He wondered how he was being portrayed in the media. “Is it like at the end of the radio newscast, when they have the weird stories? World’s largest pumpkin grown, and man emerges from Maine woods after twenty-seven years.” He asked if everyone really was calling him a hermit, and I told him they were. All the local papers, the Kennebec Journal, the Morning Sentinel, the Portland Press Herald, sometimes referred to him as the hermit. “I don’t like the term, but I understand,” said Knight. “There is a certain accuracy to it. ‘Hermit’ does fit the bill. It’s not like I could stop it, anyway.”
He saw a strategic opening here. The media was apparently clamoring to view a real live hermit, and Knight, by growing out his beard wildly, had provided the character they envisioned. His facial hair served not just as a calendar but also as a mask, absorbing the stares of others while allowing him a little privacy in plain sight. “I can hide behind it, I can play to stereotypes and assumptions. One of the benefits of being labeled a hermit is that it permits me strange behavior.”
He needed to prepare for “re-entry into society,” as he put it, and was worried that he’d be seen only as a madman. He was seeking help—he understood that his behavior was strange and hoped to change it—so I asked that he look at me. His eyes darted all over; there were no welcoming facial motions, no gestures, no interaction. Not so much as a raised eyebrow. A newborn baby can dance this way but Knight couldn’t sustain it for more than a few moments.
I finally caught his eyes and asked him the waiting-room question—“What did you do when the mosquitoes were bad?”—and he said, “I used bug spray,” and turned away. My presence was a burden to him. It seemed that all Knight desired was to be left alone. Even so, just before time expired on our visit, I asked if I could visit again.
His answer was unexpected. He said, “Yes.”
10
Knight lived in the same campsite for nearly his entire time in the woods. The site is in a surprising spot. Maine itself, the cork atop a fizz of small states crowding the American Northeast, contains vast realms of uninhabited woodlands, mostly owned by timber companies, but Knight chose to disappear well within the bounds of society. Towns and roads and houses surround his site; he could overhear canoeists’ conversations on North Pond. He wasn’t so much removed from humanity as sitting on the sidelines. From the nearest cabin to his hiding spot is a three-minute walk, if you know where you’re going.
Only Knight had known where he was going. But on the evening he was captured, before heading to jail, he shared his secret. He guided the arresting officers, Sergeant Hughes and Trooper Vance, to his hiding place. The site is on private property, and the landowner didn’t want the place to become a tourist attraction, though word of the location leaked out.
A local handyman, Carroll Bubar, who’d followed the police footprints through the snow to Knight’s camp, gave me cryptic instructions, and I drove north out of Augusta into the heartland of Maine, the road tucked like a river between tree-covered ridges. It’s cow-and-horse country, stretches of rolling farmland separating one-stoplight towns. A couple of general stores are named General Store; live bait worms are for sale in plastic containers, refrigerated next to the milk. French names are stenciled on mailboxes, Poulin and Thibodeau and Leclair—descendants, most likely, of the Acadians, the French colonists who settled in the New World in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In the region’s original charter, from 1664, King Charles II of England granted rule to his brother James, the Duke of York, over an area referred to as “the maine land of New England,” a phrase that probably determined the name of the state after it separated from Massachusetts in 1820.
A narrow washboarded road passes the driveway to the Pine Tree Camp, then leads to a locked gate. From here, a few minutes of walking offered the first glimpse of the water, ripples flashing silver in the sun. There are two ponds in the neighborhood, Little North tucked like a child against North, connected by a narrow passage—a total of nearly four square miles of water, clean and cold. Most of the cabins are set back in the trees and are hard to see.
It was midweek, toward summer’s end, and the area was quiet. With a couple of exceptions, the vacation homes along the shoreline—“camps,” they’re called, self-effacingly—are simple affairs, unfancy inside and out, several in need of new siding. In many living rooms, mounted deer heads are the principal decor. There are large outdoor fire pits, floating docks, a scattering of kayaks and canoes. A wind chime made of empty beer cans hangs on a tree. Across a small stream is a weatherworn camp with a metal roof, sided with hemlock board and batten that was hewn from trees on the lot. This is the place three minutes from the campsite.
Here, a muddy driveway forms one of the borders of Knight’s forest. Though, of course, it’s not his forest. Every night of his stay he was illegally trespassing. I was likewise trespassing, and had resolved to keep as quiet as possible. Knight’s campsite was somewhere on a two-hundred-and-twenty-acre parcel, with one year-round house on it, from which Knight never stole. It’s a large piece of property, but the North Pond area sees a regular procession of hikers and hunters and cross-country skiers, and the community hosts an annual boat parade, ice-fishing derby, and loon count. With all these people around, it seemed strange that Knight’s spot remained unknown for so long. Perhaps there was a good explanation.
As I stepped off the driveway and into the woods, the mash of trees and shrubs was so dense that the forest held its own humidity. My eyeglasses promptly fogged. The Chris Knight woods are an old-growth multispecies forest, a couple of enormous eastern hemlocks towering above the crowd, the undergrowth bursting with ferns and brilliant red-topped mushrooms. The explanation for the site’s secrecy was the jumble of boulders—vehicle-sized, possibly glacier-borne gifts from the last ice age, scattered wildly and everywhere, carpeted with moss and lichen. Half the steps I took required handholds, rocks grabbed for support while branches cracked and crunched, quiet as a car alarm.
Other than central Maine, there are not too many places in the United States that could host a hermit like Knight. The Maine woods are ideally thick—in the western U.S., as well as all of Alaska, the forests are generally far more open—and the population in this part of the state is perfectly distributed, neither too dense nor too widely scattered, either of which could hinder a thieving habit. Plus in Maine there’s both a keep-to-yourself ethos and a lax adhesion to private property boundaries, so that if you do happen to spot a stranger walking about, it’s common to simply disregard him or her. One North Pond cabin owner who lives most of the year in Texas, where trespassing is less tolerated, said that no one like Knight would have survived undisturbed in the Lone Star State.
The cryptic instructions from the handyman were this: “Keep the late-afternoon sun in your face and walk up the hill.” Okay, but there were a dozen little hills back there, and with the boulders it was impossible to move in anything close to a straight line. No paths exist, but summer is rife with mosquitoes and poison ivy and thorns. Pine needles stick to your sweat, and you have to roll down your shirtsleeves to fend off the bugs. You can’t see more than a few feet in any direction; it’s claustrophobic and disorienting. “The billy-goat woods,” Sergeant Hughes called it. The locals’ term for this patch of forest, known for repelling hunters and holding snow, is “the Jarsey,” sharing a name with the unpaved Jarsey Road, which cuts through it.
I had never lost my bearings in a forest more quickly, so I gave up, fumbled back to the muddy driveway, and sat on a rock to reset, gulping water. The second battle with the Jarsey was no better. Even after carefully aligning myself with the sun—it was, indeed, late afternoon—once again I was soon wandering randomly in the Brillo forest. The third attempt was worse. The moss covering the boulders was damp, slick as ice, and my foot slipped and the weight of my backpack, stuffed with camping gear and food, yanked me off balance. I tumbled face-first, bumping my forehead on a rock with enough force to raise an immediate lump. One of my hikin
g boots was torn, no match for these woods. Knight walked here all the time. Silently. Without injury. At night. How was this possible?
The day before, at his office in the Skowhegan barracks, Sergeant Hughes had sat with perfect posture in his starched green game warden uniform and black combat boots and described what it was like to follow Knight, matching him step for step. Hughes spends much of his workday and a majority of his free time in the woods of Maine. He traps muskrats and foxes, and makes a few dollars on the side selling the pelts. During a missing-person search, he is able to read the woods with a skill verging on clairvoyance. Nobody passes through the trees around North Pond without him knowing it; everyone leaves a trace. With one exception.
When Hughes spoke about his walk with Knight, his gaze lost its intensity. Hughes is a law-and-order man not given to using hyperbole. He was trailing a criminal who had just admitted to a thousand felonies. But he was in awe.
“I never in my life had an experience like that,” said Hughes. What he witnessed was a work of art. “Every step was calculated, every movement. He clearly took the same steps all the time, year after year, decade after decade.” Hughes said that while Knight was walking, he entered this fugue-like state. “He was in a zone,” Hughes said. “He was kind of tuned right out.” The trance was so strong that Knight didn’t respond when Hughes tried to ask him questions. “I just let him be in the zone,” Hughes recalled. “This guy would never step anywhere that would leave a track. He wouldn’t break a twig, flatten a fern, kick a mushroom. He avoided all snow. I was beside myself—I couldn’t even fathom it. I was in shock. I probably could have blindfolded him and he wouldn’t have missed a beat. He moves like a cat.”
The more stubbornly Knight’s site remained hidden, the greater grew my desire to see it. The sun dropped lower, and a couple of beams lasered through the trees. I moved slowly amid the Jarsey. At each boulder field I performed a little grid search, back and forth, probing with needle-in-a-haystack precision.
I started to form a mental map, noting unusually shaped rocks and distinct clusters of trees. At last, I began to really see the forest. In an area of exceptionally large boulders, the kind geologists might call erratics, there was an elephant-sized stone that, looked at from a certain angle, turned out to be two slightly separated rocks. The appearance of these two rocks as a single boulder was an optical illusion, a trick of the forest. The gap between the rocks was just wide enough so that I could twist my body and slip through, a secret doorway, and I emerged at a dreamlike clearing and there it was.
11
My goodness. Knight had created from the chaos a living-room-sized clearing completely invisible a few steps away, protected by a natural Stonehenge of boulders and a thicket of hemlocks. Tree branches linked overhead to form a trellis, masking his site from the air. This was why Knight’s skin was so pale—he’d resided in perpetual shade. “I’m from the woods, not the fields,” he’d said about his pallor. The room was large, about twenty feet on each side, with ideally flat ground cleared of stones and situated on a slight rise that allowed just enough breeze to keep the mosquitoes away but not so much as to cause severe windchill in winter. It felt to me as if a cube of forest had disappeared.
“If he wouldn’t have shown us his site, we probably never would have found it,” said Hughes. “He just darted between these big rocks, and I’m thinking, What the heck is he doing? Then, boom, there’s the opening.” There were other ways in and out of the site, but they were effectively blocked by dense tangles of downed trees and piles of boulders. The elephant rocks provided the only sensible entrance, and certainly the most dramatic. “We came around the rocks,” said Vance, “and my mouth hit the ground and I’m going, Oh my God, it’s real.”
The police had removed much of Knight’s stuff, enough to fill two pickups, and ripped down his tarps and dismantled his tent, which sat crumpled in a sad ball, a couple of poles sticking out like knitting needles. First, though, everything had been photographed in its original state.
“He set his tent east-west,” said Hughes, bobbing his head in reluctant approval. “That wasn’t an accident. That’s based on survivalist training. His site is not on top of a hill, not in a valley. It’s halfway between. He’s following the principles of Sun Tzu, in The Art of War. But this guy was strictly out of high school in a small town, with no military experience at all.”
Knight always kept the place fastidiously clean, raking the leaves and shoveling the snow, though it was now, nearly five months after his arrest, covered with pine needles and downed leaves. By clearing off a small area, then scraping away some soil—Hughes had suggested this—I could see, faceup, faded and badly waterlogged, the familiar yellow-bordered cover of a National Geographic magazine. The cover line was still legible (“Zaire River”) as was the date: November 1991.
The pages flaked away, but there was another issue underneath (“Florida Watershed,” July 1990). Then another, and another. A foot down, there were still more. The magazines had been bound with electrical tape into thick bundles that Knight referred to as “bricks.” Elsewhere, there were buried bricks of People, of Vanity Fair, of Glamour, of Playboy. Knight had recycled his old reading material as subflooring, creating a platform that was perfectly level and also permitted decent drainage of rainwater.
He’d spread a carpet over the magazines, which served as the floor of his interior living area. The walls of his home, the police photos showed, were constructed of brown and green plastic tarps and several large black garbage bags. These were all intricately overlaid, like roof tiles, anchored in place with guylines tied to tree branches and car batteries, forming an A-frame structure a good ten feet tall and twelve feet long, wide open at both ends like a train tunnel. It was an aesthetically pleasing creation, almost churchlike in appearance, that blended into the color palette of the forest. It’d be hard to make something nicer solely of tarps and garbage bags.
The entrance to his structure closest to the elephant rocks brought you into Knight’s kitchen: a Coleman two-burner camp stove atop a couple of milk crates, with a green five-gallon bucket as a seat. A garden hose, repurposed as a gas line, was attached to the stove and snaked out the shelter to a propane tank. The stove ventilated through the shelter’s open ends. Cooking supplies were hung from ropes along the kitchen walls—a frying pan, a mug, a roll of paper towels, a spatula, a strainer, a pot. Each item had its own hook. A couple of mousetraps guarded the floor; a bottle of Purell stood beside a portable cooler. His pantry was a rodent-proof plastic storage container.
Behind the kitchen, toward the other end of the shelter, was Knight’s bedroom—a dome-shaped nylon camping tent set up within the A-frame, for added protection from rain and camouflage for the brightly colored tent. Inside the nylon tent, more plastic bins served as closet space. Knight said that he had been embarrassed to show Hughes and Vance his site, not because it was filled with stolen merchandise but because it wasn’t clean enough. His tent walls had started to rot and disintegrate, something that happened over time. “It was like someone coming over to your mother’s house before she’d had a chance to clean,” said Knight. He had already taken a new tent, but he hadn’t yet set it up. Like any home owner, Knight was forever toying with ideas for improvements and renovations. He had planned, before he’d been arrested, to add a layer of gravel between the carpet and the magazine bricks, to further prevent rainwater from pooling beneath the floor of his A-frame.
An artificial-grass doormat sat before the tent’s door. Knight lived an unspeakably rugged existence but slept rather royally. His bed was composed of a twin-sized mattress and box spring on a metal bed frame, its legs propped on blocks of wood to prevent them from punching holes in the tent floor. There were fitted sheets and real pillows—at the time of his arrest, he was using Tommy Hilfiger pillowcases—and sleeping bags piled up for warmth.
Milk crates worked as nightstands, heaped with books and magazines. He had dozens of wristwatches, flashlights, and por
table radios. He had taken extra boots, sleeping bags, and jackets. “I like backup systems, redundancies, and options,” he explained. He’d also set up a weather station, a digital receiver wired to an outside temperature gauge, so he knew how cold it was without getting out of bed. His structure was so well designed that his tent never got wet.
On the perimeter of his site, beside the kitchen entry to the tarp structure, a low, flat-topped rock served as Knight’s wash area, for himself and his clothes. Here he stored laundry detergent and soap, shampoo and razors. There was, as he’d insisted, no mirror. He liked to steal Axe brand deodorant. He never had a warm shower in twenty-seven years, but he did dump buckets of cold water over his head.
Near the wash area, he’d lashed a tarp, flat but at a downward angle, to four trees. This acted as a giant funnel for rainwater, which he collected in plastic thirty-gallon garbage cans. He generally stored sixty to ninety gallons, enough to get through most dry spells. During severe drought years, he hiked to the shore to fetch lake water, which was clean enough to drink. When the water in his garbage bins became soiled with caterpillar droppings or downed leaves, what Knight called “tree dandruff,” he’d strain it through a coffee filter before drinking it. Eventually, the water would turn greenish and a bit slimy, after which Knight used it for laundry or bathing, or boiled it and made tea.
His bathroom, on the camp’s rear edge, farthest from the elephant-rocks entrance, was a couple of logs framing an open pit. Knight kept a bathroom kit in his shelter, usually stocked with toilet paper and hand sanitizer. As he’d insisted, there was no fire ring, not a charred piece of wood.
The largest trees around his site had served as storage units. Knight had wrapped thick ropes around a dozen hemlock trunks and tucked items into them—lengths of wire, bungee cords, rusty bedsprings, plastic bags, scissors, a tube of Super Glue, a pair of work gloves, a bent key. “The key could be used as a hook, or to pry something up, as a makeshift screwdriver, I don’t know. I couldn’t bring myself to throw anything away. I’m a saver and repurposer.” He’d strung clotheslines between trees; typically drying were Knight’s staples: dark sweatpants, flannel shirts, and water-resistant jackets and pants.
The Stranger in the Woods Page 5