The strange and curious tale of the last true hermit.

An interesting read at GQ by Michael Finkel about a man who stayed alive in Maine living in a tent for twenty-seven years surviving entirely by burglaries of food, clothing and propane and incidentals. He drove people nuts for decades. They thought they were going crazy, flashlights and batteries gone missing, food disappearing, full propane tanks exchanged for empty ones. Then they started noticing evidence of burglaries, some 40 a year (40*27=1080). He became legend  Catching the guy became an obsession. When they did catch the guy, they still couldn't quite believe it, the truth as he tells it is even more difficult to accept.

Winters in Maine are long and intensely cold: a wet, windy cold, the worst kind of cold. A week of winter camping is an impressive achievement. An entire season is practically unheard of.

I like that, the worst of all of the colds. 

Also, he didn’t feel comfortable speaking. "My vocal, verbal skills have become rather rusty and slow." 

Many victims of Knight’s thefts reported that their books were often stolen—from Tom Clancy potboilers to dense military histories to James Joyce’s Ulysses. 

It seemed that Knight was shy about everything except literary criticism; he answered that he felt "rather lukewarm" about Hemingway. Instead, he noted, he’d rather read Rudyard Kipling, preferably his "lesser known works."  

Ha! Everyone is a critic. 

"Cooking is too kind a word for what I did," Chris told me. He’d not been sick in the woods, and his worst accident was a tumble on some ice, but his teeth were rotten, and no wonder. I dug through his twenty-five years of trash, buried between boulders, and kept inventory: a five-pound tub that once held Marshmallow Fluff, an empty box of Devil Dogs, peanut butter, Cheetos, honey, graham crackers, Cool Whip, tuna fish, coffee, Tater Tots, pudding, soda, El Monterey spicy jalapeño chimichangas, and on and on and on.

The pity that I feel is tremendous. 

The story goes into all the things that he stole, and much more.