The Stranger in the Woods: The Extraordinary Story of the Last True Hermit

Civilization and its Magnificent Discontent: A Masterpiece of Research Journalism

…[L]ocals were enraged by Knight’s actions. The actual items he stole might be minor, but he also took people’s peace of mind. Their sense of security. Some said they were afraid to sleep in their own cabins, afraid for decades. ‘I felt violated, over and over again,’ said Debbie Baker, who has owned a place on North Pond with her husband for more than twenty years. ‘I lost count how many times he broke in.’ Her two sons, when they were young, were terrified of the Hermit. They had nightmares about him. So frequently, in our modernized and “progressive” society, we romanticize the escape into the wild; and while it’s true that people have been retreating to nature for its restorative powers since the beginning of time—Jesus, Buddha, Gilgamesh, St. Anthony—it was really the literature of the Romantic period—Keats, Wordsworth, Coleridge – that began to codify the retreat into Nature as a literary, as well as a physical, aesthetic. Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey”, and Shelley’s Victor Frankenstein, who found the French Alps “sublime and magnificent”, and whose “scenes afforded [him] the greatest consolation that [he] was capable of receiving” are but two examples. In the American tradition those carrying the torch of the Romantics begin with Emerson, Thoreau and Muir. Thoreau, who famously moved to the woods because he wanted to suck all the marrow out of life, Emerson’s “transparent eye-ball” and Muir’s near death experiences in a Sequoia and on a glacier all attempt to accomplish the same goal: to find Life by obliterating ego, to find one’s self by seeking Nature. So, what happens when someone seeks out Nature not to return? Michael Finkel’s telling of Christopher Knight’s story, in his book The Stranger in the Woods, explores that question. In 1986, Christopher Knight quit his job, cashed his final paycheck, got in his Subaru Brat and headed south to Florida; he turned around and drove north all the way to central Maine, down one dirt road, then another, until the ...