The Stranger in the Woods_ The - Michael Finkel

fed her, but with Knight she had no questions. “Unequivocally,” she said, “I believe him.” Sergeant Hughes
felt the same: “There’s no doubt in my mind he’s lived out there the whole time.”
There was not a morsel of convincing evidence that Knight had ever spent an evening away from the
woods, minus the one occasion he admitted to—an admission that itself was a sign of his precise honesty.
He said he didn’t need medical care because he wasn’t exposed to germs. He kept his food sealed in plastic
totes and remained in camp nearly all the time; most large animals won’t approach when a human is
present.
At the time of his arrest, after a long winter, he was down to a single set of unsoiled clothes—he was due
for a laundry day. Even in the cold, he kept himself clean with sponge baths, preferably using a large yellow
car-wash sponge, if he could steal one, and he frequently took shower gel and deodorant. He could speak so
well because vocal cords do not, in fact, curl up and die with disuse, and speaking in complex sentences isn’t
about the mouth, it comes from the brain, which in Knight’s case was fully operational, albeit idiosyncratic.
Knight had no idea that a family of Knights lived nearby, and anyway they’re not related; his surname is
common in central Maine.
He wished there had been more Great Ice Storms. “Ice is nearly liquid. You don’t have liquid in serious
cold, in killing cold. It was twenty-eight degrees during that storm. In a car, driving, it was serious. For me,
it was a novelty. Actually, it helped. It put a thick layer of ice over the snow, and I could walk around
without leaving tracks.”
Most of the North Pond locals, when they were informed that Knight’s story was undoubtedly true, did
not change their minds. They were convinced that Knight was running some bizarre con, and that all who
believed him had fallen into his trap. They didn’t reject his story mildly; they rejected it venomously. A few
seemed less angry about having their goods stolen than the fact that Knight’s tale was accepted by anyone.
They couldn’t get their heads around Knight. It was as if he’d insisted that he could flap his arms and fly. His
story was both true and unbelievable at the same time, an unsettling merger.
The locals were rattled because Knight’s feat went against all that felt natural, was antithetical to nearly
everything one learns. In the Bible, in chapter 2 of Genesis, Adam’s aloneness is the first thing God finds
objectionable: “And the Lord God said, It is not good that the man should be alone.”
One reason there are virtually no more devout Christian solitaries—and haven’t been since the 1700s—is
that they frightened the ecclesiastical authorities. Hermits were unsupervised thinkers, pondering life and
death and God, and the church, with its ingrained schedules and rote memorization, did not approve of many
hermits’ ideas. Thomas Aquinas, the thirteenth-century Italian priest, said hermits could be subversive to
obedience and stability, and that it was better to keep such people in monasteries, subject to regulations and
routine.
“The solitary is necessarily a man who does what he wants to do,” wrote Thomas Merton, an American
Trappist monk who died in 1968. “In fact, he has nothing else to do. That is why his vocation is both
dangerous and despised.”
I began asking cabin owners—and, later, many others—to estimate the longest time they’d ever spent
without human interaction. By this I meant not seeing anyone or communicating in any way, including
phone, e-mail, or text messages. Just time by one’s self, unconnected, though reading or listening to the
radio or watching TV alone was okay.
Nine out of ten people, often after a contemplative pause, realized that they had never passed a single day
in solitude. Usually it was no more than a handful of waking hours. My father has lived seventy-three years