The Stranger in the Woods_ The - Michael Finkel

A Note on the Reporting
The Kennebec County Correctional Facility permits a maximum of two meetings per week with an inmate,
each lasting one hour. I visited Christopher Knight twice in the last week of August 2013—this was after
he’d written me five letters—and then twice more in September, and a further two times in early October.
In late October, I attended Knight’s court hearing and visited him three times. Knight himself is obviously
the chief source of material for this book.
Knight was never thrilled to see me, but for each of our nine jail visits, we conversed the entire time,
through old-fashioned phone receivers. After an hour, the phones automatically cut off, but by the second
visit, Knight had learned, from observing another inmate, a jail trick. If a guard hadn’t arrived to unlock
Knight’s side of the visiting booth, he fiddled with the hook switch on the phone’s cradle—I imagined the
maneuver was like one of Knight’s lock-breaking moves—and was able to reconnect the lines, allowing us to
chat for a few extra minutes.
So despite Knight’s reticence and his lack of joy at seeing me, he wanted to continue talking for as long as
possible. After his release, during our intense visit on his property, he referred to me as his “Boswell”—a
reference to James Boswell, the eighteenth-century Scottish writer best known for The Life of Samuel
Johnson, one of the more famous biographies in all of literature.
The Life of Samuel Johnson is immense—more than a thousand pages in most editions—and I told
Knight that my book would likely be far shorter. Knight seemed disappointed to hear this. “I like long books
better,” he told me.
I made a total of seven reporting trips to Maine over the course of two years, the final one in April 2015.
I also wrote a magazine story about Knight, which was published in the September 2014 issue of GQ
magazine. The GQ story was fact-checked by a professional fact-checker named Riley Blanton, and Blanton,
along with another professional fact-checker, Max Thorn, took on the task of confirming all of the material
in this book. I did not change any names in this account, nor did I alter any identifying details. No one
interviewed was granted any editorial control.
Every trip to Maine, I spent a couple of days driving the dirt roads of North and Little North Ponds,
often visiting house after house, like a door-to-door peddler. I spoke with at least forty families who own a
cabin or permanent home in the area. The majority of cabin owners are native Mainers, most of the rest
come from the Boston area, and a few families live farther afield. Whether or not a particular family liked or
detested Knight—some families were deeply split—I was warmly welcomed. At several places, I was invited
to stay for dinner, or drink beers on the porch, or come along on a canoe ride. Everyone, it seemed, wanted
to tell their version of the hermit story.