"North Pond Hermit" on NPR's Snap Judgment

The true story of a legendary hermit is so compelling that I didn't want to miss a syllable of today's broadcast on NPR's Snap Judgment. I stayed in the carport to hear the end on my car radio.


Writer Michael Finkel learned of the hermit through a news story that police had caught a man who, for twenty - seven winters, had taken small items from recreational cabins in dense woods far north in Maine. The mysterious burglar picked locks but broke nothing, and left the cabins as he found them, minus cans of beer (though never "lite"), food items, briefs (never boxers). Locals only surmised his existence, but no one had seen him. They named the hypothetical thief the "North Pond Hermit."


Finkel's imagination was piqued by another detail, that the hermit had stolen a thousand books over the years. The man, identified as Christopher Knight from a high school yearbook from the early 1980s, still wore the same glasses from his class picture. Knight refused to talk to other reporters and writers who contacted him through phone or email, but Finkel tried a handwritten letter, and got a terse reply that showed rigorous candor, an original style, and the dry wit of superior intelligence.

As the radio story proceeds, we learn that Knight simply wanted to be alone. He found social contact awkward, and he didn't see value in the pursuits that occupy our lives. Taking blankets, some food, and some clothes with him, he drove his car deep into the woods and moved around a couple of years before he found an ideal retreat under a tangle of branches, about twenty square feet. Finkel visited the place. "You can hear the wind without feeling it; you can see out, but no one can see in." Knight, never lit a fire, to avoid detection; and, adhering to his own strict code, communicated with no one, not even the residents who left notes inviting him to just list the supplies he needed. The exceptions were a chance encounter with a hiker, when Knight said one word, "Hi." When a grandfather, son, and grandson saw him, he heard the grandfather tell the other two to calm down and leave the man alone; Knight bowed once and disappeared again. Knight regretted only that he had to steal: of that, he was ashamed.

Apprehended, tried by a sympathetic court, he endured jail several months, then worked in his brother's business. Finkel visited, and Knight appeared to be doing fine. But in a unique moment of personal expression, Knight told him he was in agony. (This was my NPR "driveway moment.") Knight made eye contact with Finkel for the first time and asked, "Am I crazy?" Finkel reassured him. Knight told Finkel of the night when, starving, he couldn't walk around his hermitage to generate warmth in the sub-zero cold. Freezing under his blankets, he saw a "lady of the woods" who asked if he was ready to go with her. He perceived that she was Death, and told her, "Not yet." But now he was thinking of surrendering to her.

Reviewers of Finkel's book tell how the author draws on Thoreau's Walden and others' thoughts on "solitude and spirituality" to find resonance with the rest of us.

Knight's written words, read aloud, reminded me of the fictional character "Scobie" in Graham Greene's The Heart of the Matter who limits his speech and daily journal to purely observable fact and utter truth. Engaged in work and relationships, Scobie inwardly removes himself, a sort of hermit in the world. (See my blogpost 12/09/2014, "Saints in Spite of Themselves".)

Knight brings to mind another fictional character who retreats from a town of gossips and hypocrites in his late teens and never comes out of the family home in daylight again: Boo Radley.

The questions about how Knight survived are interesting, but the why of his story is what compels us; that, and the strained but deep relationship between the compassionate writer and his rebarbative subject. This is a book I may have to read. Thanks to Snap Judgment for yet another intense story to enrich our imaginations.