The Stranger in the Woods_ The - Michael Finkel

ut hasn’t tried a dozen hours alone. I once embarked on a three-day solo wilderness trip but encountered a
pair of hikers and stopped to chat, so my record is around forty-eight hours. A few accomplished explorers
I know have gone a week. To meet someone who’s finished a month would be extraordinary.
Chris Knight, with his thousands upon thousands of days alone, was an unfathomable outlier. His feat
goes so far beyond anyone else’s physical or mental limit that it rearranges our notion of the possible. But
the truth is that Knight was out there every one of those winters, and what he did in the cold was both
prosaic and profound.
He suffered. When he ran out of propane and food, he often became “cold, cold, really cold.” Such cold
is often called mind-numbing, but he was aware of it always. He called it “physical, emotional,
psychological pain.” His body fat was eaten from within, his stomach begged. He sensed the nearness of
death. Yet he refused to light a fire or leave a traceable footprint.
When the situation passed some point of dire, he monitored the weather reports on the radio and waited
for a snowstorm to approach. With the exception of a few year-round homes, which Knight never touched,
the area was mostly deserted in winter, and he knew which seasonal cabins likely still had food. With the last
of his energy he’d slog through the forest, cut across the frozen pond, hit one of these cabins, and return as
the flakes started to fall, erasing his tracks.
He could not always maintain an impassive neutrality. Sometimes a tiny thing wormed into the deep spot
where he’d stashed his emotions. Once, as he was listening to the radio, a blizzard swirling around him, the
school closures were announced. His old high school was mentioned. Just a moment on the radio, but it
brought back a flood of memories. And Knight felt his chest clench with melancholy. How had his life come
to this?
He occasionally missed his family. “I suppose a more subtle answer would be I missed some of my
family to a certain degree,” he allowed. For long stretches, family didn’t exist in his thoughts. Then a
memory would be triggered and they’d be alive in his head. He missed his sister, Susanna, the most. She’s
the sibling closest in age to Knight, a year younger, and has Down syndrome. “She was the one I spent most
of my childhood with,” he said.
There were times, he admitted, when he wept, but he provided no further details. Sporadically, especially
during the first decade, the idea of quitting his seclusion entered his mind. He had a system in place. He
kept a whistle in his tent, and if he ever became too weak to move, he knew that if he blew on it in sustained
sequences of three, the high-pitched sounds would carry across the water and help might eventually come.
After a while, though, he resolved that he wouldn’t use the whistle. He made a firm decision that he was
not going to voluntarily emerge from the trees. Civilization was three minutes away, but he never went
except to steal. “I was prepared to die out there,” he said.