The Stranger in the Woods_ The - Michael Finkel

9
Augusta, Maine, is picturesque but a little melancholy, the downtown streets empty, the factories along
the Kennebec River that once produced broom handles and headstones and shoes now giant brick skeletons.
The jail was built in 1858. The original structure, a small granite fortress, has become the sheriff’s
department offices, and Knight was incarcerated in the attached addition, a three-story slab of pale gray
cinder blocks.
Visiting hours begin most evenings at six forty-five. I arrived early and passed through two sets of metal
doors on the ground floor, into the jail’s waiting room. I stood at a narrow desk before a mirrored window
made of one-way glass, wondering if I needed to press a button to get a person’s attention. A sign beside a
giant pump dispenser of hand sanitizer instructed visitors to use some before entering the facility.
“Who you here to see?” squawked an amplified voice from the other side of the glass.
“Christopher Knight.”
“Relationship?”
“Friend,” I answered, unconfidently. He didn’t know I was here, and I had doubts that he would agree to a
visit. His letters had hinted at great suffering and greater fortitude, as well as a singular story untold, and
once it had become clear that he was no longer writing, I’d taken a chance and flown east, Montana to
Maine.
A metal drawer popped open, and identification was demanded. I deposited my driver’s license, and the
drawer snapped shut. When the license was returned, I sat on a bench in the waiting room, buzzing and
slamming sounds reverberating through the dirty white walls.
An elderly couple checked in, followed by a man who answered “I’m his father” to the relationship
question, then sat down clutching a bag of underwear as if it were a lifeline. Underwear, in its original
packaging, is one of the few items you can give to an inmate at the Kennebec County jail. Then came a
woman with two young girls in matching pink dresses. The girls looked as though they had chicken pox, but
the mother explained, to no one in particular, that it was just mosquito bites. “We live way out in the
woods,” she added. This reminded me to ask Knight, if I did see him, how he had coped with insects, which
can be savage in the northern forests. Even Henry David Thoreau, not known for kvetching, wrote in The
Maine Woods that he was “seriously molested” by bugs.
Eventually a baby-faced corrections officer appeared, carrying a handheld metal detector. He called out a
name, and the elderly couple stood. The officer worked the detector, unlocked a maroon door labeled
VISITING 1, and shut it behind them. Then he sent the man with the underwear into VISITING 2.