The Stranger in the Woods_ The - Michael Finkel

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Before Christopher Knight stayed in the woods for a quarter century straight, he never once spent the
night in a tent. He grew up less than an hour’s drive east of his campsite, in the village of Albion, two
thousand people and four thousand cows. Chris is the fifth child and fifth son of Joyce and Sheldon Knight,
following Daniel, Joel, Jonathan, and Timothy; he also has a younger sister, Susanna. His sister, according to
Chris, has Down syndrome. Joyce raised the kids, and Sheldon, a navy veteran who served in Korea, worked
in a creamery, washing out tanker trucks. They lived in a basic two-story farmhouse with a screened-in front
porch, on sixty wooded acres with apple trees and raspberry bushes.
The Knight children had old-school chores. “We were country people,” said Chris. They split logs to feed
their home’s wood-burning stove, and picked berries for Joyce’s jellies and jams, and tended the family’s
two-acre garden, which they tilled with a tractor.
Under their father’s tutelage, Chris and his brothers learned to fix what was broken, electrical to
automotive, and build what they wanted. One family project was a hut, designed by Sheldon and constructed
among a stand of cedars on their property. It’s both functional and artistic. The walls are made of stone,
every rock gathered by one of the boys and carefully stacked and cemented in place. A stove was fashioned
from a fifty-five-gallon oil drum, vented with a homemade pipe; the hut was an ideal shelter during deer
hunts.
Evenings at the Knight residence were usually devoted to reading, each parent in a rocking chair, book in
hand. A family friend, Kerry Vigue, said that the inside of the house looked like a library. The Knights
subscribed to magazines such as Organic Gardening and Mother Earth News, and they owned the entire
Foxfire series of books, which detail rural skills like tanning hides and keeping bees. Chris said that as a
child he tore through dozens of Time-Life history books, available at his elementary school library.
Joyce and Sheldon expected academic excellence from their sons, and they received it. Former high
school teachers and classmates all described the Knight boys as uncommonly bright; “a family of brainiacs,”
one recalled. More prized by his parents than good grades, Chris mentioned, was “Yankee ingenuity”—
putting your smarts to work. “It’s better to be tough than strong, better to be clever than intelligent,” he said,
repeating a family maxim. “I was tough and clever.”
The family frequently experimented with new varieties of seeds, to maximize yield. They grew potatoes,
beans, pumpkins, and corn. “Basic stuff to fill the bellies of a bunch of boys,” said Chris.
The Knights also studied thermodynamics, then built a small greenhouse, where they buried hundreds of
one-gallon milk jugs, filled with water, just below ground level, creating what’s known as a heat sink. Due