For 47-year-old Christopher Knight, the game of cat and mouse is over.
After spending the last 27 years hidden in Maine's isolated north-eastern woods, the "hermit" was finally arrested after he tripped a surveillance sensor.
His crime? Having allegedly stolen food and supplies from camps and private properties.
Knight's last verbal contact with another human being was in the 1990s. He is now in jail.
At the time of writing, attempts to contact any family members have not borne fruit and his sudden disappearance from home at the age of 19 remains unexplained.
People who choose to live the life of a hermit don't tend to elicit much sympathy. Others regard their motives with suspicion.
The lifestyle of Christopher McCandless, the self-styled "supertramp" whose lonely tribulations in the 1990s were documented in the book and biopic "Into The Wild," was disparaged by those who couldn't fathom his decision to give up everything — a privileged upbringing, belongings, his life savings — in order to explore his country's open roads and wilderness.
When he died of starvation after a particularly rough winter spent living in an abandoned bus in Alaska's back country (his lifeless body, when weighed, came in at 67 pounds), many Alaskans spoke with disdain of his experiment, blaming him for not being resourceful enough, mocking his amateur ways.
The adventure blogger Jill Homer, a former Alaska-based journalist, pointed out that her friends and colleagues thought he was a "total douche." They saw his demise as entirely avoidable.
But for me, hermits, tramps and assorted train-hoppers are a source of hope. They remind me that no matter how caught up we might be in the rat race, there is always a way out.
If towering buildings, fumes, and overcrowded buses become too overwhelming, those freedom seekers remind us that we can make the choice to just opt out and hit the road.
It's not a lifestyle which would be adopted by many — the vast majority of us would never dare to leave our comfortable lives behind — but it is there.
Knight, regardless of his motivations, achieved this. So does the community of Slab City, a spot in the Colorado desert miles from "civilisation," which functions without heating or running water and is populated by artists, hippies, and reprobates.
Perhaps less radically, the scientist and author Anne LaBastille left her old life for land in the Adirondack woods in 1965.
She built herself a cabin, hidden from the world, in which she spent the next decades with her canine companions, never regretting for a second leaving a suffocating, urbanised world behind.
She gave up basic amenities but found solace in solitude, paving the way for hundreds of like-minded people — often women who, in the early 1970s, realised for the first time they didn't need marriage to lead a happy life.
Critics point out that such lifestyles are often only made possible on the backs of "honest" citizens or companies — from the people whose cottages Knight allegedy stole from, to train companies who have to deal with illegal passengers using their freight lines to travel. This is true.
Henry David Thoreau himself was accused of using his own mother to fulfill his dream — set out in Walden— of self-sufficiency, relying on her to do his laundry, and on friends to provide food and clothing.
But those who truly master the art of the disappearing act acquire an unworldly quality: They become ghosts, mysterious presences, part of the local folklore, floating unshackled in the wild.
This may not be what Thoreau had in mind when he spoke of transcendentalism, but for me it comes pretty close to transcending what capitalism expects of its subjects.
Would I have been happy to have my freezer robbed by a famished Knight? Of course not. Few people would, even if, as reported, some families left food out for him, perhaps thoughtfully, or perhaps to avoid having their cottages broken into.
All things considered though, it might be a small price to pay to allow us to dream of the possibility of freedom.
I still live vicariously through those who find the courage to break out on their own, ignoring the arbitrary rules of society they can't relate to.
If the truth be told, I really wish they hadn't caught him.
This article originally appeared on guardian.co.uk
SEE ALSO: The Maine Hermit Is A Truly Remarkable Human Being
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