The Stranger in the Woods_ The - Michael Finkel

hunting or trapping or fishing, you’re going to starve. Knight worked his way south, eating very little, until
paved roads appeared. He found a road-killed partridge, but did not possess a stove or a way to easily start a
fire, so he ate it raw. Neither a tasty meal nor a hearty one, and a good way to get sick.
He passed houses with gardens. Knight was raised with rigid morals and a great deal of pride. You make
do on your own, always. No handouts or government assistance, ever. You know what’s right and what’s
wrong, and the dividing line is usually clear.
But try not eating for ten days—nearly everyone’s restraints will be eroded. Hunger is hard to ignore. “It
took a while to overcome my scruples,” Knight said, but as soon as his scruples fell, he snapped off a few
ears of corn, dug up some potatoes, and ate a couple of green vegetables.
One time, during his first weeks away, he spent the night in an unoccupied cabin. It was a miserable
experience. “The stress of that, the sleepless worry about getting caught, programmed me not to do that
again.” He never slept indoors after that, not once, no matter how cold or rainy the weather.
He continued moving south, picking through gardens, and eventually reached a region with a familiar
distribution of trees, a diversity of birdcalls and bugs he recognized, and a temperature range he felt
accustomed to. It had been colder up north. He wasn’t sure precisely where he was, but he knew it was
home ground. It turned out that he was less than thirty miles, as the crow flies, from his childhood home.
He came upon a pair of lakes, one large and one small, with cabins all around and plenty of small
gardens offering easy snacking. Knight hoped to stay awhile, but there seemed to be no good place to camp,
nothing offering both comfort and seclusion.
In the early days of his escape, nearly everything Knight learned was through trial and error, with the
great hope that no error would end his seclusion. He had been gifted with a good head for figuring out
workable solutions to complicated problems. All his skills, from the rigging of tarps to rainwater filtration
to walking through the forest without leaving tracks, went through multiple versions and were never
considered perfect. Tinkering with his systems was one of Knight’s hobbies.
For a while, he tried living in a riverbank. The bank was tall and steep, and the stream offered a nice
trickling soundscape. With a stolen shovel, Knight tunneled deep into the bank, reinforcing the walls and
ceilings with scavenged wood, so that the dwelling resembled an old mine shaft. It wasn’t acceptable. He was
basically living in a hole, cold and damp, with hardly enough room to sit up. It was well camouflaged, but
the forest around the cave offered far too easy walking. And, indeed, the spot was eventually discovered by
deer hunters, long after Knight had abandoned it. The cave became a pilgrimage site for locals seeking
answers to the hermit legend, though no one was sure if it had actually been constructed by him, or even if
there was a hermit at all.
Knight tried at least six other places in the area, over a span of several months, without satisfaction.
Finally he stumbled upon a region of nasty, boulder-choked woods without so much as a game trail running
through it, far too harsh for hikers. He’d found the Jarsey, and he liked it immediately. Then he discovered
the elephant rocks with the hidden opening. “I knew at once it was ideal. So I settled in.”
He still remained hungry. He wanted more than vegetables, and even if he did stick with gardens, the
Maine summer, as every local knows, is that rare lovely guest who leaves your house early. Once it ended,
Knight understood, for the next eight months the gardens and cornfields would lay fallow beyond snacking.
Knight was realizing something almost every hermit in history has discovered: you can’t actually live by
yourself all the time. You need help. Hermits often end up in deserts and mountains and boreal woodlands,