TWENTY-SEVEN YEARS LIVED IN ISOLATION

THE STORY OF THE LAST TRUE HERMIT 

by Kyt Lyn Walken

[Instructor and Official Representative of Hull’s Tracking School, Conservation Ranger certified by Conservation Rangers Operations Worldwide, Columnist for American and English newspapers]

Everything that is ordinary for us has not been for twenty-seven years for Christopher Knight.

We are not talking about calamitous events, kidnappings or crashed planes.

Not even a change of identity.

At the basis of this story there is a choice, which rests its foundations in the search for another way. Or life. Or both, if you prefer.

Maine, United States. It was 1986 when Christopher Knight, a twenty-year-old incensed accident-prevention installer, a completely normal past, raised in a religious and reserved family, disappeared into thin air. Parents and other siblings do not talk about it with the authorities, perhaps believing in a personal decision by the young man to get away from everything and everyone.

He is arrested when he is now forty-seven years old. Not for murder, as many might suspect. But by theft: over a thousand minor break-ins of this kind have been committed by Knight over the course of twenty-seven years, and for one reason only: to survive. And not so bad, then.

On the day of his disappearance, in fact, he had no plan and no provisions or camping equipment of any kind. He had – by his own admission – not even the knowledge of a Survivalist or the ingenuity of a Prepper if not the ability with the anti-theft devices (then almost embryonic) derived from his previous use.

Of course, places make the difference. And Maine, a sparsely populated state, full of forests and small lakes, so dark, even Gothic in its marvelous isolation, is one of those corners of the Earth where if you want to hide and are able to do it well, it will repay every effort. On the other hand, Thoreau himself had paved the way a few decades earlier: “Not before we have lost the world, we will begin to find ourselves.” But Knight will label him as an “amateur”. Its goal is not to write a book. Not even living like the McCandless of the famous “Into the wild” did he expect and pursue with fiery ardor.

Knight is shiny. Cynical. He has in mind the figure of the pure hermit, who “never sees neither a doctor nor a woman”, as he will tell Michael Finkel, journalist and writer who patiently approached Knight during his detention, looking for the reasons for his gesture. But he must face the grumpy diffidence of the other “Someone would like me confused and welcoming, full of the hermit’s friendly wisdom […] Ready to unleash fortune cookie phrases from my refuge.”

Those twenty-seven years, spent in isolation, stealing food, gas cylinders – never lit a fire in order not to reveal his position from above, hidden in the woods by large boulders, pants, sweaters, books, magazines, torches, have been unsuccessful from a personal and spiritual growth point of view, how would some like to call it?

Finkel himself replied, almost becoming a translator of Knight’s thoughts: “He continually thinks about how to improve his accommodation, every tool, stolen, is carefully stored, clean and in order like everything else. The hermit never goes too far from there. He spends most of his days in some form of contemplation of the space around him, of nature, immersed in his thoughts, without ever feeling boredom […] He does not understand how it can be considered acceptable to spend hours locked in a room in front of a PC for money, and strange to relax in a tent in the woods. He doesn’t understand how observing trees can be lazy and cutting them down. ”

If we initially thought of John Rambo we can say that we were totally wrong:

not only does Knight not look a little like him (there is no physical prowess, nor specific military training behind him, nor weapons), but he proposes himself as the exact antithesis. It does not run away, it hides. Which is quite different. If he accidentally meets someone, he takes refuge early in his protected space.

One wonders if he could have escaped the detention for the thefts committed if he had a plan at the beginning of everything. If he had rations, bushcraft knowledge and more. But his story was written by himself. As in twenty-seven years he has sought with such dedication.

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