Suppose you wanted to get away from it all. Suppose you wanted to light out for the Territory, step away from civilization, and leave the world behind. What would you do? Where would you go?
If the journalist Michael Finkel is to be believed, all you have to do is slip off to the wild forests of Maine. At least, that's what a man named Christopher Knight did. Back in 1986, 20 years old and working as an alarm-system installer, Knight decided he'd had enough. He lit out for the woods of central Maine and didn't emerge for 27 years.
As Finkel tells the story in The Stranger in the Woods, his new book about the would-be hermit, Knight built a nest for himself near North and Little North Ponds, between the townships of Smithfield, Mercer, and Rome. And there he dwelt, sleeping on a floor of salvaged copies of National Geographic. He admits that sometime in the 1990s he said "Hi" to a hiker he accidentally let spot him, but that was his only human contact for almost three decades. Christopher Knight was, Michael Finkel suggests, "the most solitary known person in all of history."
It's nonsense, of course. Knight didn't forage the woods. He foraged the nearby cabins, committing over a thousand small burglaries, 40 or so a year, to keep himself supplied with food, batteries, and lantern fuel. He lifted a little portable television set, powered by a stolen car battery, so he could watch the local PBS station. He listened to talk shows on the radio he'd pilfered and read books from the houses he'd robbed.
Far from being the most solitary person in history, Knight may have been the most utterly dependent. Everything he had—everything he consumed, everything he touched—originated in robbery from other human beings. He emerged from the wild not because he decided to share the Thoreauvian wisdom of his hermitage years. He came out of the woods because Maine's game wardens put him in handcuffs and dragged him out in 2013. They had finally caught the "North Pond Burglar" after setting up surveillance cameras and alarms at Pine Tree Camp, a facility for children and adults with disabilities, which Knight had robbed at least 50 times over the years.
There's something incredible in the story of Maine's burglarious hermit, in the literal meaning of the word: something not entirely credible. To read The Stranger in the Woods is to find oneself shying, like a horse that wants to refuse a jump. How did Knight survive the winters that often fell to 20 below? How did he fend off anemia from the clouds of mosquitos that rise from Maine's ponds in the summer? How did he manage colds and toothaches? No matter how valiantly Michael Finkel tries through his nine interviews with Knight at the Kennebec County Jail, he simply cannot get the man to explain why he went off to the woods, why he robbed so many houses, and why he shunned other people for so long. The lack of motive paints a dreamlike, fantastical patina over the book's prose. It just doesn't feel real.
Add to that the fact that Finkel does not have the best track record for journalistic honesty. Back in 2002, he wrote "Is Youssouf Malé a Slave?," a New York Times Magazine feature about a young worker on a cocoa plantation in the Ivory Coast. The story quickly fell apart when other journalists began doing follow-up reporting, and the Times was forced to print a retraction that admitted the story was about "a composite character, with time sequences and certain other facts falsified." By 2007, however, Finkel had recovered his position as a leading freelance reporter, penning a cover story for National Geographic and vowing not to repeat the crimes of his New York Times debacle.
By all accounts, he hasn't duplicated those journalistic crimes, and just to be sure we know he's now scrupulous, he meticulously footnotes every source he uses in The Stranger in the Woods and names not just one but two fact-checkers who vetted his work. For that matter, the book is an expansion of a popular article Finkel wrote about Knight for GQ in the summer of 2014, and in the months since no one has come forward with any revelations of the story's falsity. The local police, game wardens, and state troopers all believe Knight stayed in his secret nest in the woods for 27 years, and the state-mandated psychiatrists who've interviewed the captured hermit have apparently failed to find any cracks in his story.
Without a clear motive, Knight's trek into the woods was "a confounding mix of incredible commitment and complete lack of forethought," Finkel writes. He expands his GQ essay into a book by describing his own nights spent in Knight's hideaway, and he interviews many of Knight's victims, letting them explain how the continuous small burglaries kept the area's residents uneasy for decades.
Knight never stole anything large or particularly valuable, never physically hurt anyone, and tried not to break anything. Still, a thousand robberies is quite a crime spree, making Knight the most unswerving burglar in "maybe the world," Finkel writes, and it will strike the reader as odd that Maine's courts let him off without serious jail time. Knight himself was not particularly grateful, as far as that goes: The ex-hermit complains that he's now been "thrown into the waters of society and expected to swim."
Knight's plaintive cry at his forced return to society would tug a little more at the heartstrings if he hadn't always been in society. He participated in the social order in a peculiar way, admittedly, and his techniques of social interaction lacked the personal touch. But with his survival by robbery he was profoundly involved with, profoundly reliant on, other people.
Throughout The Stranger in the Woods, Michael Finkel wants us to see the North Pond Hermit as a genuine rebel who set off to be by himself. Henry David Thoreau is dismissed as a rank amateur in the name of promoting Knight as the true professional among recluses, the reigning prince of self-isolation.
A better, sadder lesson might come from turning Knight's story upside down. The young man who walked off into the woods strove for independence and found only dependence. He sought freedom from social constraints and discovered only a life more constrained than he had known before. The ex-alarm installer wanted liberty, and he spent 27 years more narrowly bound than anyone not in prison. He hiked into the wilderness, and the wilderness proved to be lakefronts lined with summer cabins, each with a pantry to pilfer.
The lesson of Christopher Knight is surely that we have no escape hatch anymore—no place to get away for those who need to get away. The greatest problem of culture may be that there's no escape from culture. The greatest problem of politics may be that there's no escape from politics. If we hungered to leave the world behind, if we wanted to light out for the Territory, what now could we do? Where now could we go?