If he were forced to select a favorite book, it might be The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, by William Shirer. “It’s concise,” Knight said, a quick twelve hundred pages, “and impressive as any novel.” He stole every book on military history he saw.
He pilfered a copy of Ulysses, but it was possibly the one book he did not finish. “What’s the point of it? I suspect it was a bit of a joke by Joyce. He just kept his mouth shut as people read into it more than there was. Pseudo-intellectuals love to drop the name Ulysses as their favorite book. I refused to be intellectually bullied into finishing it.”
Knight’s disdain for Thoreau was bottomless—“he had no deep insight into nature”—but Ralph Waldo Emerson was acceptable. “People are to be taken in very small doses,” wrote Emerson. “Nothing can bring you peace but yourself.” Knight read the Tao Te Ching and felt a deep-rooted connection to the verses. “Good walking,” says the Tao, “leaves no tracks.”
Robert Frost received a thumbs-down—“I’m glad his reputation is starting to fade”—and Knight said that when he ran out of toilet paper, he sometimes tore pages from John Grisham novels. He mentioned that he didn’t like Jack Kerouac either, but this wasn’t quite true. “I don’t like people who like Jack Kerouac,” he clarified.
Knight stole portable radios and earbuds and tuned in daily, voices through the waves another kind of human presence. For a while he was fascinated by talk radio. He listened to a lot of Rush Limbaugh. “I didn’t say I liked him. I said I listened to him.” Knight’s own politics were “conservative but not Republican.” He added, perhaps unnecessarily, “I’m kind of an isolationist.”
Later he got hooked on classical music—Brahms and Tchaikovsky, yes; Bach, no. “Bach is too pristine,” he said. Bliss for him was Tchaikovsky’s The Queen of Spades. But his undying passion was classic rock: the Who, AC/DC, Judas Priest, Led Zeppelin, Deep Purple, and, above all, Lynyrd Skynyrd. Nothing in all the world received higher praise from Knight than Lynyrd Skynyrd. “They will be playing Lynyrd Skynyrd songs in a thousand years,” he proclaimed.
On one raid he stole a Panasonic black-and-white five-inch-diagonal television. This was why he needed so many car and boat batteries—to power the TV. Knight was adept at wiring batteries together, in series and parallel. He also carried off an antenna and hid it high in his treetops.
He said that everything shown on PBS was “carefully crafted for liberal baby boomers with college degrees,” but the best thing he watched while in the woods was a PBS program, Ken Burns’s documentary The Civil War. He was able to recite parts of the show verbatim. “I still remember Sullivan Ballou’s letter to his wife,” said Knight. “It brought tears to my eyes.” Ballou, a major in the Union army, wrote to Sarah on July 14, 1861, and was killed at the First Battle of Bull Run before the letter was delivered. The note spoke of “unbounded love” for his children, and Ballou said his heart was attached to his wife’s “with mighty cables that nothing but Omnipotence could break”—an expression of human connection that made Knight weep, even if he wasn’t compelled to seek it himself.
Knight was aware of world events and politics, but he seldom had any reaction. Everything seemed to be happening far away. He burned through all his batteries after September 11, 2001, and never watched television again. “Car batteries were so heavy and difficult to steal anyway,” he said. He repurposed the ones he had as anchor weights for guylines, and after he stole a radio that received television audio signals, he switched to listening to TV stations on the radio; “theater of the mind,” he called it. Seinfeld and Everybody Loves Raymond were his television-on-the-radio favorites.
“I do have a sense of humor,” Knight said. “I just don’t like jokes. Freud said there’s no such thing as a joke—a joke is an expression of veiled hostility.” His favorite comedians were the Marx Brothers, the Three Stooges, and George Carlin. The last movie he saw in a theater was the 1984 comedy Ghostbusters.
He never bothered listening to sports; they bored him, every one of them. For news, there were five-minute updates at the top of the hour on WTOS, the Mountain of Pure Rock, out of Augusta. Also, he said, he sometimes listened to French news stations out of Quebec. He didn’t speak French, but he understood most of it.
He liked handheld video games. His rule for stealing them was that they had to appear outdated; he didn’t want to take a kid’s new one. He’d be stealing those in a couple years anyway. He enjoyed Pokémon, Tetris, and Dig Dug. “I like games that require thought and strategy. No shoot-’em-ups. No mindless repetitive motion.” Electronic Sudoku was great, and crossword puzzles in magazines were welcome challenges, but he never took a deck of cards to play solitaire, and he doesn’t like chess. “Chess is too two-dimensional, too finite of a game.”
He didn’t create any sort of art—“I’m not that type of person”—nor did he spend any nights away from his camp. “I have no desire to travel. I read. That’s my form of travel.” He never even glimpsed Maine’s celebrated coastline. He claimed that he did not speak to himself aloud, not a word. “Oh, you mean like typical hermit behavior, huh? No, never.”
Not for a moment did he consider keeping a journal. He would never allow anyone to read his private thoughts; therefore, he did not risk writing them down. “I’d rather take it to my grave,” he said. And anyway, when was a journal ever honest? “It either tells a lot of truths to cover a single lie,” he said, “or a lot of lies to cover a single truth.”
Knight’s ability to hold a grudge was impressive. Though many National Geographic magazines were buried beneath his tent, he despised the publication. “I didn’t even like stealing them,” he said. “I only looked at them when I was desperate. They’re really only good for burying in the dirt. That glossy paper lasts a long time.”
His aversion to National Geographic extends back to his youth. When Knight was in high school, he was reading a copy and came across a photo of a young Peruvian shepherd standing beside a road, crying. Behind him were several dead sheep, struck by a car as the boy had been trying to guide them. The photograph was later reprinted in a book of National Geographic’s all-time greatest portraits.
It incensed Knight. “They published a photo of the boy’s humiliation. He had failed his family, who had entrusted him with the herd. It’s disgusting that everybody can see a little boy’s failure.” Knight, still furious about the image thirty years later, was a man acutely attuned to the ravages of shame. Had he done something shameful before he’d fled to the forest? He insisted that he had not.
Knight had a strong distaste for big cities, filled with helpless intellectuals, people with multiple degrees who couldn’t change a car’s oil. But, he added, it wasn’t as if rural areas were Valhalla. “Don’t glorify the country,” he said, then tossed off a line from the first chapter of The Communist Manifesto about escaping “the idiocy of rural life.”
He acknowledged, forthrightly, that a couple of cabins were enticing because of their subscriptions to Playboy. He was curious. He was only twenty years old when he disappeared, and had never been out on a date. He imagined that finding love was something like fishing. “Once I was in the woods, I had no contact, so there was no baited hook for me to bite upon. I’m a big fish uncaught.”
One book that Knight never buried in his dump or packed away in a plastic tote—he kept it with him in his tent—was Very Special People, a collection of brief biographies of human oddities: the Elephant Man, General Tom Thumb, the Dog-Faced Boy, the Siamese twins Chang and Eng, and hundreds of sideshow performers. Knight himself often felt that he was something of circus freak, at least on the inside.
“If you’re born a human oddity,” says the introductory chapter of Very Special People, “every day of your life, starting in infancy, you are made aware that you are not as others are.” When you get older, it continues, things are likely to get worse. “You may hide from the world,” advises the book, “to avoid the punishment it inflicts on those who differ from the rest in min
d or body.”
There was one novel above all others, Knight said, that sparked in him the rare and unnerving sensation that the writer was reaching through time and speaking directly to him: Dostoyevsky’s Notes from the Underground. “I recognize myself in the main character,” he said, referring to the angry and misanthropic narrator, who has lived apart from all others for about twenty years. The book’s opening lines are: “I am a sick man. I am a spiteful man. I am an unattractive man.”
Knight also expressed no shortage of self-loathing, but it was offset by a fierce pride, as well as an occasional trace of superiority. So, too, with the unnamed narrator of Underground. On the final page of the book, the narrator drops all humbleness and says what he feels: “I have only in my life carried to an extreme what you have not dared to carry halfway, and what’s more, you have taken your cowardice for good sense, and have found comfort in deceiving yourselves. So that perhaps, after all, there is more life in me than in you.”
17
It wasn’t reading or listening to the radio that actually occupied the majority of Knight’s free time. Mostly what he did was nothing. He sat on his bucket or in his lawn chair in quiet contemplation. There was no chanting, no mantra, no lotus position. “Daydreaming,” he termed it. “Meditation. Thinking about things. Thinking about whatever I wanted to think about.”
He was never once bored. He wasn’t sure, he said, that he even understood the concept of boredom. It applied only to people who felt they had to be doing something all the time, which from what he’d observed was most people. Hermits of ancient China had understood that wu wei, “non-doing,” was an essential part of life, and Knight believes there isn’t nearly enough nothing in the world anymore.
Knight’s nothingness had another component. “Watching nature,” he called it, but he wasn’t satisfied with the description. “It sounds too Disneyfied.” Nature, Knight clarified, is brutal. The weak do not survive, and neither do the strong. Life is a constant, merciless fight that everyone loses.
From his clearing in the woods, every sight line short, Knight heard far more than he saw, and over the years his hearing grew sharp. His existence had a seasonal sound track. Springtime brought wild turkeys—yelping hens, gobbling toms—as well as chirping frogs. “You can mistake them for crickets, but they’re frogs.” Summer hosted the songbird chorus, morning and evening performances, and a lake buzzing with powerboats, which to Knight was the quintessential sound of humans at play.
In autumn came the drumming of ruffed grouse, the birds beating their wings to attract mates, while deer moved over dry leaves as if “walking on cornflakes.” In winter, the rumble of an ice crack propagating across one of the ponds sounded like a bowling ball rolling down an alley.
A heavy storm would blot out everything. After three or four days straight, Knight just got used to hearing the wind. Then when the wind stopped, it was silence that sounded like a stranger. Rain could fall torrentially, thunderbolts cracking with fury, and a really close lightning strike, Knight admitted, frightened him. “I like wet weather, but there’s enough of the little boy in me that I don’t like thunderstorms.”
He saw plenty of deer some years, none other years. An occasional moose. Once, the hindquarters of a mountain lion. Never a bear. Rabbits were on a boom-or-bust cycle, a lot or a few. The mice were bold—they’d come into his tent while he was lying there and crawl on his boots. He never thought about keeping a pet: “I couldn’t put myself in a situation where I’m competing with the pet for food and maybe have to eat the pet.”
His closest companion may have been a mushroom. There are mushrooms all over Knight’s woods, but this particular one, a shelf mushroom, jutted at knee height from the trunk of the largest hemlock in Knight’s camp. He began observing the mushroom when its cap was no bigger than a watch face. It grew unhurriedly, wearing a Santa’s hat of snow all winter, and eventually, after decades, expanded to the size of a dinner plate, striated with black and gray bands.
The mushroom meant something to him; one of the few concerns Knight had after his arrest was that the police officers who’d tromped through his camp had knocked it down. When he learned that the mushroom was still there, he was pleased.
Even in the warm months, Knight rarely left his camp during the daytime. The chief exception to this came at the tail end of each summer, as the cabin owners were departing and the mosquitoes died down, when Knight embarked on a brief hiking season. There were a couple of aesthetically pleasing groves he liked to visit, natural Zen gardens, one with a ghostly scatter of white birches with their paperlike bark, another with a breeze-triggered huddle of quaking aspens. He passed some time at a few sandbanks along the shore of North Pond that felt to him like tiny beaches. “Sometimes I’d stay up late,” he said, “and listen to some crazy AM talk-radio show, and hike to a high clearing before dawn and watch the ground fog collect in the valley.”
Fall foliage is undeniably beautiful, as easy to like as chocolate, but Knight felt that the woods were at their loveliest when the leaves were finished. He liked the skeletal look of bare branches. “I’ve read too much Victorian literature—old books, used, the ones with bookplates in them, and the plates always show bare-limbed trees, to convey a sense of loss or coming horror.”
He never celebrated his birthday, or Christmas, or any human holiday; he was usually unaware of the exact date, unless he heard it on the radio. He periodically witnessed the northern lights, flowing in pinks and greens like billowing drapes hanging from the sky, and if a lunar eclipse was mentioned on the news, he walked to an open meadow and watched it. He could sense, by the flow of darkness and day, when the winter and summer solstices had arrived, as well as the autumnal and vernal equinoxes, though he marked the occasions with no special festivity. “I didn’t sing, I didn’t dance, I didn’t make sacrifices.”
Knight had a particular fondness for the days around the Fourth of July. He did not watch fireworks but instead enjoyed his own private show. “It was the peak of firefly season. I thought that was poetically appropriate. I suspect John Adams would approve. Wasn’t it he who recommended fireworks on the Fourth of July?”
It seemed that Knight could immediately recall anything he had ever read or seen, though he insisted that he did not have a photographic memory. He just remembered it all. “Both Adams and Jefferson died on the Fourth of July in 1826,” he added. He wondered if modern society, with its flood of information and tempest of noise, was only making us dumber. “I was not overwhelmed with data,” he said. “I had a rather restricted diet, literally and figuratively.” The internet, wrote Nicholas Carr in The Shallows, his book about brain science and screen time, steadily chips away at one’s “capacity for concentration and contemplation.”
According to more than a dozen studies conducted around the world, Knight’s camp—an oasis of natural quiet—may have been the ideal setting to encourage maximal brain function. These studies, examining the difference between living in a calm place and existing amid commotion, all arrived at the same conclusion: noise and distraction are toxic.
The chief problem with environmental noise one can’t control is that it’s impossible to ignore. The human body is designed to react to it. Sound waves vibrate a tiny chain of bones—the hammer, anvil, and stirrup, the old-time hardware store of the middle ear—and these physical vibrations are converted to electrical signals that are fired directly into the auditory cortex of the brain.
The body responds immediately, even during sleep. People who live in cities experience chronically elevated levels of stress hormones. These hormones, especially cortisol, increase one’s blood pressure, contributing to heart disease and cellular damage. Noise harms your body and boils your brain. The word “noise” is derived from the Latin word nausea.
You don’t need that much quiet to change things, or even have to be alone. But you do have to seek out a soothing environment, and you must do it often. Japanese researchers at Chiba University found that a daily fifte
en-minute walk in the woods caused significant decreases in cortisol, along with a modest drop in blood pressure and heart rate. Physiologists believe our bodies relax in hushed natural surroundings because we evolved there; our senses matured in grasslands and woods, and remain calibrated to them.
A Duke regenerative biologist, Imke Kirste, working with mice, found that two hours of complete silence per day prompted cell development in the hippocampus, the brain region related to the formation of memory. Studies of humans in the United States, Great Britain, Holland, and Canada have shown that after passing time in quiet, rural settings, subjects were calmer and more perceptive, less depressed and anxious, with improved cognition and a stronger memory. Time amid the silence of nature, in other words, makes you smarter.
For Knight, the quintessence of serenity was a late-summer heat wave in midweek, when nearly every cabin was unoccupied. This happened maybe once a year. Then, deep in the night, he’d leave his camp and walk until the trees abruptly ended and the waters of the pond swayed before him. He’d drop his clothes and slip into the water. The lake’s top few inches, after cooking all day in the sun, would be nearly bath warm. “I’d stretch out in the water,” he said, “and lie flat on my back, and look at the stars.”
18
The only book Knight didn’t steal was the one he most often saw. “I had no need for a Bible,” he said. Knight came from Protestant stock but did not attend church as a child, though he read every page of the Good Book. “I don’t practice a religion. I can’t claim a belief system. I would say at this point I’m more polytheist than monotheist. I believe there are multiple gods for multiple situations. I don’t have names for these gods. But I do not particularly believe in one big god of all gods.”
The Stranger in the Woods Page 9