The Stranger in the Woods_ The - Michael Finkel

once. The hermit appeared to have the same passions on an exponentially grander scale. I thought about
Knight as I vacuumed the breakfast crumbs, and I thought about him as I paid bills in my office. I worried
that someone with no immunity to our lifestyle, physically or mentally, was now being exposed to all our
germs. And more than anything, I was eager to hear what he’d reveal.
Nothing, it turned out. The reporters moved on to other matters, and the documentary team packed up
and went home. My mind still swirled, my curiosity kindled. Two months after his arrest, in the late-evening
calm of a house filled with sleepers, I sat at my desk and harnessed my thoughts. I took out a yellow pad of
lined paper and a smooth-rolling pen.
“Dear Mr. Knight,” I began. “I’m writing to you from western Montana, where I have lived for nearly
twenty-five years. I’ve read a few newspaper stories about you, and I felt strongly compelled to write you a
letter.”
Everything I’d learned about him, I continued, had only triggered more questions. I added that I was an
avid outdoorsman and that we were both in the same middle-aged part of life—I was forty-four years old,
three years younger than him. I informed Knight that I was a journalist, and I photocopied a few of my
recent magazine articles, including a piece on a hunter-gatherer tribe in remote East Africa whose isolation I
thought might appeal to him. I mentioned my love of books and divulged that Ernest Hemingway was one of
my favorites.
“I hope you are coping okay in your new situation,” I wrote in the final paragraph of the two-and-a-halfpage
letter. “And I hope, too, that your legal situation is resolved in as gentle a manner as possible.” I signed
off, “Yours, Mike.”