Once I picked up The Stranger in the Woods, I just couldn’t put it down. The true life tale of Christopher Knight, I man who went into the Maine woods and didn’t come back — untraceable for over 25 years.
His feat of living this solitary hermit’s life is made all the more incredible by the fact he refused to light fires for warmth in order to not risk himself being discovered. Spending the harsh Maine winters wrapped in sleeping bags, waking himself at 2am to pace up and down his camp to avoid falling unconscious from hypothermia, and not leaving his camp once the ground was covered in snow as he would leave tracks.
The darker side of the story was that Knight was essentially a parasite and enabled his lifestyle by regularly and repeatedly stealing from the holiday cabins and camps surrounding the waters of North Pond. His thefts ran into the thousands by the time he was finally apprehended in 2013.
The Stranger in the Woods is a fascinating tale delving into how Knight survived for this long and explores his difficult return to society, delving into the mindset of a man who thrived on solitude yet took a morally questionable approach to obtain it.
