But the flurry of newspaper attention quickly faded.

I live surrounded by woods myself (though not under a tarpaulin), so the story piqued my interest. I remember reading about him at the time of his capture. He hadn’t spoken to anyone except to say “Hi”, once, to a hiker he’d failed to avoid.

Aside from camp chores and cabin raids, he had spent the last quarter-century contemplating nature, reading stolen books, listening to his stolen radio and playing stolen video games. He was the fifth son of a close-knit rural family that observed the old American virtues of self-reliance, practical ingenuity and extreme reticence (so extreme they never told the police he had gone missing).

In 2013 a game warden, determined to capture the elusive “Hermit of North Pond”, nabbed him in flagrante, stealing from a summer camp for disabled children. Some people left bags of food out for him, though others resented his intrusions – on their peace of mind as well as their property. His skill as a thief, along with the modest nature of his plunder, earned him a certain mythic local status. There, through the ferocious winters and mosquito-ridden summers, he remained unseen, though not unnoticed: every week or two he would break into one of the many seasonal camps and cabins dotting the shores of a nearby lake and steal supplies. He set up home in a small tent below a camouflaged tarpaulin in a secluded spot in the woods. He didn’t have a plan, nor project, nor even a conscious motive other than a fondness for solitude.

I n the summer of 1986, a young man returning home from a road trip impulsively drove past his house without stopping and continued north on smaller and smaller roads until he reached a forest trail in northern Maine, where he abandoned his car, stepped out into the wilderness, and disappeared for 27 years.

Download the stranger in the woods