The Stranger in the Woods_ The - Michael Finkel

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My goodness. Knight had created from the chaos a living-room-sized clearing completely invisible a few
steps away, protected by a natural Stonehenge of boulders and a thicket of hemlocks. Tree branches linked
overhead to form a trellis, masking his site from the air. This was why Knight’s skin was so pale—he’d
resided in perpetual shade. “I’m from the woods, not the fields,” he’d said about his pallor. The room was
large, about twenty feet on each side, with ideally flat ground cleared of stones and situated on a slight rise
that allowed just enough breeze to keep the mosquitoes away but not so much as to cause severe windchill in
winter. It felt to me as if a cube of forest had disappeared.
“If he wouldn’t have shown us his site, we probably never would have found it,” said Hughes. “He just
darted between these big rocks, and I’m thinking, What the heck is he doing? Then, boom, there’s the
opening.” There were other ways in and out of the site, but they were effectively blocked by dense tangles of
downed trees and piles of boulders. The elephant rocks provided the only sensible entrance, and certainly
the most dramatic. “We came around the rocks,” said Vance, “and my mouth hit the ground and I’m going,
Oh my God, it’s real.”
The police had removed much of Knight’s stuff, enough to fill two pickups, and ripped down his tarps
and dismantled his tent, which sat crumpled in a sad ball, a couple of poles sticking out like knitting
needles. First, though, everything had been photographed in its original state.
“He set his tent east-west,” said Hughes, bobbing his head in reluctant approval. “That wasn’t an accident.
That’s based on survivalist training. His site is not on top of a hill, not in a valley. It’s halfway between. He’s
following the principles of Sun Tzu, in The Art of War. But this guy was strictly out of high school in a
small town, with no military experience at all.”
Knight always kept the place fastidiously clean, raking the leaves and shoveling the snow, though it was
now, nearly five months after his arrest, covered with pine needles and downed leaves. By clearing off a
small area, then scraping away some soil—Hughes had suggested this—I could see, faceup, faded and badly
waterlogged, the familiar yellow-bordered cover of a National Geographic magazine. The cover line was
still legible (“Zaire River”) as was the date: November 1991.
The pages flaked away, but there was another issue underneath (“Florida Watershed,” July 1990). Then
another, and another. A foot down, there were still more. The magazines had been bound with electrical
tape into thick bundles that Knight referred to as “bricks.” Elsewhere, there were buried bricks of People,
of Vanity Fair, of Glamour, of Playboy. Knight had recycled his old reading material as subflooring,
creating a platform that was perfectly level and also permitted decent drainage of rainwater.