He had a tent and a backpack but no compass, no map. Knight parked the car and tossed the keys on the centre console.

Then a trail off that.” He went as far into the wilderness as his vehicle could take him. Soon he reached the shore of Moosehead Lake, the largest in Maine, and the point where the state begins to get truly remote. The last time he saw his family home was through the windscreen of his car. “I think it was just to have one last look around, to say goodbye,” he said. There aren’t many roads in the centre of the state, and he chose the one that went right by his family’s house. He drove north to Maine, where he had grown up. Every meeting with another person seemed like a collision. Interacting with others was so often frustrating. Driving through Georgia and the Carolinas and Virginia, blessed with invincibility of youth, buzzed by “the pleasure of driving”, he sensed an idea growing into a realisation, then solidifying into resolve.Īll his life, he had been comfortable being alone. Ronald Reagan was president the Chernobyl nuclear disaster had just occurred. Eventually, he turned around and headed north.

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