The Stranger in the Woods_ The - Michael Finkel

the bright side. The sun will come up tomorrow.” He grew tired of hearing them, so now he keeps quiet. He
doesn’t blame anyone—“everyone’s doing their best,” he says in a way that can be construed as arrogant—
but following their rules causes him to feel worse. Jail, in some sense, was preferable. Now that he’s free, it
is clear that he isn’t.
He reaches into a front pocket of his jeans and pulls out a watch with a broken strap. His family, he says,
doesn’t want him speaking with me. If they knew I was here, they’d be upset. The timing of my visit is
good, but we don’t have long. His mother is coming home soon. And then his brother needs to drive him to
Augusta for his drug testing. He shakes his head. He’s never in his life used illegal drugs, not so much as a
toke of pot, yet this is how he must spend his afternoon.
“I am a square peg,” he says. Everybody he encounters, he feels, is smashing at him, pounding on him,
trying to jam him into a round hole. Society seems no more welcoming to him than before he left. He fears
he may be forced to take psychotropic medicines, drugs that will mess with his brain, when he already
knows exactly how to fix everything.
All he needs to do is return to his camp. Though, of course, he can’t. He must perform the whole dogand-pony
show of his punishment. “Am I crazy?” he asks. He says he received the video of my books, but
that lately he’s not even interested in reading. He asks again: “Am I crazy?”
Knight looks at me and actually holds eye contact for a few beats, and I can read the sadness. While in
jail, he had always felt emotionally closed off. Possibly, it was the cumbersome arrangement of the visiting
booth—the glass wall, the staticky phone receivers, the lack of privacy. Now his face has taken on a new
dimension, no longer cold and off-putting. He is reaching out; he seems to be asking for help.
Maybe the best way to forge a bond with a true hermit is to leave him alone for a while. In jail he was
orating, pontificating. Now we are speaking. Some connection has formed. We aren’t friends, but perhaps
we are acquaintances. By explaining to me how nobody else understood him, he may have hinted that he
feels like I do have some understanding.
I say to him, truthfully, that I don’t believe he is crazy.
Then, as if to challenge my conclusion, he suddenly asks me a seemingly random question. “What do you
think I’m talking about when I say ‘the Lady of the Woods’? I’m speaking allegorically.”
“Mother Nature,” I guess.
“No,” he says. “Death.”
Knight’s question wasn’t random. Death, in fact, is the subject he most wants to talk about. He says that
he’s seen the Lady of the Woods before, during a very bad winter. His food was finished, his propane used
up, and the cold was unrelenting. He was in his bed, in his tent, starving, freezing, dying. The Lady
appeared. She was wearing a hooded sweater, a feminine Grim Reaper. She lifted an eyebrow and lowered
her hood. She asked if he was going with her or staying. He says he’s aware, on an intellectual level, that it
was just some fevered, desperate hallucination, but he’s still not entirely sure.
He tells me he has a plan. He is going to wait for the first really frigid day, probably in late November,
six or so months from now, and he will set out into the forest wearing very little clothing. He will walk as
deep into the woods as he can. Then he is going to sit down and allow nature to take care of him. He will
freeze himself to death. “I’m going to walk with the Lady of the Woods,” he says. He thinks about this all
the time. He realizes he’s caught in an impossible trap: if he seeks liberty by returning to his camp, he’ll be
locked up. He craves to “touch, embrace, accept relief.” He’s done some research; hypothermia, he