The Stranger in the Woods_ The - Michael Finkel

times, he tried meditating. “I didn’t meditate every day, month, season in the woods. Just when death was
near. Death in the form of too little food or too much cold for too long.” Meditation worked, he concluded:
“I am alive and sane, at least I think I’m sane.” Again there was no formal closing. His letters simply ended,
sometimes in mid-thought.
He returned to the theme of sanity in a following letter: “When I came out of the woods they applied the
hermit label to me. Strange idea to me. I had never thought of myself as a hermit. Then I got worried. For I
knew with the label hermit comes the idea of crazy. See the ugly little joke.”
Even worse, he feared that his time in jail would only prove correct those who thought him insane. His
legal proceedings were mired in delays, and after four months in jail Knight had no clue what punishment
awaited. A sentence of a dozen or more years was possible. “Stress levels sky high,” he wrote. “Give me a
number. How long? Months? Years? How long in prison for me? Tell me the worst. How long?”
The uncertainty wore on him. The conditions in jail—the handcuffs, the noise, the filth, the crowding—
mangled his senses. It’s likely that, if one must be incarcerated in the United States, a jail in central Maine
would be among the more tolerable spots, but to Knight it was torture. “Bedlam” is how he referred to the
place. It never got dark in jail; at eleven p.m., the lights merely became a little duller. “I suspect,” he noted,
“more damage has been done to my sanity in jail, in months; than years, decades, in the woods.”
Finally, he decided that he could not even write. “For a while writing relieved stress for me. No longer.”
He sent one last, crushing letter, the fifth he’d mailed me over the course of eight weeks; in it, he seemed at
the verge of breakdown. “Still tired. More tired. Tireder, tiredest, tired ad nauseum, tired infinitium.”
And that was it. He ceased writing. I mailed him three letters over the next three weeks—“How are you
holding up?” I worried—but no wobbly-addressed white envelopes appeared in my mailbox. I reread his
final letter, hoping to unearth some subliminal message. I did not. But the closing lines clutched at me. For
the only time in our summer-long correspondence, he had signed his name. Despite the exhaustion and the
tension, the last words he’d penned were wry and self-mocking: “Your friendly neighborhood Hermit,
Christopher Knight.”