On April 4, 2013, 47-year-old Christopher Thomas Knight was arrested during a break-in at a summer camp for the disabled in the woods of central Maine. What made that otherwise unremarkable apprehension of a petty thief extraordinary was the identity of the perpetrator--someone who had spent 27 years in those woods, intentionally cut off from any human contact. The Stranger in the Woods is journalist Michael Finkel's intimate account of Knight's long sojourn, one man's singular response when the tension of living in society became unbearable.
After Knight left his job installing home and vehicle alarm systems, and walked away from the world without a word in 1986, he made his way to the area of North Pond and Little North Pond, about 25 miles north of Augusta, where he settled for the duration of his time in the woods. He supported himself through periodic raids on the nearby camp and its seasonally occupied cabins. By the time of his capture, he had racked up, by his own estimate, some 1,000 thefts, a record that astonished some of the locals and infuriated others.
One of the most striking aspects of Knight's isolation was the fact that his elaborate hiding place--a "living-room-sized clearing completely invisible a few steps away, protected by a natural Stonehenge of boulders and a thicket of hemlocks"--lay about a three-minute walk from the nearest cabin. And yet, in all those years, his only human encounter was a brief one with a passing hiker in the 1990s. Knight's ability to survive the brutal Maine winters alone required both ingenuity and courage.
Without trying to endow Knight's story with some larger meaning, Finkel (True Story: Murder, Memoir, Mea Culpa) adroitly connects it to accounts of other hermits in groups he categorizes as "protesters, pilgrims and pursuers." But this one is not so easily pigeonholed. Despite considerable reflection, Knight, a well-read man who loves Shakespeare and Emily Dickinson, and whose favorite books include Dostoevsky's Notes from the Underground, never arrived at a satisfactory explanation of his own for his flight.
In the fast-moving 200 pages of The Stranger in the Woods, Finkel takes pains not to deify or demonize Christopher Knight. He does offer an undeniably sympathetic portrait of his subject, a "refugee from the human race," fleeing contact "because the world is not made to accommodate people like him." His account will appeal to readers who enjoy stories of encounters with both the natural world and the natures within. --Harvey Freedenberg, attorney and freelance reviewer
Shelf Talker: Journalist Michael Finkel offers a fascinating look at one man's 27 years as a hermit in the Maine woods.