Chapter 16 Knight lived in the dirt but was cleaner than you. Way cleaner. Pine needles and mud don''t make you dirty, except superficially. The muck that matters, the bad bacteria, the evil virus, is typically passed through coughs and sneezes and handshakes and kisses. The price of sociability is sometimes our health. Knight quarantined himself from the human race and thus avoided our biohazards. He stayed phenomenally healthy. Though he suffered deeply at times, he insists he never once had a medical emergency, or a serious illness, or a bad accident, or even a cold.
During the summers, especially in the early years, he was strong, fit, and spry. "You should have seen me in my twenties--I ruled the land I walked upon, it was mine," Knight said, exposing the prideful streak that runs below his surface of contrition. "Why shouldn''t I claim it as my own? No one else was there. I was in control. I controlled it as much as I wanted. I was lord of the woods." Poison ivy grows throughout the area; its prevalence prevented some people from searching for his site. Knight kept a little jingle in his head--"leaves of three, let it be"--and so ably memorized where each patch grew that even at night he didn''t brush against it.
He says he was never once afflicted. Lyme disease, a bacterial illness transmitted through tick bites that can cause partial paralysis, is endemic to central Maine, but Knight was spared that as well. He brooded about Lyme for a while, then came to a realization: "I couldn''t do anything about it, so I stopped thinking about it." Living in the woods, subject to the whims of nature, offers a great deal of autonomy but not much control. At first, Knight worried about everything: snowstorms might bury him, hikers could find him, the police would capture him. Gradually, methodically, he shed most of his anxiety. But not all. Being too relaxed, he felt, was also a danger.
In appropriate doses, worry was useful, possibly lifesaving. "I used worry to encourage thought," he said. "Worry can give you an extra prod to survive and plan. And I had to plan." At the conclusion of each thieving mission, he was absolved temporarily of worry. The order in which he ate his food was governed by the pace of spoilage, ground beef to Twinkies. When he was down to little more than flour and shortening, he''d mix those together with water and make biscuits. He never stole homemade meals or unwrapped items, for fear someone might poison him, so everything he took came sealed in a carton or can.
He ate every morsel, scraping the containers clean. Then he deposited the wrappers and cartons in his camp''s dump, stuffed between boulders at the boundary of his site. The dump was scattered over an area of about a hundred square feet. One section was devoted to items like propane tanks and old mattresses and sleeping bags and books, another to food containers. Even in the food area, there was no odor. Knight added layers of dirt and leaves to aid with composting, which eliminated any smell, but most of the packaging was waxed cardboard or plastic, slow to disintegrate. Upon excavation, the colors on many boxes remained garish, superlatives and exclamation points and rococo typography popping from the soil while robins chirped in the branches above. The archeological record contained in his dump revealed why Knight''s only significant health issue was his teeth.
He brushed regularly, he stole toothpaste, but did not see a dentist and his teeth began to rot. It didn''t help that his culinary preferences never progressed beyond the sugar-and-processedfood palate of a teenager. " ''Cooking'' is too kind a word for what I did," he said. A staple meal was macaroni and cheese. Dozens of macand-cheese boxes were buried between the rocks, along with several empty spice bottles--black pepper, garlic powder, hot sauce, blackened seasoning. Often, when Knight was inside a cabin with a good spice rack, he would grab a new bottle and try it out on his macaroni and cheese. Also in his dump was a flattened thirty-ounce container from cheddar-flavored Goldfish crackers, a five-pound tub from Marshmallow Fluff, and a box that had held sixteen Drake''s Devil Dogs. There were packages from graham crackers, tater tots, baked beans, shredded cheese, hot dogs, maple syrup, chocolate bars, cookie dough.
Betty Crocker scalloped potatoes and Tyson chicken strips. Country Time lemonade and Mountain Dew. El Monterey spicy jalapeño and cheese chimichangas. All of this came from a single kitchen-sink-sized hole, dug out by hand. Knight had fled the modern world only to live off the fat of it. The food, Knight pointed out, wasn''t exactly his choice. It was first selected by the cabin owners of North Pond, then snatched by him. He did steal a little money, an average of fifteen dollars a year--"a backup system," he called it--and lived an hour''s walk from the Sweet Dreams convenience store and deli, but never went there.
The last time he ate at a restaurant, or even sat at a table, was at some fast-food place during his final road trip. He stole frozen lasagna, canned ravioli, and Thousand Island dressing. You can dig in the dump until you''re lying on your side, arm buried to the shoulder, and more keeps emerging. Cheetos and bratwurst and pudding and pickles. Quarry a trench deep enough to fight a war from--Crystal Light, Cool Whip, Chock full o''Nuts, Coke--and you still won''t reach bottom. So he wasn''t a gourmet. He didn''t care what he ate. "The discipline I practiced in order to survive did away with cravings for specific food.
As long as it was food, it was good enough." He spent no more than a few minutes preparing meals, yet he often passed the fortnight between raids without leaving camp, filling much of the time with chores, camp maintenance, hygiene, and entertainment. His chief form of entertainment was reading. The last moments he was in a cabin were usually spent scanning bookshelves and nightstands. The life inside a book always felt welcoming to Knight. It pressed no demands on him, while the world of actual human interactions was so complex. Conversations between people can move like tennis games, swift and unpredictable. There are constant subtle visual and verbal cues, there''s innuendo, sarcasm, body language, tone.
Everyone occasionally fumbles an encounter, a victim of social clumsiness. It''s part of being human. To Knight, it all felt impossible. His engagement with the written word might have been the closest he could come to genuine human encounters. The stretch of days between thieving raids allowed him to tumble into the pages, and if he felt transported he could float in bookworld, undisturbed, for as long as he pleased. The reading selection offered by the cabins was often dispiriting. With books, Knight did have specific desires and cravings--in some ways, reading material was more important to him than food--though when he was famished for words, he''d subsist on whatever the nightstands bestowed, highbrow or low. He liked Shakespeare, Julius Caesar especially, that litany of betrayal and violence.
He marveled at the poetry of Emily Dickinson, sensing her kindred spirit. For the last seventeen years of her life, Dickinson rarely left her home in Massachusetts and spoke to visitors only through a partly closed door. "Saying nothing," she wrote, "sometimes says the most." Knight wished he''d been able to procure more poetry written by Edna St. Vincent Millay, a fellow native of Maine, born in the coastal village of Rockland in 1892. He quoted her bestknown lines--"My candle burns at both ends / It will not last the night"--and then added, "I tried candles in my camp for a number of years. Not worth it to steal them." If he were forced to select a favorite book, it might be The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich , by William Shirer.
"It''s concise," Knight said, a quick twelve hundred pages, "and impressive as any novel." He stole every book on military history he saw He pilfered a copy of Ulysses , but it was possibly the one book he did not finish. "What''s the point of it? I suspect it was a bit of a joke by Joyce. He just kept his mouth shut as people read into it more than there was. Pseudo-intellectuals love to drop the name Ulysses as their favorite book. I refused to be intellectually bullied into finishing it." Knight''s disdain for Thoreau was bottomless--"he had no deep insight into nature"--but Ralph Waldo Emerson was acceptable. "People are to be taken in very small doses," wrote Emerson.
"Nothing can bring you peace but yourself." Knight read the Tao Te Ching and felt a deep-rooted connection to the verses. "Good walking," says the Tao , "leaves no tracks." Robert Frost received a thumbs-down--"I''m glad his reputation is starting to fade"--and Knight said that when he ran out of toilet paper, he sometimes tore pages from John Grisham novels. He mentioned that he didn''t like Jack Kerouac either, but this wasn''t quite true. "I don''t like people who like Jack Kerouac," he clarified. Knight stole portable radios and earbuds and tuned in daily, voices through the waves another kind of human presence. For a while he was fascinated by talk radio.
He listened to a lot of Rush Limbaugh. "I didn''t say I liked him. I said I listened to him." Knight''s own politics were "conservative but not Republican." He added, perhaps unnecessarily, "I''m kind of an isolationist." Later he got hooked on classical music--Brahms and Tchaikovsky, yes; Bach, no. "Bach is too pristine," he said. Bliss for him was Tchaikovsky''s The Queen o.