But aside from that romantically reckless initiating gesture, what does Knight’s story really have to offer?Īccording to Michael Finkel, a great deal. True, the idea of a 20-year-old turning his back on the world so decisively has something compelling about it. Also, his dependence on burglary for his basic needs limited his appeal as inspirational role model. Knight hadn’t martyred himself in the cause of ascetic survivalism like the hero of Jon Krakauer’s celebrated study Into the Wild, Chris McCandless, who starved to death he hadn’t dispatched manifestos and explosive packages from his woodland fastness à la Ted Kaczynski (the Unabomber) and he hadn’t written a new Walden. But the flurry of newspaper attention quickly faded. I live surrounded by woods myself (though not under a tarpaulin), so the story piqued my interest. I remember reading about him at the time of his capture. He hadn’t spoken to anyone except to say “Hi”, once, to a hiker he’d failed to avoid. Aside from camp chores and cabin raids, he had spent the last quarter-century contemplating nature, reading stolen books, listening to his stolen radio and playing stolen video games. He was the fifth son of a close-knit rural family that observed the old American virtues of self-reliance, practical ingenuity and extreme reticence (so extreme they never told the police he had gone missing). In 2013 a game warden, determined to capture the elusive “Hermit of North Pond”, nabbed him in flagrante, stealing from a summer camp for disabled children. Some people left bags of food out for him, though others resented his intrusions – on their peace of mind as well as their property. His skill as a thief, along with the modest nature of his plunder, earned him a certain mythic local status. There, through the ferocious winters and mosquito-ridden summers, he remained unseen, though not unnoticed: every week or two he would break into one of the many seasonal camps and cabins dotting the shores of a nearby lake and steal supplies. He set up home in a small tent below a camouflaged tarpaulin in a secluded spot in the woods.
He didn’t have a plan, nor project, nor even a conscious motive other than a fondness for solitude. I n the summer of 1986, a young man returning home from a road trip impulsively drove past his house without stopping and continued north on smaller and smaller roads until he reached a forest trail in northern Maine, where he abandoned his car, stepped out into the wilderness, and disappeared for 27 years.
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