Written World Podcast

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

Secrets have power. And no one knows that better than the people who trade in secrets, constantly playing at a game of hiding information from the enemy while simultaneously trying to to crack that enemy’s own codes.And then there are secrets that are just meant to empower one group while denying the contributions of another. That’s certainly the case for Elisabeth Friedman—the greatest codebreaker you’ve never heard of.As part of the writing process, I end up doing a lot of research and reading. Some of this is intensive, such as reading half a dozen books on a topic, searching out YouTube videos and documentaries, that sort of thing. Some is just spot research, a quick dip into Wikipedia or a Google search for things like "common Russian boy names."As I was writing The Stepping Maze, I read everything I could get my hands on about WWII-era codebreaking. One of the books I stumbled upon was The Woman Who Smashed Codes, by Jason Fagone. It's a look into the life of Elisabeth Friedman, wife of famed Cryptologist William Friedman.Though William gets all the historical credit, particularly for his part in the founding of the NSA, Elisabeth may be the bigger powerhouse, when it comes to their codebreaking legacy. She contributed as much if not more than any male counterpart when it came to deciphering the coded messages of the Nazis, during WWII. And because of her work, a pretty serious threat against the United States was quashed before it began.Prior to WWII, during the Prohibition era, Elisabeth was recruited to work with the Coast Guard. She was instrumental in finding, exposing, and ultimately taking down a secret network of rum runners and gangsters, assisting law enforcement in bring some pretty shady characters to justice. And she did it with the complete disdain of the media, who preferred to call out how attractive and unsupposing she was, rather than emphasize her utter brilliance.This sort of treatment was something that would plague Elisabeth all her life. Even during WWII, her exposure of a Nazi spy ring in South America was co-opted by a new, fledgling law enforcement agency—the Federal Bureau of Investigations. In an effort to make a name for himself and the FBI, J. Edgar Hoover blatantly took credit for Elisabeth's work, framing everything in such a way that it was an FBI victory by FBI resources. If you've ever read much history about Hoover, you won't find this surprising at all. He was kind of a tool.It's notable, by the way, that during the time that Elisabeth was taking down Nazis using a pen and legal pad, she was also caring for her husband, William. His own work in cryptography is astounding, and includes some of the most incredible advances to that field of study the world has ever known. He and his team created an encoding and decoding machine so effective that it was never cracked. In fact, the Nazis and the Japanese ceased even attempting to crack US coded messages, as it was such a phenomenal waste of time. The guy was that good.But it came at a huge cost. The intense hours and pressure, the absolute need for secrecy, even from his wife, and the burden of knowing that lives depended on every stroke of his pen and every clever thought—it eventually took a toll on him. William suffered a complete breakdown, and for a time was committed to a sanitarium. At a time when all mental illness was treated with brutal and horrifying methods, William faced not only life-threatening treatments but the potential end of his career, even if he were "cured."Elisabeth stepped in to care for him during this time, creating for him a peaceful and happy home life with her and their children, encouraging him and standing for him as he faced challenges with employers. At one point they had to fight for him to be paid for his work, and fought again to keep him in his role with the military.She did this, all of it, while continuing to break the codes used by the enemies of the US and the Allies. She kept her husband sane, her family healthy, both their careers intact, and the country safe. What a woman!Though The Stepping Maze isn't about Elisabeth Friedman, and only briefly mentions her, I can tell you that her spirit is there. I appreciate people with her sort of inner strength, and her brilliant intelligence. She is a figure obscured in history, but is an absolute lynchpin in the mechanics of our modern world. We all owe her, more than we can repay.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

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

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