The Stranger in the Woods_ The - Michael Finkel

chocolate, whipped cream, and red wine.
He filled plastic totes with nonperishable food. He took warm clothes and sleeping bags. And he
stockpiled propane, hauling the potbellied white tanks from barbecue grills all around North and Little
North Ponds. The tanks were vital—not for cooking (cold food still nourishes) or heat (burning gas in a tent
can create enough carbon monoxide to kill you) but for melting snow to make drinking water. It was a fuelintensive
task; Knight required ten tanks per winter. When each tank was finished, he buried it near his site.
He never returned an empty.
The supply-gathering process was a race against the weather. With the first significant snowfall of the
season, typically in November, all operations shut down. It is impossible to move through snow without
making tracks, and Knight was obsessive about not leaving a print. So for the next six months, until the
spring thaw in April, he rarely strayed from his clearing in the woods. Ideally, he wouldn’t depart from his
camp at all the entire winter.
To combat the cold, Knight groomed his beard to winter length—about an inch: thick enough to insulate
his face, thin enough to prevent ice buildup. For most of the summer, using stolen shaving cream, he’d
remain clean-shaven, to stay cool, except during the height of mosquito season, when a heavy scruff served
as a natural insect repellent. The blackflies can swarm so thickly in central Maine that you can’t breathe
without inhaling some; every forearm slap leaves your fingers sticky with your own blood. Many North
Pond locals find peak insect season more challenging than the severest cold snap.
Once the bugs subsided, Knight would shave again, until the blustery season in late fall—facial hair also
offers good protection from the wind. As for the hair on his head, he kept it simple: several times a year,
he’d shave himself bald, using scissors and a disposable razor. While he lived in the woods, Knight never
once appeared classically hermitlike, hirsute and disheveled, and only while he was in jail and no longer a
hermit did he begin to look exactly like one. It was his idea of a practical joke.
It’s natural to assume that Knight just slept all the time during the cold season, a human hibernation, but
this is wrong. “It is dangerous to sleep too long in winter,” he said. It was essential for him to know
precisely how cold it was, his brain demanded it, so he always kept three thermometers in camp: one
mercury, one digital, one spring-loaded. He couldn’t trust just a single thermometer, and preferred a
consensus.
When frigid weather descended, he went to sleep at seven-thirty p.m. He’d cocoon himself in multiple
layers of sleeping bags and cinch a tie-down strap near his feet to prevent the covers from slipping off. If he
needed to pee, it was too cumbersome to undo his bedding, so he used a wide-mouthed jug with a good lid.
No matter what he tried, he couldn’t keep his feet warm. “Thick socks. Multiple socks. Boot liners. Thin
socks, thinking it was better to have my feet together, using the mitten theory. I never found a perfect
solution.” Still, he did not lose a toe or a finger to frostbite. Once in bed, he’d sleep six and a half hours, and
arise at two a.m.
That way, at the depth of cold, he was awake. At extreme temperatures, it didn’t matter how well
wrapped he was—if he remained in bed much longer, condensation from his body could freeze his sleeping
bag. His core temperature would plunge, and the paralyzing lethargy of an extreme chill would begin to
creep over him, starting at his feet and hands, then moving like an invading army to his heart. “If you try and
sleep through that kind of cold, you might never wake up.”
The first thing he’d do at two a.m. was light his stove and start melting snow. To get his blood circulating,
he’d walk the perimeter of his camp. “Out of the tent. Turn left. Fifteen paces. Turn left. Eight paces. To