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I first read Graham Hancock’s Fingerprints of the Gods: The Evidence of Earth’s Lost Civilization in the early 2000’s, after a friend casually mentioned it in conversation. It wasn’t really a book recommendation, at that point. And in fact, I don’t really remember what he said about the book, specifically, that piqued my interest. But he was someone I respected, the book sounded intriguing, and I immediately picked up a copy.

The thing was a tome. About two inches thick, in paperback, and coming in at 592 pages. It was far from being the longest book I’d read up to that point, but it was definitely a chunk of book that felt wonderful to hold in my hand. I do almost all of my reading via ebooks these days, but I’ve always been a sucker for a good, solid book.

I’ve also always loved history, though I did go through a period where I apparently denied this, first to myself and then, by extension and attitude, to others. It wasn’t cool, after all. I had enough trouble getting along with people in school, especially high school, without throwing “he’s the guy who nerds out about history” into the mix. 

Actually, it wasn’t even strictly history I nerded out over. It was weird and unusual history.

I loved reading and watching things about ancient Egypt, for example, but mostly it was the stuff about lost tombs and treasures, mystic objects and mythic beings, powerful gods and sorcerers that really got my brain buzzing. The hint of mystery among the ancient was always the most intriguing part to me. Reading a laundry list of lineage between dynasties was never quite as appealing, and neither was memorizing when Person X read Speech Y at Location and Event Z.

A plea to history teachers: Please stop teaching history as if it’s just one big census, and start focusing on the inspiring and fun parts. Love, people who love history. 

Fingerprints of the Gods hit all the right notes for me, right from page one. And though it was not the first book about “weird and unusual history” I’d ever read, it was still the start of a new era in reading and research and thought for me. It became a foundational book for my experience with and slog through history and archaeological study, and even more so for my career as a novelist. 

You can see the influence of this book (as well as other books by Hancock and his peers) in my Dan Kotler Archaeological Thrillers. Kotler is, in essence, an homage to guys like Hancock—an archaeologist who skirts the edge of the accepted narrative of history, who finds himself continuously at odds with the institutions of science and academia, challenging their self-assured positions with new facts that they’d prefer to ignore. Kotler gets compared to other famous fictional archaeologists and historians—notably the likes of Indiana Jones and Dr. Robert Langdon (of Da Vinci Code fame), and even Clive Cussler’s Dirk Pitt, at times—but at his core is an echo of Graham Hancock.

The thing that intrigues me most about Fingerprints is the concept of comparative mythology. It’s a theme I’ve come back to hundreds of times in my novels, and to me it’s perhaps the key to understanding more about human culture and history, shedding a very different light on our origins than what has so far been our story. 

Comparative mythology is, in a nutshell, the notion that hidden among all of the various and disparate cultures of the world are threads of a common story, and hints of a civilization lost to the mists of time. As just one example, when you look into every single myth and religion in recorded history, there is a flood myth. And that flood myth invariably contains common elements, even between cultures that should have absolutely nothing in common. There is always a man who communes with a greater power (God, or gods, or spirits, or some other powerful entity). This figure is told in advance of the coming of a great flood, and given explicit instructions for what to do so he and his family will survive. And in following those instructions they all do survive, to go forth and repopulate the Earth.

It’s mind boggling how similar the stories are. It shows up everywhere.

Call me on this. Go look at myths from the Mayans and Aztecs, compare them to myths from the Christian story, and then to myths from ancient Egypt, the Mesopotamian, the Phoenicians. And then, just for fun, look for flood myths among the Celts and Vikings. 

Water, water everywhere.

The same thing happens with other myths and legends, including the presence of “great trees” in just about every religion in existence, and the story of a savior who dies, only to be resurrected and raised to the heavens. Read the story of Osiris, and compare him to Christ, and then for some real fun go look at the story of Viracocha—the bearded, white-skinned god worshiped by the pre-Inca in Peru, who was known for traveling the land with his disciples, teaching about doing good while healing the sick, and even walking on water.

Mind = Blown.

Fingerprints looks at all of the above, by the way, and has served me as a very stable foundation for exploring things like this at a much deeper level. 

In this book I first learned of the alignment of the pyramids at Giza to the stars in the belt of Orion. I further learned that the same sort of alignment is in evidence at the Mayan pyramids. I learned about the prolific presence of circular cycles of destruction and resurrection in all the ancient cultures, a speculation about the continual death and rebirth of humanity. I learned that there are human cultures of which we know practically nothing, beyond the whispers we’ve deciphered from time-worn stone and ancient artifacts. All of these things, in one form or another, have made it into my books. And all of them hint at a world before the world we know, more ancient than we ever imagined.

“Stuff just keeps getting older,” as Graham Hancock himself is fond of saying. And he’s right. 

If you’ve read and enjoyed my Dan Kotler thrillers, and have an interest in the type of “weird and usual history” that Kotler is now famous for exploring, I recommend reading Fingerprints of the Gods, and the other books that have sprung from Hancock’s pen. You’ll come away with a new perspective on history and humanity, and it will change you forever.

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YOU ARE READING SIDE NOTES

Side Notes is an extension of my Notes at the End, which are author’s notes that appear at the end of every one of my novels. If you like these posts, you’ll love the books. 

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Traveling—especially the whole #vanlife version of traveling—does a lot to inspire me. Over the past two months along we’ve seen all kinds of interesting sights and explored all sorts if locations. I’ve been to ancient and mysterious structures, fabulous seaside mansions, and haunting historical sites. And technically I never left my home, since we were in the van the whole time. There’s something kind of awesome about exploring the world while having your own personal bathroom at hand.

One of the locations we visited a short time back is known as “the Viking Tower,” located in Newport, Rhode Island.

In my first Dan Kotler book, The Coelho Medallion, the Viking Tower got a very brief mention. It was one of several sites in the US that Kotler called out as potential evidence for the presence of Vikings in America. The structure is pretty ancient by American terms, standing in what is now a small and well-manicured public park near the coast.

I had heard about this structure years ago, and in that time I’ve read and watched a lot about it. There’s some controversy around its origins and even its age. At present, the consensus seems to be that it is actually an old windmill, presumably built in the 17th century.

You can learn more about it from this Wikipedia article: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Newport_Tower_(Rhode_Island)

And my buddy and fellow thriller author, Nick Thacker, and I talked about the structure a bit on an upcoming episode of our podcast, Stuff That’s Real, That You Didn’t Know was Real, But Also Is Cool (we’ll let you off the hook, and you call it Stuff That’s Real Podcast for short). You can find the podcast and watch for that upcoming episode here: http://stuffthatsreal.com

I love topics like this one. The mystery. The history. The questions. Even the answers are intriguing, mostly because you can sense and see that there are those who are willing to ignore one set of facts in favor of another, all in the name of putting the questions to rest. That’s just good science, right there. It’s at least good thriller novel fodder.

Because whatever the real origin and history of the Viking Towner (or the Newport Tower, or the Old Stone Mill) might be, the fact that there is a haze of uncertainty and questions around it means its wide open for some novelist conjecture and what-if.

I mean… what if it really is a structure built by Vikings, in some pre-Columbian era of North America? What does that suggest about our history, both known and unknown?

Or what if it turns out that this really was an old mill, built by American settlers… what happened to them? Where did they go? Was this a Roanoke scenario, where a whole village of early settlers just vanished from the Earth? And if so, who was responsible, and why?

Why aren’t there any other structures dated to around the time of the Old Mill?

Why haven’t they found evidence of timbers or implements that would be associated with the mill?

What if their carbon dating of the mortar between stones was thrown off by environmental factors?

So… many… questions.

And where there are questions, there are stories.

My job, as a novelist, is to mine questions and mysteries for the story I can craft for my audience. And if I were to choose to write about the Viking Tower, I can already think of a half-dozen directions to take those stories. Dan Kotler would surely be intrigued, and so would I. And so, hopefully, would my readers.

If you happen to be one of those readers, my hope is you’re seeing a bit of the behind-the-scenes that goes into my thriller novels. This is how it happens. I stumble across something while traveling or doing research, I have questions, I go looking for answers, and when I don’t find any I start making some up. Because being a storyteller, I’m compelled to come up with some explanation for this mystery, and if I can’t find it in the real world then the only way to scratch that itch is to invent it.

I think the same is true for readers. It’s why I read thrillers and mysteries and books with intriguing questions at their heart, anyway. If an author presents me with an intriguing enough question, I’ll read to find the answer. It’s a satisfying symbiotic relationship.

For any authors who may have stumbled across this post, here’s the lesson at its heart: Your job, as the storyteller, is to pose the right question. If you ask the right question, then readers will buy and read your book to find the answer. So the more intriguing and nuanced the question, the better your chances of a sale.

The really good books, movies, television shows, and video games we consume have this at their core. It’s all about asking a question that gets the reader or viewer or player excited, and then delivering a satisfying answer to that question.

So, if you’re a writer, spend a little time tinkering and refining your question. See if you can boil it down to a line or two. That can be labeled as “your premise.”

If you’re a reader, then you’re already doing your part in the novel writing process. Chances are that if the question asked by the book isn’t good enough, you won’t bother picking it up. And if the answer the author gives you isn’t good enough, you’ll leave a bad review.

Such is the cycle of life.

Questions and answers.

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Say hello using the Contact menu above, and God bless you with health, happiness, and happy reading.

David Hahn was not a terrorist.

The story of a boy scout who nearly went nuclear.
Kevin Tumlinson | WrittenWorld.us

We all have our hobbies. Maybe it’s trains. Maybe it’s comic books. Maybe it’s scotch or fine wine. There’s going to be something you’re passionate about, maybe even obsessed about, that occupies your time away from your work.

But what happens when our hobbies become a threat? And not just a threat to us, but maybe even a threat to our neighbors? Or—think bigger—what happens when our hobbies become a threat to national security?

I’m Kevin Tumlinson, and this … is the Written World.

I like quirky bits of history. I'm always on the lookout for odd little tidbits that make you scratch your head and wonder at what happened. And these can range on the spectrum of epicness—from little-known facts about the evolution of a turn of phrase, such as "jump the shark," to more profound revelations such as the historical presence of Vikings in North America, centuries before its discovery by Europeans.

 I even wrote a whole book about that last one.

 Sometimes, though, you come across some quirky history that makes you pause and makes you think, and may even makes you laugh and cringe a little.

 That's exactly how I feel about David Hahn, the "Radioactive Boy Scout."

 The thing about David's story that resonates most with me is that he grew up in a small town, without much of a social scene, and so he was forced to find his entertainment where he could. He was smart, and I like to think that we share that trait. The opinions of others may vary. And he was resourceful, another thing I believe (or hope) we have in common.

 Growing up in Commerce Township, Michigan, David was a Boy Scout. He participated in all the usual boy scout things, such as going hiking and camping, learning to tie knots, and doing good deeds for the community. By most signs, David was a good kid.

 He earned a lot of badges while in the scouts, but one of those badges set him on a path that would lead to infamy. David, it turns out, was one of only a few people to earn the Atomic Energy merit badge.

David had a keen interest in atomic energy. He obsessed over it, studying everything he could find on the subject. And as it turned out, he could find a lot.

 When trips to the local library weren't producing enough information, David did what any bright and curious kid would do: He opened up a phonebook (this was the early 1990s ... Google wasn't quite a thing yet) and started making phone calls.

He reached out to experts in the field, sometimes telling them he was a student working on a project, sometimes posing as a researcher or other official position. David would often write twenty or more letters per day, occasionally claiming to be a Physics teacher at Chippewa Valley High School. His letters went to experts and professionals all across the industry, including the Department of Energy and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

 In the end, not only did David learn exactly how something like a nuclear reactor might work, but he also managed to talk some experts into sending him some parts and supplies.

 What he needed, though, was fissionable material to work with. And lots of it.

 To get it, he got creative. He began salvaging radioactive material from household products. Americium from smoke detectors. Thorium from camping lanterns. Radium from clocks. Tritium from gunsights. Lithium from batteries.

All items that could be obtained either by rummaging through the trash or buying from a local supermarket.

 With materials gathered, and plans cobbled together from books in the public library and documents sent by bonafide nuclear experts, David moved his operation to the shed behind his mother's house. And there, he made history.

 Using his pilfered materials, David built a small nuclear reactor, known as a "breeder reactor." David favored this design because, in a sense, it was self-sustaining.

 We won't go into the pure physics of this, for several reasons. But the short version is that as a breeder reactor uses nuclear fuel, the fission creates radioactive byproducts. So while energy is being generated, the "waste" collects, and this waste can also be used in a fission reaction. In a sense, a breeder reactor generates its own fuel. And though this is far from a perpetual energy source, it can result in a pretty long-lasting source of energy.

 More than most teenagers need, at any rate.

 David got incredibly far along in his experiments and in his build. In fact, he actually succeeded in building the breeder reactor, complete with a radioactive fuel source. And though it never came close to critical mass, it did start generating alarming levels of radiation—more than one thousand times normal background radiation.

This got attention.

 Actually, David and his neighborhood have sheer luck to thank for the fact that his operation was discovered.

 In 1994, just before 3AM on a late August morning, local police were called to investigate claims that a teenager was stealing tires off of cars. They arrived to find David Hahn, who claimed he was just waiting for a friend.

They didn't believe him, and ended up searching his vehicle. When they opened the trunk, they found a metal toolbox, locked and sealed with duct tape, as well as a large assortment of lanterns, clocks, smoke detectors, and more. There were also fifty small cubes of a mysterious gray powder, wrapped in aluminum foil. But what alarmed them most was when David cautioned them about the toolbox, claiming that it was radioactive.

 From there, things escalated quickly. The FBI was called, and they brought along experts from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (one of the same agencies David had contacted for his research). A Federal State of Nuclear Emergency was declared. There's something you don't see much, in a small town.

 Eventually, men in radiation suits arrived to dismantle David's miniature nuclear facility, carting up not only the reactor and the various materials used but also the tools, the furniture, even the walls of the shed itself. All of it was permeated with alarming levels of radiation, thanks to David's work.

 Frighteningly, some of that material ended up in the local landfill, thrown away in the neighborhood garbage before the Feds ever knew it was there.

These days, the shed and its contents are buried in an undisclosed location in the Great Salt Lake Desert, where it resides next to a bevy of nuclear cast-off, including some of the early experiments that led to the development of the first atomic bomb.

 David Hahn wasn't a terrorist. He was a curious, intelligent, very resourceful boy who became fascinated with something to the degree of obsession. He pursued that obsession, learning everything he could until he did what many might consider impossible.

 David's story is both inspiring and horrifying. On the one hand, it's remarkable that someone so young could have worked out the details of this, in a pre-internet age, to a degree high enough to actually build this device. On the other hand, now that we live in the age of instant information, the implications of something like this are beyond frightening.

I played with this idea a bit in my first thriller novel, The Coelho Medallion. In that book, the terrorist steal crates of smoke detectors, ultimately using the radioactive material within them to build a dirty bomb. It's a scenario that isn't all that farfetched. Which is why it works so well for fiction.

 The world is an interesting and sometimes frightening place. And as we advance in technology, and in our ability to discover and share information, it might be good to keep in mind the David Hahns of the world, and to stress to them the old adage, that just because you can do something, doesn't mean you should.

IF YOU ENJOYED THIS LITTLE TALE …

You might enjoy a good thriller novel. And I happen to write thriller novels. Find something to keep you up all night at KevinTumlinson.com/books

BE SURE TO SUBSCRIBE WHEREVER YOU LISTEN TO PODCASTS!

Kevin Tumlinson is an award-winning and bestselling thriller author and podcast host. He travels the world looking for interesting tidbits of history and culture to fold into his work, and spends much of his time writing from hotels, cafes, coffee shops, and the occasional ride line at Disney World. Find more of Kevin and his work, including novels and podcasts, at KevinTumlinson.com.

Death unites us all (in the end).

Ah Puch, the Mayan Death God
Kevin Tumlinson | WrittenWorld.us

What’s one thing we all have in common?

Regardless of your wealth or poverty, your skin color, your nationality, your politics, or even religious affiliation, there’s one thing you can count on sharing with every other living human being—and that is, one day, NOT being a living human being.  

Death unites us all. In the end.

In my novel The Girl in the Mayan Tomb one of the most pivotal characters never actually shows up, never has a line of dialogue, and never interacts with any of the other characters. ​Still, the Mayan god, Ah Puch, has a sinister and ominous presence in the story, for sure. He helps to drive the action, giving Dan Kotler plenty to work with regarding legend and mythos and hidden secrets. Ah Puch manages to threaten the modern world from deep within the tomb of history. Pretty cool stuff. The kind of legend that archaeological thrillers are made of.

In the book, I give some details about Ah Puch and his role in Mayan culture. There are tidbits and cool facts, plenty of Wikipedia-level information about him. I'd call it a nice overview, rather than an in-depth look into who and what he was, and that's intentional.

I'm not writing histories here, I'm writing fictional adventures. Still, you want to get some things right.

I admit that some details are skewed, if not made up entirely. There's no evidence linking Ah Puch to the Inca god Viracocha, for example. At least, none I'm aware of. But connecting those two ideas helped me to build some intrigue into the story, plus a bit of that "misplaced history" that I love folding into the batter of these books before baking them to a nice, crispy brown. Little concessions to the history behind the fiction were a necessity for the story, but the core of the Ah Puch legend is real, and I kept that intact as much as possible.

True, Ah Puch is one of the names of the Mayan god of death, darkness, and destruction, but what fascinates me is that he is also the god of birth and new beginnings, making him a study in opposites. He actually manages to embody the two extremes of human existence, as if he would be the one standing at the door between life and death, greeting you no matter which direction you're moving. That appeals to me for its aesthetic encapsulation of the cycle of life: Ah Puch alone would have a complete outsider's perspective on both life and death in the Mayan world. He'd be the unbiased witness to all of it.  

Having an outsider's perspective on something as profound as all of life and death has to lead to an equally profound level of wisdom. At least, that's how I see it, from my own highly biased perspective as a living human. And so I think it's not entirely a coincidence that one of the dominant totems for Ah Puch was the owl—a creature we've come to associate with wisdom itself. Though there's really no reason why ancient Mayan cultures would have seen the owl in just this way—I could be backfilling my own cognitive bias onto the symbolism of an ancient civilization. But the idea of "wise old Mr. Owl" has some deep roots, and there's nothing to say that ancient Mayans didn't think of owls in more or less the same way.

Again, it's fiction. I'm pretty ok with making a few leaps. 

It’s far more likely, though, that the owl became associated with Ah Puch because of his role as not only the god of death but the god of darkness and disaster as well. Owls, by their very nature, are nocturnal, hunting small prey in the night and taking them off into the darkness where they are consumed. If you happen to be a rodent, that’s some pretty disastrous stuff. I can certainly see the Mayans watching this and connecting it to their own small roles in the panoply of the Amazon jungles. If anyone was wise to the cycle of life and death, it was the Mayans.

It isn’t much of a leap to think of the god of death as a predatory bird swooping down to snatch the lives of humans, to carry them off into the dark and indiscernible underworld. ​Which underworld, however, was sort of up in the air.

In Western culture, we tend to lump the Mayans into one solid category, but their civilization was a lot more complex and nuanced than we might imagine. As a general not-quite-unified civilization, the Mayans were spread throughout Central America and Mexico, with some hints of them extending to further extremes on the Southern Continent. Mayan settlements peppered the Yucatán Peninsula, Mexico, Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador, Belize—it was an empire widespread enough to rival the Roman and British empires, at least to scale, though it predated both by thousands of years.

Wrap your brain around that one for a second. The Mayans were a fully functional, tool-wielding, government-operating culture, building epic stone structures and inventing mythologies and unfolding histories before most Europeans ever were Europeans.

Though all of these Mayan tribes (if "tribes" is even the right word) shared some common core beliefs, by necessity some of the specifics would skew from the core as an ancient game of telephone played out. One tribe would take its beliefs and mythology in this slightly shifted direction, while another took it in that moderately altered perspective. As such we find that Ah Puch had a catalog of names: Hun Ahau, Yum Cimil, Cum Hau, Pukuh, Cizin, and a host of variations on some of these, alongside a plethora of mythical and mystical origins, motivations, and enemies. 

Ah Puch also ended up with a wealth of homeworlds. Nearly every Mayan group had its own ideas of where Ah Puch lived when he wasn't capturing souls on Earth, relegating them to an array of underworlds. The Yucatec Maya referred to Ah Puch's home turf as Xibaba, for example, while the Quiche Maya called the underworld Metnal.

I sort of prefer the latter.  

Metnal was the lowest level of the underworld, which makes a kind of sense. When we die, regardless of our culture and traditions, we are almost always on a one-way trip into the dirt at our feet. It's only logical that most cultures would begin to think of the afterlife as a place below us, a world played out in caverns and caves.

What I find fascinating is the presence of "levels" of the underworld in Mayan culture, in a close and bizarre parallel to the way Westerners defer to Dante's Divine Comedy, particularly Inferno, to describe the afterlife. Metnal was the lowest level of the underworld to the Mayans in much the same way that the Inferno was represented as stacked layers of hell to Europeans. What a strange place to find parallels between two distant and disparate societies, right?

And then there was the devil himself.

As a god of death, Ah Puch was associated with some of the more heinous aspects of human culture and life, including disease, war, and that horrific but macabrely fascinating practice—human sacrifice. I drew from this for Girl in the Mayan Tomb, principally the disease bits, and I regret nothing. History and legend and myth tend to have some root in real-world, discernible fact, and it seems plausible (to me, at least) that if a culture worships a god who controls disease, they might hold disease itself in some reverence. If you haven't read the book, I don't think I'm throwing any spoilers out there, but it relies pretty heavily on this idea of disease as a form of worship.

We Westerners tend to filter our perspective of history and mythology through the pantheons of ancient civilizations such as the Greeks, the Romans, the Norse. But there are so many gods out there—an endless parade of them in every culture, and in every shape and form imaginable. The thing that tingles in my brain and my soul, every time I read and learn more about these pantheons and their gods, is how similar they can be. 

Ah Puch has his parallels in the Greek god of death Thanatos (which may sound a little familiar to fans of the Avengers films and Marvel Comics in general, as an inspiration for the character Thanos). There are parallels as well with gods such as Hades (Greek), Anubis (Egyptian), Yama (Hindu), Osiris (Egyptian), Azrael (Judaism), Yan Luo (Chinese), the Morrigan (Celtic) and many, many more.

I could have chosen any Mayan death god—there were several. But Ah Puch piqued my attention for a variety of reasons. His symbols—including the skeletal figure you might expect, as well as the predatory owl—were intriguing to me, as was the sort of cognitive dissonance of his roles as both the god of death and the god of birth. His name itself was a sort of draw, giving me a chance to have Agent Roland Denzel continually fumbling it, getting close but never quite getting it right. How could I pass on a good "Ah-Choo" joke?

Trick question. I can't. 

History and mythology are so overripe with characters like Ah Puch that I could write about them for the rest of my life and still leave stories untold. That, of course, is the biggest draw of all. There's also the satisfaction of knowing I'm calling attention to characters who may otherwise have been lost to history, or at least to the pop-culture filter of history.

I'm happy to have helped bring Ah Puch into the modern spotlight a little. He probably wouldn't like it much, but it was fun all the same. Delivering a dark and forgotten god forward into history allowed me to dig a little deeper into a lost (mostly lost) culture, to think about how they thought and lived and understood the world around them, and to come away with some new insights and perspectives that I could share, hopefully in exciting, action-packed ways.

That's half of why I write in the first place—to explore the Written World we sometimes live in parallel to, and never fully realize is there. If you enjoyed this little tale …

IF YOU ENJOYED THIS LITTLE TALE …

You might enjoy a good thriller novel. And I happen to write thriller novels. Find something to keep you up all night at KevinTumlinson.com/books

BE SURE TO SUBSCRIBE WHEREVER YOU LISTEN TO PODCASTS!

Kevin Tumlinson is an award-winning and bestselling thriller author and podcast host. He travels the world looking for interesting tidbits of history and culture to fold into his work, and spends much of his time writing from hotels, cafes, coffee shops, and the occasional ride line at Disney World. Find more of Kevin and his work, including novels and podcasts, at KevinTumlinson.com.

What does it mean to be truly alone?

Who was the North Pond Hermit?
Kevin Tumlinson | WrittenWorld.us

Have you ever actually been alone for any real length of time? No smartphones, no internet, nobody in the apartment next door. Just you and miles of wilderness. Would you be willing to endure that kind of alone-ness and solitude for a day? A week? A month?

How about 27 years?

One man knows exactly what this means.

There's something about being alone, especially alone in the woods, that starts you thinking in a brand new way. You may begin with fear and apprehension, startled by every sound in the brush. If you're afraid of snakes or bears, or bears with snakes for arms, these things will have a growing presence in your consciousness. You'll start to see and hear signs of them everywhere.

Beyond fear, though, being alone in the wilderness can often bring a sense of peace. When you’re away from the noise of civilization, alone with only your own thoughts for company, you become aware of some greater force. Maybe it’s God, or maybe it's just the presence of nature. Your own filters and bias can decide. But it's there. You may not believe it, but when you're out there all on your own, you will feel it.

Just ask the North Pond Hermit.

Christopher Thomas Knight got his nickname the hard way: He lived it for nearly three decades, out in the woods beside North Pond Maine, alone. By himself. No human contact.

For 27 years.

Some of us can’t go a full day without checking in on Facebook, but Chris Knight managed to abandon humanity entirely for half his life, wandering into the woods at 20 years old and not emerging and rejoining society again until he was 47 years old.

Well … sort of.

Turns out, during that 20 years in the woods, though Knight really was utterly alone, speaking to no one and in fact having no human contact whatsoever, he hadn't entirely removed himself from human society. He held on to a tether, of sorts.

During those 27 years in the woods, Knight managed to survive by breaking into local cabins and even a camp for disabled kids, all during the offseason. He would raid pantries and cupboards and walk-in freezers for as much food as he could carry back to his camp. He would swipe clothing and sleeping bags, plastic tarps and propane tanks, and anything else he might need.

And books—he stole a lot of books. Plus handheld videos games, a small black-and-white television, even a twin-sized mattress.

He stole what he needed from the people who lived or owned property around North Pond, and he did it hundreds of times over three decades. He may actually turn out to be the most successful serial robber in history.

Knight would lug this ill-gotten bounty back with him, pushing into the thick, impossible woods that ride the edge of North Pond, somehow managing to haul it all through the brambles to a clearing he'd made for himself.

The clearing was something of a miracle itself.

Throughout his 27 years in the woods, Knight had swept the grounds, removed stray branches and stones, and made a space for himself. But he hadn't stopped there. He went on to lining and leveling the ground with bundles of stolen National Geographic Magazine—favored for its glossy pages, which helped to keep water moving rather than soaking in. He created a subfloor with bricks of magazines, and then built on top of it. Layering tarps and tents and other materials, Knight built the ultimate grownup blanket fort, capable of keeping out rain and snow, insects and animals. A cozy little place to spend a life alone.

It wasn't perfect. Not like having a tiny cabin in the woods. The cold, sometimes dipping as low as -25˚F (-32˚C), still crept in, bypassing any attempt to keep it at bay and threatening to end him every winter.

Knight survived by fattening himself up, the same way bears and other mammals might, and sticking to a strict discipline of getting up early, around 2 AM each morning, moving and performing tasks to get his blood flowing. While people slept in warm beds and heated cabins just a few hundred feet from him, Chris Knight intentionally struggled against the Maine Winter, literally stomping it out as he performed chores in his camp.

He never managed to keep his feet warm, though. Layers of socks, hot water bottles, piles of blankets and sleeping bags, and without fail his feet were freezing by morning anyway. Such is the life of a hermit in the woods of Maine.

To keep himself hidden, Knight committed to some extreme methods, and even more extreme discipline. He never left his clearing when there was snow on the ground, for example, because there was no way to avoid leaving tracks. He never lit a fire, because someone might see the smoke or the flames. He learned to walk on the stones and tree roots of his woods, so there could never be a trace of him even if someone came looking.

For 27 years, the North Pond Hermit plagued (some would say “terrorized”) locals, finding ways to break into their vacation homes, taking whatever he needed, absconding with food and alcohol and clothing, and with any and all candy he could find. He had something of a sweet tooth.

The North Pond Hermit became a local legend, like Maine's version of Sasquatch or the Jersey Devil. Some doubted his existence. Some were afraid of him. No one, however, ever saw him or spoke to him for almost thirty years. The most anyone had in the way of evidence for his existence were some game camera photos and a bit of security camera footage. And a lot of missing stuff, of course.

Here's the thing—Chris Knight lived an existence entirely apart from human interaction for three decades, surviving in one of the harshest regions of the US (Maine winters are brutal), and getting by more or less on the refuse and leavings of humanity, all while living only a few hundred feet from civilization.

The woods that Knight called home were situated in an area that had a light permanent population but a sizeable seasonal vacation presence. From his clearing, he could hear activity on the lake, from fishermen to motorboats. And he was just a short walk from the cabins he robbed on a regular basis.

Somehow, Christopher Thomas Knight, the North Pond Hermit, had pulled off the near-impossible feat of disappearing in plain sight. And if he hadn’t finally been caught and arrested while breaking into that camp for disabled children, in 2013, it’s possible he would have lived a lifetime and died a peaceful death right among the local population, without anyone ever knowing he was there.

A quiet, unremarkable, unknown death. Just as he would have wanted.

If you’ve read any of my fiction, you know that I have a great fondness for resourceful, autonomous, independent characters. I love the idea of someone being able to withdraw from society, if they have to, and get by on their wits and intelligence. I write characters who primarily look at the modern world as a cookie jar of resources and are unafraid to take what they need when they need it.

Christopher Knight wasn't quite identical to any given character I've written, but at heart, he is exactly who I have in mind.

I discovered Knight through Michael Finke’s book The Stranger In The Woods, and I found myself (over and over) identifying with him. Maybe it was a romanticized sort of thing, I can cop to that. I don’t exactly have an urge to live in the woods, secluded from everyone, too afraid to so much as light a fire to keep warm or cook a meal. But that impulse to walk away from the world and rely on my own character and strength and resourcefulness? Oh yeah. That attracts me.

My version of this was to do things like selling the house my wife and I lived in for four years and buy an RV, traveling the country while I wrote and produced podcasts and attended author conferences. And now that we're back to a "home base," I find myself lingering on ideas like trading my pickup for a camper van, or maybe just putting a camper shell on the truck and lighting out for parts unknown.

The other parallel for me is my tendency to do things like choose a city and fly there, just to spend a week walking its streets, alone, checking out all the hidden corners. As I write this, I'm doing that very thing, wandering the streets of Seattle. I don't shy away from either the ritzy heights or the impromptu tent villages of the homeless people. I check out the touristy stuff, and I duck into the things that buttress the city's real culture and personality.

On trips like this, I'll sometimes skip the hotel in favor of wandering on foot for a day and a night, catching quick naps in coffee shops and bookstores and libraries, sleeping in a rental car if I have one. My version of roughing it.

But the thing is, I can always get a hotel. I can hop on a plane home, whenever I want. I can take out my iPhone and get an Uber to an AirBnB. I have a backup plan.

Chris Knight had none of that, and he didn’t want it. He left society behind, not because he was angry or afraid or bitter but because …

Well, honestly, even Knight himself doesn’t know. There was no reason. He had no reason for leaving.

We find that impossible to accept.

“Everything has a reason.” That’s our mantra. It’s what our entire culture and society are built on. But the truth, the real truth, is that sometimes there isn’t a reason. Sometimes we decide to grab soup instead of a sandwich, or a table by the window instead of one by the fireplace, or a red scarf instead of a blue scarf, and we just have no justification for any of it. And sometimes we decide to park our car, toss the keys on the dash, and walk into the woods forever, with nothing motivating us beyond the idea of it.

Being alone can change who you are. It can be both damaging and healing. It can be an expression and a silence, a protest, and an acceptance. Did Chris Knight have any of this in mind, at any time from the start to finish of his life in the woods? Maybe. Maybe not. But looking at what he did and how he lived, it’s inspiring. We can learn from it, even if there was no lesson intended.

If you enjoyed this little tale …

You might enjoy a good thriller novel. And I happen to write thriller novels. Find something to keep you up all night at KevinTumlinson.com/books

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Kevin Tumlinson is an award-winning and bestselling thriller author and podcast host. He travels the world looking for interesting tidbits of history and culture to fold into his work, and spends much of his time writing from hotels, cafes, coffee shops, and the occasional ride line at Disney World. Find more of Kevin and his work, including novels and podcasts, at KevinTumlinson.com.