The Stranger in the Woods_ The - Michael Finkel

10
Knight lived in the same campsite for nearly his entire time in the woods. The site is in a surprising spot.
Maine itself, the cork atop a fizz of small states crowding the American Northeast, contains vast realms of
uninhabited woodlands, mostly owned by timber companies, but Knight chose to disappear well within the
bounds of society. Towns and roads and houses surround his site; he could overhear canoeists’ conversations
on North Pond. He wasn’t so much removed from humanity as sitting on the sidelines. From the nearest
cabin to his hiding spot is a three-minute walk, if you know where you’re going.
Only Knight had known where he was going. But on the evening he was captured, before heading to jail,
he shared his secret. He guided the arresting officers, Sergeant Hughes and Trooper Vance, to his hiding
place. The site is on private property, and the landowner didn’t want the place to become a tourist attraction,
though word of the location leaked out.
A local handyman, Carroll Bubar, who’d followed the police footprints through the snow to Knight’s
camp, gave me cryptic instructions, and I drove north out of Augusta into the heartland of Maine, the road
tucked like a river between tree-covered ridges. It’s cow-and-horse country, stretches of rolling farmland
separating one-stoplight towns. A couple of general stores are named General Store; live bait worms are for
sale in plastic containers, refrigerated next to the milk. French names are stenciled on mailboxes, Poulin and
Thibodeau and Leclair—descendants, most likely, of the Acadians, the French colonists who settled in the
New World in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In the region’s original charter, from 1664, King
Charles II of England granted rule to his brother James, the Duke of York, over an area referred to as “the
maine land of New England,” a phrase that probably determined the name of the state after it separated
from Massachusetts in 1820.
A narrow washboarded road passes the driveway to the Pine Tree Camp, then leads to a locked gate.
From here, a few minutes of walking offered the first glimpse of the water, ripples flashing silver in the
sun. There are two ponds in the neighborhood, Little North tucked like a child against North, connected by a
narrow passage—a total of nearly four square miles of water, clean and cold. Most of the cabins are set
back in the trees and are hard to see.
It was midweek, toward summer’s end, and the area was quiet. With a couple of exceptions, the vacation
homes along the shoreline—“camps,” they’re called, self-effacingly—are simple affairs, unfancy inside and
out, several in need of new siding. In many living rooms, mounted deer heads are the principal decor. There
are large outdoor fire pits, floating docks, a scattering of kayaks and canoes. A wind chime made of empty
beer cans hangs on a tree. Across a small stream is a weatherworn camp with a metal roof, sided with