The Stranger in the Woods_ The - Michael Finkel

He’d spread a carpet over the magazines, which served as the floor of his interior living area. The walls
of his home, the police photos showed, were constructed of brown and green plastic tarps and several large
black garbage bags. These were all intricately overlaid, like roof tiles, anchored in place with guylines tied
to tree branches and car batteries, forming an A-frame structure a good ten feet tall and twelve feet long,
wide open at both ends like a train tunnel. It was an aesthetically pleasing creation, almost churchlike in
appearance, that blended into the color palette of the forest. It’d be hard to make something nicer solely of
tarps and garbage bags.
The entrance to his structure closest to the elephant rocks brought you into Knight’s kitchen: a Coleman
two-burner camp stove atop a couple of milk crates, with a green five-gallon bucket as a seat. A garden
hose, repurposed as a gas line, was attached to the stove and snaked out the shelter to a propane tank. The
stove ventilated through the shelter’s open ends. Cooking supplies were hung from ropes along the kitchen
walls—a frying pan, a mug, a roll of paper towels, a spatula, a strainer, a pot. Each item had its own hook.
A couple of mousetraps guarded the floor; a bottle of Purell stood beside a portable cooler. His pantry was
a rodent-proof plastic storage container.
Behind the kitchen, toward the other end of the shelter, was Knight’s bedroom—a dome-shaped nylon
camping tent set up within the A-frame, for added protection from rain and camouflage for the brightly
colored tent. Inside the nylon tent, more plastic bins served as closet space. Knight said that he had been
embarrassed to show Hughes and Vance his site, not because it was filled with stolen merchandise but
because it wasn’t clean enough. His tent walls had started to rot and disintegrate, something that happened
over time. “It was like someone coming over to your mother’s house before she’d had a chance to clean,”
said Knight. He had already taken a new tent, but he hadn’t yet set it up. Like any home owner, Knight was
forever toying with ideas for improvements and renovations. He had planned, before he’d been arrested, to
add a layer of gravel between the carpet and the magazine bricks, to further prevent rainwater from pooling
beneath the floor of his A-frame.
An artificial-grass doormat sat before the tent’s door. Knight lived an unspeakably rugged existence but
slept rather royally. His bed was composed of a twin-sized mattress and box spring on a metal bed frame,
its legs propped on blocks of wood to prevent them from punching holes in the tent floor. There were fitted
sheets and real pillows—at the time of his arrest, he was using Tommy Hilfiger pillowcases—and sleeping
bags piled up for warmth.
Milk crates worked as nightstands, heaped with books and magazines. He had dozens of wristwatches,
flashlights, and portable radios. He had taken extra boots, sleeping bags, and jackets. “I like backup
systems, redundancies, and options,” he explained. He’d also set up a weather station, a digital receiver
wired to an outside temperature gauge, so he knew how cold it was without getting out of bed. His structure
was so well designed that his tent never got wet.
On the perimeter of his site, beside the kitchen entry to the tarp structure, a low, flat-topped rock served
as Knight’s wash area, for himself and his clothes. Here he stored laundry detergent and soap, shampoo and
razors. There was, as he’d insisted, no mirror. He liked to steal Axe brand deodorant. He never had a warm
shower in twenty-seven years, but he did dump buckets of cold water over his head.
Near the wash area, he’d lashed a tarp, flat but at a downward angle, to four trees. This acted as a giant
funnel for rainwater, which he collected in plastic thirty-gallon garbage cans. He generally stored sixty to
ninety gallons, enough to get through most dry spells. During severe drought years, he hiked to the shore to
fetch lake water, which was clean enough to drink. When the water in his garbage bins became soiled with