shocks than do nothing but sit quietly with their thoughts for fifteen minutes. Unless you are a trained meditator, the study’s authors concluded, the “mind does not like to be alone with itself.” Terry Anderson, kidnapped in Lebanon in 1985 and held mostly alone for more than six years, said, “I would rather have had the worst companion than no companion at all.”
Many evolutionary biologists believe that early humans thrived, despite being weaker and slower than other animals, chiefly due to their superior ability to work together. Human brains are wired to connect—magnetic resonance imaging shows that the same neural circuitry that causes us to feel physical pain is activated when we face social pain, like being shunned from a group or picked last on the playground.
Harry Harlow, a psychology professor at the University of Wisconsin, ran a series of experiments starting in the 1950s, showing that young rhesus monkeys, when isolated from other monkeys for as little as three months, could be behaviorally damaged for life. Brain scans of war prisoners in the former Yugoslavia demonstrated that without sustained social interaction, a brain can become as injured as one that has incurred a traumatic blow. Upon being taken captive, John McCain had two broken arms and a broken leg, and later developed chronic dysentery, but the pain of loneliness, he implied, was worse.
Our inherent and environmentally stimulated sociability may have made our brains grow so large in the first place. “Reading and interpreting social cues,” noted social neuroscientist John Cacioppo, “is, for any of us, at any time, a demanding and cognitively complex activity.” The need to recognize the constantly shifting status of friends and foes, to act for the betterment of a group when it isn’t in your immediate self-interest, to understand how to reason and cajole and deceive, likely gave rise to an expanded cerebral cortex, which, in turn, resulted in the dominance of humans.
Further, evolution selected genes that reinforce pleasure and safety in company, and unease and fear when alone. Unwanted loneliness makes you sick—social isolation is as damaging as high blood pressure, obesity, or smoking as a risk factor for illness and early death. “Happiness for a member of the human species demands connection,” wrote Cacioppo. “Our brains and bodies are designed to function in aggregates, not in isolation.”
Connectivity and cooperation transcend humans; these traits extend to the most ancient forms of life. Many animals display extreme devotion to group bonding and social good. There are hives, flocks, herds, schools, gaggles, troops, packs, bands, bevies, coveys, and droves. (There are also lone wolves and solitary apes and even hermitlike wasps, but these are exceptions to the general rule of the animal kingdom.) Salmonella bacteria work together, secreting signaling molecules that help them determine the opportune moment to collectively attack a host. By the time a human infant is eight months old, attachments to others have already been formed. It’s only Knight, and his fellow solitaries throughout history, who are puzzling anomalies.
After his arrest and incarceration, Knight craved solitary confinement. “I have a hope, wish, fantasy of a cell of my own,” he wrote in one of his letters. “And to think this would be considered punishment. It is to laugh.” But not aloud—Knight always made sure to laugh silently, internally. He worried that if he were seen grinning in jail, amused by a thought in his head, it would be considered further proof of his feeblemindedness.
For his first several months in jail, Knight had a cellmate, with whom he scarcely exchanged a word. When he was finally transferred to a single cell, he was much relieved.
Isolation is the raw material of greatness; being alone is hazardous to our health. Few other conditions produce such diametrically opposing reactions, though of course genius and craziness often share a fence line. Sometimes even voluntary solitude can send a person over to the wrong side of the fence.
In 1988, a cave explorer named Véronique Le Guen volunteered for an extreme experiment: to live alone in an underground cavern in southern France without a clock for one hundred and eleven days, monitored by scientists who wished to study the human body’s natural rhythms in the absence of time cues. For a while, she settled into a pattern of thirty hours awake and twenty hours asleep. She described herself as being “psychologically completely out of phase, where I no longer know what my values are or what is my purpose in life.”
When she returned to society, her husband later noted, she see
med to have an emptiness inside her that she was unable to fully express. “While I was alone in my cave I was my own judge,” she said. “You are your own most severe judge. You must never lie or all is lost. The strongest sentiment I brought out of the cave is that in my life I will never tolerate lying.” A little more than a year later, Le Guen swallowed an overdose of barbiturates and lay down in her car in Paris, a suicide at age thirty-three. “It was a risk that came with this experiment, to become half crazy,” she’d reportedly said on a radio show two days earlier.
The first solo around-the-world sailing race, the Golden Globe, began in 1968. Bernard Moitessier of France was on his way to winning when he realized that he loved being alone on his boat and dreaded returning to the hubbub of society. He quit the race after seven months and continued sailing for nearly a complete second lap of the world, achieving a personal victory he found far more meaningful than any contest. “I am free, free as never before,” he wrote.
But another competitor in the Golden Globe, Donald Crowhurst of Great Britain, became increasingly lonely and depressed, began radioing false reports about his progress, and finally retreated to his cabin, where he composed a lengthy and hallucinatory treatise. Then he went overboard. His body was never recovered. “It is finished. It is finished. It is the mercy” were some of his final written words.
The same solitude, that of the enormous emptiness of the ocean, moved Moitessier to ecstasy and drove Crowhurst to insanity. Knight had within him, it seemed, a little of both sailors—a dark side and a light, a yin of winter and a yang of summer. “Pain and pleasure,” he called it. Both were essential, he believed, and one could not exist without the other. “Suffering is such a deep part of living,” wrote Robert Kull, who lived alone on an island in Patagonia for a year, in 2001, “that if we try too hard to avoid it, we end up avoiding life entirely.” The Tao Te Ching says that “happiness rests in misery.”
The Stranger in the Woods Page 11
