The Stranger in the Woods_ The - Michael Finkel

Jail, he’s realized, might not be all bad. There’s routine and order in jail, and he’s able to click into a
survival mode that is not too dissimilar, in terms of steeliness of mental state, to the one he’d perfected
during winters in the woods. “I’m surrounded in here by less than desirable people,” he says, “but at least I
wasn’t thrown into the waters of society and expected to swim.”
Now he is being tossed into public life, and he’s frightened. It’s not the big things, like getting a job or
relearning to drive, that worry him but the little ones, like eye contact and gestures and emotions, all of
which can be badly misinterpreted. “I’m extremely emotionally thin-skinned. I need therapy. I realize that.”
He feels like the stakes are high for him—he’s fearful that he is going to make a mistake that will send
him to prison. The punishment looms over him like a guillotine. “I have no preparation for re-entry into
society. I don’t know your world. Only my world, and memories of the world before I went to the woods.
What is life today? What is proper? There are blank spots in my skill set. I have to figure out how to live.”
He refers to what’s happening to him, literally and metaphorically, as his “double winter.” He was
arrested as one winter was ending and will be released as the next is beginning. “It’s going to be a year
without summer. Like when Krakatoa blew.”
He’s been invited into the family home, to the sixty-acre plot in the town of Albion, back to his boyhood
bedroom. “They don’t approve of what I did, but I am still part of the family. I am grateful.” He will move
in with his mother and his sister, with his brother Daniel close by. Even after decades, his home looms large
in his memory. He saw a picture of the house in a newspaper story and noticed right away that it had been
painted a slightly different color.
He is unimpressed with what he’s learned in jail of the society he is about to enter, and is certain he is not
going to fit in. Everything moves at light speed, without rest. “It’s too loud. Too colorful. The lack of
aesthetics. The crudeness. The inanities. The trivia. The inappropriate choices of aspirations and goals.”
He admits that he’s really not in a position to judge. He says that when he is released, he is going to avoid
even the intimation of wrongdoing; he will hew to the law and keep clean. “I don’t want people questioning
my questionable judgment.”
His job prospects, he knows, are dim. “Money, huh? I’ve got to reacquire the taste for money. I intend to
get a job. But my résumé is rather thin.” He has low expectations of employment, low and slow. Washing
dishes, stocking shelves.
He was actually offered a sort of internship while in jail. The owner of a local organic farm contacted the
DA’s office and said she had an idea to introduce Knight to her style of growing crops. The farm is plowed
by horse and oxen, and has a roadside stand that sells homemade pies, jams, and sun-dried-tomato pesto.
There are sleigh rides for kids in winter. The owner spoke of how the farm healed her family, and she
thought it could do the same for Knight. She was permitted to present the offer to Knight in person at the
jail.
Knight tried his hardest, he says, to remain polite and cooperative during the meeting. “I talked farming. I
know about farming. I talked about the whole hippie-experience thing, the back-to-the-land movement,
worshipping nature. I think I gave her the wrong idea that I wanted to work in the fields.”
Neighbors of the farm, according to Knight, were nervous about the notion of him being there, and the
owner rescinded the offer. Knight was pleased that the crop-picking idea collapsed. “Me bent over in the hot
fields after all those years in the shade of the woods was not going to happen.”
I tell Knight that I can research employment opportunities for him, quiet jobs like security guard or