Update: The Stranger in the Woods has been chosen as the next book. Author Michael Finkel will be joining us for a podcast conversation and a Facebook group Q&A in the coming month; stay tuned for more details.

In April 2013, Sergeant Terry Hughes caught a man breaking into the walk-in fridge of a summer camp for disabled children in central Maine. This was the end of the hunt for Maine鈥檚 legendary North Pond Hermit, Christopher Knight.

It was a moment akin to catching the yeti snatching hikers off a Himalayan mountainside. Except, in this case, the yeti shaved, and some people wistfully thought they might want to live like him鈥攖o run off into the woods, hear birds sing, watch water ripple, see snow drop, and rediscover the ideal of unalloyed individualism. Knight did it for nearly 30 years. In ($26; Knopf), author Michael Finkel uncovers the minute and astonishing elements of Knight鈥檚 story. These six made us do a double take.

He Didn鈥檛 Talk to Anyone for 27 Years

Well, Knight did bump into a hiker once. That day, he looked up, nodded, and said, 鈥淗i.鈥� Then Knight walked on, because he didn鈥檛 feel like talking鈥攁nd he didn鈥檛 talk for the other nearly 10,000 days he spent in the woods. When people are suffering, we tell them, 鈥淵ou鈥檙e not alone.鈥� When they feel the need to be understood, we tell them, 鈥淚 hear you.鈥� When we want to punish people for extreme offenses, we isolate them. The United Nations defines that last idiosyncrasy of ours as torture, by the way. And yet Knight chose to forget the sound of human voices and let his own voice fade. The night he was captured and questioned, his sentences were 鈥渟tuttery and clanky, an old engine struggling to turn over, each syllable a chore,鈥� as Finkel describes in the book.

He Was Just 20 When He Began His Seclusion

When Knight walked into the woods in 1986, he had never been on a date or even spent a night in a tent. One day, he drove his Subaru as far as roads would take him into the Maine woods, less than an hour from where he grew up. He left the keys on the dashboard and started walking south. There weren鈥檛 many indicators that Knight wanted to abandon human contact so completely鈥攈e was following some sort of inner directive that worked on a level removed from logic. He told Finkel, 鈥淚 had no plans when I left, I wasn鈥檛 thinking of anything. I just did it.鈥� Knight had a fairly normal childhood in an unusually resourceful, slightly reclusive New England family. At the time, he was working installing alarm systems and had just bought the new car. No one expected it, not his school friends or even his brother, who had helped fund the Subaru and would be saddled with the debt for it. One day, Knight simply decided that he would live a life of his own design.

He Lived So Close to a House That He Couldn鈥檛 Sneeze Aloud

For the vast majority of time he spent in the woods, Knight lived about a three-minute walking distance from the nearest cabin and a washboard road, on a 220-acre parcel of land where other simple summer homes were set in the woods along the lake. To avoid detection, he never lit a campfire and tried to avoid sneezing. He built his long-term woodland encampment in an essentially invisible clearing between two boulders, using tarps, garbage bins, and many issues of National Geographic (great for water drainage鈥擪night created a level platform in his living space with duct-taped bundles of magazines). He was constantly tinkering with the shelter, but no matter the adjustments Knight made, it never provided much warmth. So, in the intense Maine winters, he froze but survived. Knight would lie under a mass of blankets and force himself to wake in the coldest parts of the night. 鈥淲hat he did in the cold was both prosaic and profound,鈥� Finkel writes. 鈥淗e suffered.鈥�

He Broke into More Than 1,000 Buildings Before Getting Caught

Though he suffered, Knight did find a surprising amount of sustenance in other people鈥檚 homes. He was an expert burglar. Using skills that lingered from the alarm-installation job, Knight left no trace. Rather than break down doors, he would take them off their hinges and put them back on later. Most of his neighbors only noticed they鈥檇 been robbed when they found that food, sleeping bags, clothes, magazines, books, alcohol, or candy were missing. This kleptomaniacal mode of survival was subtle, but it was so consistent that Knight ended up creating a mood of unease in the cabin community, most of whom were seasonal residents who used the cabins for their own escapes during the summers. 鈥淎ll Patterson wanted from her cabin was a place to escape the pressures of daily life,鈥� writes Finkel of one of the victims. 鈥淜night denied her that.鈥� All solitude comes at a cost, whether for the secluded or those who surround him.

There Is an Online Hermit Community That Thinks He鈥檚 Overrated

Much of the hermit community objected to Knight鈥檚 particularly parasitic mode of existence. Yes, there is a hermit community, with an online forum at . Many of the hermits on that forum declared that Knight couldn鈥檛 be considered a real hermit because he stole things. Knight himself agrees鈥攈e that he does not consider himself a hermit but a thief. Still, many other modern-day hermits actually live in their parents鈥� basements or analogous internet-connected pits and have meals slipped through a crack in the door while they chat online with their hermit friends. In Japan, there are more than half a million of this sort of hermit. They鈥檙e known as hikikomori and are that the Japanese Ministry of Health, Labor, and Welfare has studied their condition.

Conceptually, it might seem weird that all these hermits, Knight among them, would choose to rely on society in some way. Actually, most of history鈥檚 known hermits have interacted with their societies to varying degrees. There were the walled-off medieval anchorites who ate meals slipped through slots by servants, and then slipped excrement back out. Then there was Everett Ruess, who showed up at a shop every once in a very long while before disappearing again into the desert with his mules. Even the Unabomber sent off his explosive missives through the postal service from his woodland lair. If there were hermits who鈥檝e never had to interact with society, we鈥檝e never heard of them (for obvious reasons). But Knight does stand out for going the longest period without human contact.

He Hates Henry David Thoreau

When Knight was captured, a media storm broke over the Kennebec County Jail as journalists descended from around the world to rattle him like hail. All of them, including Finkel, tried to glean hermit wisdom in the process. In the end, the only major insight Knight expressed to Finkel was 鈥済et enough sleep.鈥� The pithiness and grounded practicality of that advice isn鈥檛 entirely surprising. It was unlikely that Knight would ever come up with ethereal maxims, memorable aphorisms, or spiritual nuggets. He branded Thoreau a 鈥渄ilettante鈥� and said others like him who published and commodified their thoughts were false hermits. What Knight took from the woods were not grand cosmic insights, but memories of a time when he was attuned to the nature, beautiful and brutal, around him. He remembered how on the warmest days of the year, the pond would be warm and he would strip and float in it, gazing at the stars. Though he lost track of time, Knight eagerly anticipated the days around the Fourth of July. Rather than recalling gawking at fireworks with a drunken mass, Knight remembered those times because he could sit back and watch as the pitch-black forest around him filled with fireflies.

The post The Secret Life of America’s Last True Hermit appeared first on 国产吃瓜黑料 Online.

Colin Thubron has made a name for himself writing about brutal solo adventures. He looks the part: in , he appears to have just been punched in the face but is either too cool, too rugged, or too pickled to respond with anything but a swaggering smile. On the page, however, his observations are sharp and betray his deep sense of curiosity, and he fashions his many fascinations into prose that reads like poetry. All of this makes Thubron one of our greatest living travel writers, known for masterworks of the genre like Shadow of the Silk Road, Lost Heart of Asia, and In Siberia. He鈥檚 also president of the Royal Society of Literature and a Booker-longlisted novelist. In his 77 years, Thubron has wandered most of the earth and authored 18 books. His latest novel, Night of Fire ($27; ), feels like a culmination of that career.

The plot is structured around a building that鈥檚 burning down. Each chapter alternates between first person in the past tense and third person in the present. One by one, Thubron鈥檚 omniscient narrator focuses on a single resident and the memories that flood his or her mind as the fire sucks oxygen from the air and mental life is extinguished. A priest recalls his struggles with doubt in the seminary, on Mount Athos, and in Rwanda during the genocide. An amateur lepidopterist remembers her troubled family and the human connections she made during her one butterfly hunting adventure. A former schoolteacher reflects on the compulsions that pushed him into a lifetime of travel.

Each character expresses a need to record the life passing them by, to save the signifiers of memory and self they keep around them. When one tenant wakes to realize there鈥檚 a fire, he takes mementos from his 50 years of traveling and throws them out the window. Likewise, Thubron鈥檚 travel books鈥攆ull of over-lush, logomaniacal prose鈥攇ive the impression that the thing he would save first in a blaze would be his notes. The volume of detail in his nonfiction is overwhelming, as if Thubron is in a rush to capture the entirety of a world that he feels is slipping away.

In Night of Fire, it鈥檚 clear that Thubron hasn鈥檛 lost this love of details, but he has come to conclusions that supersede the details in importance. There is a strange recurring focus on the nature of God in this book鈥攕trange because Thubron鈥檚 previous聽book, To a Mountain in Tibet, was about processing the death of his mother, the last of his relatives, in the absence of religion. If Thubron has chosen a God, though, it鈥檚 a deity that鈥檚 been on the outskirts of all his writing: the God of the road, which unfurls itself before him in the perceptions of memory and the moment. 鈥淭hink of it like a journey,鈥� the burning building鈥檚 landlord tells himself, having realized the approaching inevitability of expiration by fire, as he shovels sleeping pills into his mouth.

Throughout the book, memories of travel and the road offer Thubron鈥檚 characters a semblance of solace in the face of death. The last thing the聽former teacher remembers is his final journey into a remote wasteland. On his way 鈥渢hrough this wilderness of boulders and skeletal trees, towards a horizon that had misted away,鈥� the man nearly collides with a sanyassi, a holy man whose religion commands him to wander forever and whom the traveler at first mistakes for his mirror image. 鈥淭he skyline would recede before him,鈥� Thubron writes, 鈥渦ntil he stepped from his path to die.鈥�

One of the tenants, the priest, remembers a night in Rwanda when he woke to find himself walking barefoot. 鈥淚 stopped dead,鈥� he remembers. 鈥淎bove the unlit camp spread the African stars. Nothing familiar shone there鈥he heaven of the northern hemisphere had become an ice field of unknown constellations, multiplying their millions into a haze of alien light. I went on gazing up in emptied fascination.鈥� In moments like this, it seems that after a lifetime of scraping for individual meaning in a wealth of details, Thubron has accepted that each life is just a fleeting aspect of this vast universe, far beyond the comprehension of one man, or even a building full of memories.

The post The Meaning of Life, According to a World Traveler appeared first on 国产吃瓜黑料 Online.

When Rory Stewart was 15 and visiting his parents in China, he bought a cheap bicycle in a Guangzhou department store and decided to bike more than 100 miles back to the family apartment in Hong Kong. This worried his mother, though perhaps not as much as when he decided to spend two and a half weeks on a school break from Oxford walking the Afghanistan-Pakistan border into the Wakhan corridor, or later when he went scrabbling up and down sharp ridges across the jungle of Indonesian Papua.

After a little less than five years in the British foreign service in Montenegro and Indonesia in his twenties, which Stewart has admitted gives 鈥渢he appearance of鈥� spycraft, he decided to walk around the world. He got through about 6,000 miles across Asia and entered the bestseller lists with , an account of the 2002 Afghan portion of the walk. In 2003, at age 30, Stewart found himself part of the occupation government of Iraq, briefly in charge of a region that鈥檚 a bit smaller than New Jersey (he writes about this in ). Later still, in Kabul, he headed up the , a charity Stewart founded with Prince Charles.

On the heels of this globe-trotting era, after a brief stint teaching at Harvard, Stewart moved to Britain in 2009 to run for a seat in Parliament (he succeeded). In the years since, he has tried to grapple with this damp little island that he has never really known as his own. His new book, ($27; Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), is about that inner conflict, his relationship with his recently deceased father, and trying to establish a home by parsing the elements of history and identity.

In most of Stewart鈥檚 books, there鈥檚 the sense of stories and trips unshared. Here he seems to unveil most of it, examining the scope of his life in an attempt to establish himself in place.

Stewart was born in Hong Kong, and though he spent some of his childhood in Britain, he moved around a lot because his father was a Malaysian colonial administrator and the second-most senior man in the British Secret Service. 鈥淚t鈥檚 very eccentric, being brought up as I was by my father,鈥� Stewart tells me with a carefully enunciated upper-class accent over the phone from London. 鈥淥ur Sunday afternoon walk would be in the jungle in Malaya, making rafts and floating down rivers.鈥� He says that his father, a World War II Scottish Highland regiment veteran who was 鈥渕ore playful and more over the top than most people,鈥� tried in his own way to instill Britishness in his son. He made Stewart dance Scottish traditional dances to music played on a cassette player and laid out historic British military battles on their apartment floor. 鈥淚t would be a little bit like an American father bringing someone up in Hong Kong and constantly talking about crossing the Potomac or the Gettysburg address.鈥�

But until 2009, when he joined Parliament, Stewart had little direct knowledge of Britain. When he finally moved into a cottage in Britain鈥檚 Lake District, he began trying to understand this place in the same way he had tried to understand much of the rest of the world: on foot. In 2011, Stewart walked the length of Hadrian鈥檚 Wall, the Roman ruin dotted on an east鈥搘est axis across England, with his father following along in a car part of the way. The next year, he walked 400 miles along the English and Scottish border from his cottage to his parents鈥� Scottish estate. These are the book鈥檚 titular marches. 鈥淲alks are miracles,鈥� Stewart writes, 鈥渨hich can let me learn, like nothing else, about a nation, or myself.鈥�

Someone who has grown up like Stewart, tossed around the earth, at first involuntarily, then with mounting enthusiasm, will question how one place could hold this special designation of home and how a nation could be integral to one鈥檚 identity. The question that seems to reverberate as background noise of The Marches: If one grew up everywhere, would one be at home everywhere鈥攐r nowhere?

After World War I, it was claimed that the newly introduced British passport could take you all around the world without seeing a sunset. For postwar travel writers like Peter Fleming, Robert Byron, and Wilfred Thesiger, home wasn鈥檛 where their passports indicated. It was wherever those passports carried them. At one point in his life, Stewart saw himself as a successor to this tradition. But he now realizes that tradition was, to a great extent, a function of the British Empire. For Stewart鈥檚 generation of British citizens born abroad, in a world without empire, abroad was no longer an extension of home. Stewart acknowledges that, in this light, the position of the travel writer has also become shaky.

鈥淭he problem with these imperialist travel writers is not only all the very disturbing elements of colonial history, of racism, of arrogance,鈥� Stewart tells me, 鈥渂ut it鈥檚 also that their own sense of British identity is actually very fragile. It鈥檚 not very sensitive or inventive.鈥� The working travel writers he admires today don鈥檛 fit in that genre in the classical sense. They鈥檙e more properly described as journalists, like John McPhee and Peter Hessler, both of whom frequently write for the New Yorker. They analyze and report with a wealth of information that comes from beyond just personal experience. For The Marches, Stewart acted as much as a reporter as he did a pure travel writer, recording countless interviews and doing years of research for the book. 鈥淭he other books took me only a year to write,鈥� he says. 鈥淭his one took me nearly four.鈥�

Stewart brings up an affinity for V.S. Naipaul and an aversion to Paul Theroux. When I mention his introduction to Bruce Chatwin鈥檚 The Songlines, Stewart allows a startled 鈥淥h鈥� to escape. 鈥淵ou鈥檙e right,鈥� he concedes. 鈥淚 did love him as a younger guy, but as an older guy, I鈥檝e become really angry with him.鈥�

Chatwin, who more than anyone embodied the image of the travel writer in the second half of the previous century, built a career pinballing around the world, chasing larger-than-life stories and extraordinary objects. In The Songlines, the culmination of a lifetime of thought on nomadism, Chatwin concludes that home is just the territory we move through. Stewart seems to be one of the few travel writers who hasn鈥檛 fully accepted this concept of a yo-yo humanity, swinging out across the earth and back, as the basis of a happy modernity.

鈥淚鈥檓 afraid that sometimes I think he鈥檚 a fraud,鈥� he says. 鈥淚 think he found it very difficult to write about the modern world because he鈥檚 always trying to make it seem more romantic, more exotic, and more carefully turned than it actually is. I wish Chatwin were capable of acknowledging that a lot of the experience of travel can be boredom, can be familiarity, can be frustration. Whereas he writes books that turn travel into a sort of fairy tale. I鈥檓 really keen to fight that. I鈥檓 really keen to do all I can to capture just how weird and strangely formed the modern world is.鈥�

Finally, Stewart admits, 鈥淚 think I鈥檓 always struggling as a person between my own sort of romantic Bruce Chatwin side and my desire to be more realistic about the modern world.鈥� In this book, he says, 鈥渕y romance and absorption with the past of the British landscape is rubbing up against the reality of modern Britain.鈥�

And what is that reality? In Afghanistan and Iraq, Stewart met people who had stayed put on a piece of land for generations. They had 鈥渄istinct identities and oral histories鈥� that secured them to the land. He believed that home was not a quandary for them; it was a given. In contemporary Britain, however, Stewart finds that few linger and home is not so obvious. In the face of these split geographical loyalties and the accompanying detachment, he realizes that modern ideas of home and identity must be fundamentally different from inherited ones. He comes to understand that, today, a homeland鈥攂e it Syria, Scotland, or the British Empire鈥攊s at its heart an invented tradition, a web of stories.

After his father died, Stewart did a lot of hard thinking. 鈥淲hat my father represents is that identity is an activity,鈥� he concludes. And with the younger Stewart, to some extent, it鈥檚 not what he thinks and knows about a place that make it home, it鈥檚 how he experiences and acts in it. That鈥檚 why the Lake District, one of the world鈥檚 most-walked landscapes, is what he chose to call home. 鈥淚 become a very different person, even on a short walk,鈥� Stewart says. 鈥淎 seven- or eight-hour walk in Cumbria in the hills and I immediately feel this is the best thing I鈥檝e done all month. I just feel happier.鈥�

The post What Does Home Mean to a Nomadic Travel Writer? appeared first on 国产吃瓜黑料 Online.