Riley Blanton
Max Thorn
Robin Desser
Sonny Mehta
Paul Bogaards
Jeanne Harper
Rachel Elson
Adam Cohen
Diana Finkel
Ben Woodbeck
Paul Finkel
Mark Miller
Janet Markman
Shana Cohen
Mike Sottak
Ross Harris
Emma Dries
David Gore
Bonnie Thompson
Maria Massey
For insight into Knight:
Matt Hongoltz-Hetling
Terry Hughes
Diane Vance
Harvey Chesley
Andrew Vietze
Jennifer Smith-Mayo
Simon Baron-Cohen
Catherine Benoist
Peter Deri
Stephen M. Edelson
Thomas W. Frazier
Jill Hooley
Roger Bellavance
Tony Bellavance
Stephen M. Prescott
Tom Sturtevant
Neal Patterson
Martha Patterson
Pete Cogswell
Lillie Cogswell
Jodie Mosher-Towle
Gerard Spence
Catherine Lord
Carroll Bubar
David Proulx
Louise Proulx
John Cazell
Greg Hollands
Garry Hollands
Brenda Hollands
Debbie Baker
Donna Bolduc
T. J. Bolduc
Maeghan Maloney
Walter McKee
Robert Kull
Fred King
Larry Gaspar
Mary Hinkley
Michael Parker
Rick Watson
Wayne Jewell
Bruce Hillman
Kyle McDougle
Carol Sullivan
Lauren Brent
Kerry Vigue
Kevin Trask
Larry Stewart
Jeff Young
Phil Dow
John Catanzarite
Kevin Wilson
Ryan Reardon
Michael Seamans
Rachel Ohm
Bob Milliken
John Boivin
Amanda Dow
Monica Brand
Lena Friedrich
Meng-hu
Angela Minnick
Catherine Lovendahl
Jim Cormier
Debbie Wright Theriault
For friendship, encouragement, and one last drink:
Dada Morabia
Ian Taylor
Toni Sottak
Jill Cowdry
HJ Schmidt
Randall Lane
Tim Hartmann
Tilly Parker
Gabrielle Morabia
Laurence Schofield
Larry Smith
Lawrence Weschler
Martyn Scott
Michel Pfister
Max Reichel
John Byorth
Bill Magill
Barbara Strauss
Piper Kerman
Abby Ellin
Joshua Willcocks
Emmanuelle Hartmann
Gary Parker
Alan Schwarz
Theresa Barker
Arron Bradshaw Cline
Tara Goldfrank
Mohamed El-Bouarfaoui
Jake Werner
Annette Schipf
Chris Anderson
David Hirshey
Harris Barker
Brian Whitlock
Eddie Steinhauer
Naima El-Bouarfaoui
Carma Miller
Michaela Struss
Marion Durand
Ryan West
Brett Cline
Arthur Goldfrank
Pascale Hickman
Adi Bukman
Jim Schipf
Ben Struss
Kent Davis
Patty West
A Note on the Reporting
The Kennebec County Correctional Facility permits a maximum of two meetings per week with an inmate, each lasting one hour. I visited Christopher Knight twice in the last week of August 2013—this was after he’d written me five letters—and then twice more in September, and a further two times in early October. In late October, I attended Knight’s court hearing and visited him three times. Knight himself is obviously the chief source of material for this book.
Knight was never thrilled to see me, but for each of our nine jail visits, we conversed the entire time, through old-fashioned phone receivers. After an hour, the phones automatically cut off, but by the second visit, Knight had learned, from observing another inmate, a jail trick. If a guard hadn’t arrived to unlock Knight’s side of the visiting booth, he fiddled with the hook switch on the phone’s cradle—I imagined the maneuver was like one of Knight’s lock-breaking moves—and was able to reconnect the lines, allowing us to chat for a few extra minutes.
So despite Knight’s reticence and his lack of joy at seeing me, he wanted to continue talking for as long as possible. After his release, during our intense visit on his property, he referred to me as his “Boswell”—a reference to James Boswell, the eighteenth-century Scottish writer best known for The Life of Samuel Johnson, one of the more famous biographies in all of literature.
The Life of Samuel Johnson is immense—more than a thousand pages in most editions—and I told Knight that my book would likely be far shorter. Knight seemed disappointed to hear this. “I like long books better,” he told me.
I made a total of seven reporting trips to Maine over the course of two years, the final one in April 2015. I also wrote a magazine story about Knight, which was published in the September 2014 issue of GQ magazine. The GQ story was fact-checked by a professional fact-checker named Riley Blanton, and Blanton, along with another professional fact-checker, Max Thorn, took on the task of confirming all of the material in this book. I did not change any names in this account, nor did I alter any identifying details. No one interviewed was granted any editorial control.
Every trip to Maine, I spent a couple of days driving the dirt roads of North and Little North Ponds, often visiting house after house, like a door-to-door peddler. I spoke with at least forty families who own a cabin or permanent home in the area. The majority of cabin owners are native Mainers, most of the rest come from the Boston area, and a few families live farther afield. Whether or not a particular family liked or detested Knight—some families were deeply split—I was warmly welcomed. At several places, I was invited to stay for dinner, or drink beers on the porch, or come along on a canoe ride. Everyone, it seemed, wanted to tell their version of the hermit story.
David and Louise Proulx, whose tiny black-and-white television had been stolen by Knight, suffered at least fifty break-ins over the decades, and they described the strange psychological effects of the crimes—at first, they were convinced it was one of their own children who was guilty; then they seriously wondered if they had begun to lose their minds. Pete Cogswell, whose size thirty-eight Lands’ End jeans and brown leather belt were stolen, and his wife, Lillie Cogswell, who worked in the Texas criminal justice system for more than thirty years, spoke with me at length, describing the details of Knight’s confounding break-ins and speculating on what might be an appropriate punishment for him. Donna and T. J. Bolduc shared with me their game-camera photos of Knight, as well as their Skinnygirl margarita mix joke.
Garry Hollands, one of the first people to hang a bag on his cabin’s door with offerings for the hermit, spoke of all the books he’d lost, and how he’d balanced a nearly invisible bit of fishing line over his door that would be dislodged when someone opened it, so he could tell when he’d been burglarized. Debbie Baker described how fearful her young children were of the hermit—it was her family that nicknamed him the Hungry Man. Neal Patterson recounted his fourteen nights waiting in his ca
bin in the dark, with a gun, trying to catch the hermit.
Sergeant Terry Hughes spent hours telling me about his hermit obsession, and one evening he took me around in his pickup truck to check his traps, then brought me to his clubhouse and provided instructions as I skinned my first-ever muskrat. State Trooper Diane Vance met me after Knight’s court hearing and spoke with me several times over the phone. Both the district attorney, Maeghan Maloney, and Knight’s attorney, Walter McKee, granted me interviews. No one in Knight’s family spoke with me, but dozens of people in the Albion community did, including several of Knight’s former teachers and classmates, as well as a few longtime friends of the Knight family.
During each trip to Maine, I visited Knight’s camp. It was never easy to find. There is no way to overstate how thick and confusing the Jarsey is, or the astonishment provoked, every time, by stepping from the dense forest into the site.
To attempt to comprehend more of Knight’s mind-set, I had lengthy telephone conversations and e-mail chats with several psychologists and autism experts, including Simon Baron-Cohen of Cambridge University; Catherine Benoist, who runs a clinical practice near Chicago; Peter Deri, in private practice in New York; Stephen M. Edelson of the Autism Research Institute, in San Diego; Thomas W. Frazier of the Center for Autism at the Cleveland Clinic; Jill Hooley of Harvard University; and Catherine Lord of Weill Cornell Medicine. Stephen M. Prescott, president of the Oklahoma Medical Research Foundation, spoke with me about the nature of communicable diseases and how it was possible that Knight had never gotten sick.
In order to gain insight into the ordeals of forced isolation, I corresponded extensively with John Catanzarite, an inmate in the California prison system who spent almost fourteen years locked in solitary confinement. I also read a dozen other accounts from solitary prisoners.
There’s an ocean of hermit literature; I began my reading on one shore, with Lao-tzu’s Tao Te Ching (I recommend the Red Pine translation), and started swimming from there. Excellent explorations of the history and motivations of hermits include Solitude by Anthony Storr, A Pelican in the Wilderness by Isabel Colegate, Hermits by Peter France, and Solitude by Philip Koch.
Perceptive and valuable personal explorations of time alone include A Book of Silence by Sara Maitland, Party of One by Anneli Rufus, Migrations to Solitude by Sue Halpern, Journal of a Solitude by May Sarton, The Point of Vanishing by Howard Axelrod, Solitude by Robert Kull, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek by Annie Dillard, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly by Jean-Dominique Bauby, A Field Guide to Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit, The Story of My Heart by Richard Jefferies, Thoughts in Solitude by Thomas Merton, and the incomparable Walden by Henry David Thoreau.
Adventure tales offering superb insight into solitude, both its horror and its beauty, include The Long Way by Bernard Moitessier, The Strange Last Voyage of Donald Crowhurst by Nicholas Tomalin and Ron Hall, A Voyage for Madmen by Peter Nichols, Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer, and Alone by Richard E. Byrd.
Science-focused books that provided me with further understanding of how solitude affects people include Social by Matthew D. Lieberman, Loneliness by John T. Cacioppo and William Patrick, Quiet by Susan Cain, Neurotribes by Steve Silberman, and An Anthropologist on Mars by Oliver Sacks.
Also offering astute ideas about aloneness are Cave in the Snow by Vicki Mackenzie, The Life of Saint Anthony by Saint Athanasius, Letters to a Young Poet by Rainer Maria Rilke, the essays of Ralph Waldo Emerson (especially “Nature” and “Self-Reliance”) and Friedrich Nietzsche (especially “Man Alone with Himself”), the verse of William Wordsworth, and the poems of Han-shan, Shih-te, and Wang Fan-chih.
It was essential for me to read two of Knight’s favorite books: Notes from the Underground by Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Very Special People by Frederick Drimmer. This book’s epigraph, attributed to Socrates, comes from the C. D. Yonge translation of Diogenes Laërtius’s third-century A.D. work The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers.
The Hermitary website, which offers hundreds of articles on every aspect of hermit life, is an invaluable resource—I spent weeks immersed in the site, though I did not qualify to become a member of the hermit-only chat groups.
My longtime researcher, Jeanne Harper, dug up hundreds of reports on hermits and loners throughout history. I was fascinated by the stories of Japanese soldiers who continued fighting World War II for decades on remote Pacific islands, though none seemed to be completely alone for more than a few years at a time. Still, Hiroo Onoda’s No Surrender is a fascinating account.
And then there’s the story of the last survivor of an Amazon tribe. In 2007, after several failed attempts to make peaceful contact with this man, who once fired an arrow into the chest of a rescue worker, the Brazilian government provided him with a thirty-one-square-mile region of rain forest. The land is off-limits to everyone except this man. He traps animals for food. He has been completely alone for about twenty years. Now that Chris Knight resides in society, this man, whose name is unknown—as is the name of his tribe and the language he speaks—may be the most isolated person in the world.
A Note About the Author
Michael Finkel is the author of True Story: Murder, Memoir, Mea Culpa, which was adapted into a 2015 motion picture. He has reported from more than fifty countries and written for National Geographic, GQ, Rolling Stone, Esquire, Vanity Fair, The Atlantic, and The New York Times Magazine. He lives in western Montana.
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The Stranger in the Woods Page 16