The Last American Man

by Elizabeth Gilbert

  But they’d had their most desperate food experience back in Maine, when they climbed off the trail for a few days and stayed in a small town with a family who kept the community hog in the backyard. The way the community hog system worked was that everyone in the town fed the hog their table scraps and then, come butchering time, split the meat for the winter. Frank and Eustace learned of this interesting custom the day the lady of the house baked some apple pies and gave the boys a bucket of apple peelings to take out back for the hog to eat. Outside, Frank and Eustace looked at each other, looked at the apple peelings, and said, “Fuck that.” They hid behind the barn and scarfed down the peelings. After that, they graciously offered to take over the feeding of the hog. To this day, all they will report about this experience is that the kind people of that small Maine town sure did throw away a lot of perfectly good food, and that the handsome community hog sure didn’t gain any weight while Eustace Conway and Frank Chambless were around.

  In every way, the journey was a triumph. Hiking, delight, revelation, challenge, and epiphany—day after day. Frank and Eustace found all this heightened communication with each other, a tight sense of kinship. They were on the same page about nature and what was wrong with America, and they were both heavily into Native American lore and teachings. Eustace could talk to Frank about problems with his father, and Frank could talk to Eustace about problems with his father and about his feelings for his girlfriend, Lori. There was an earnestness to these two young men, a perfect absence of the cynicism, detachment, and coolness that defined their generation as a whole. Each was shamelessly open with the other.

  They weren’t even embarrassed to talk about God. Both had been raised in Southern Baptist households, where devotion and fundamentalism were the default mode. Eustace’s grandfather Chief Johnson had been a rock-solid Christian, a man of blindingly intense morals, and Eustace’s mother had tried to pass those convictions along to her firstborn. Eustace had excelled in church as a kid. He was the early star of Sunday school—sharp, inquisitive, attentive. He was always a big fan of Jesus Christ. Eustace had a powerful response to the idea of Jesus going into the temple of money lenders and “knocking all the fucking tables over,” and he particularly liked that bit where the Savior went deep into the wilderness to seek the big answers.

  But as he grew older, he became disillusioned with the congregation and leadership of his church. He smelled insincerity and deceit everywhere. He would sit between his parents every Sunday as they bowed their heads and took in the pious sermon. Sunday after Sunday, Eustace became sadly aware of what an act this was, and how grave was the contrast between this public image of familial sanctity and the reality of the familial discord—a savage discord that was packed away in a hidden container every Sabbath so as not to disturb the neighbors. Soon, he took to looking around at the other holy-seeming families in their pews, all nicely dressed, with their heads bowed, and he couldn’t help wondering what horrors were hidden behind their hymnals.

  Increasingly, too, he began to take issue with the Christian cycle of pray-sin-repent-pray-sin-repent-pray-sin-repent. It seemed obvious to him that this was nothing more than a moral cop-out, writ large. You sin; you are immediately forgiven; you go out and sin some more, armed with the understanding that you’ll be forgiven once again. He found it stupid, weak, and cheap. Why was there this assumption that people were destined to sin, anyhow? If people loved the Bible so much, Eustace wondered, why couldn’t they just obey the clear instructions it offers and quit lying, cheating, stealing, murdering, and whore-mongering? How many times you gotta read the friggin’ Ten Commandments before you get them right? Stop sinning! Live the way you’ve been taught to live! Then you won’t have to come to church every Sunday and kneel and weep and repent. And you’ll have a lot more time to spend outside in the forest, where, as Eustace believed, “there is only truth to be found—no lies, no shams, no illusions, no hypocrisy. Just a truthful place, where all beings are governed by a set of perfect laws that have never changed and never will.”

  Of course, given his disposition and his personal force, it wasn’t long before Eustace refused to go to church and started looking for his own answers. He spent his teen years studying every religion he could find, keeping the lessons of Christianity that he liked and adding to them some bits from other beliefs. He was inspired by the ecstatic love celebrations of the ancient Sufimystics, while his attentive inner perfectionist instinctively responded to the central tenet of Buddhism—namely, that one will achieve enlightenment only through constant mindfulness.

  He liked the Taoist notion that people should try to be like water, should flow around hard surfaces, altering form to fit the shapes of nature and patiently wearing away at stone. He liked the spiritual lessons of the Eastern martial arts, about bending before the aggression of others and letting them hurt themselves without harming you. He found something in almost every religion to keep, and would talk to anyone (Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses, Krishnas in the airports) about God. It was always the spirituality of Native Americans, though, that Eustace responded to most fully. He’d had exposure to it through the local Native American leaders he’d met at the Scheille Museum and through his study of anthropology. He could fully accept the idea that God—indeed, godliness—is to be found in every living being on this planet, and that every thing on this planet is a living being. Not only animals, but the trees and the air and even dense stones, all of them ancient and integral.

  And this is where Eustace and his Appalachian Trail partner Frank had an intersection of belief, in their mutual conviction that God is to be found only in nature. That, of course, is why they were out there on the trail, the better to find this godliness within themselves and the larger world. Nor were they embarrassed to talk about this godliness, night after night. Or to take out their handmade Indian pipes in the evenings and smoke and pray, connected with each other through their belief that the pipe was the vehicle of prayer and the smoke only the sacred representation of what they were offering up to the cosmos. They knew that some might consider the idea of a couple of white guys praying with an Indian pipe to be foolish or even offensive, but Eustace and Frank weren’t merely playing Indian—they were there on the brink of their manhood, living in the most earnest way they could, facing together every day’s revelations and challenges. And it was this togetherness, more than anything, that Eustace cherished about the journey.

  And then, in Pennsylvania, Eustace Conway met a girl.

  Her name was Donna Henry. She was a nineteen-year-old college student from Pittsburgh, and she and Eustace ran into each other on the Pennsylvania leg of the Appalachian Trail. Donna was on a weekend hike with her aunt and her cousin, and their little journey was going like hell, because the aunt and the cousin were wholly out of shape and they’d overstuffed their backpacks with way too much food and gear. So, at the moment of the encounter, Donna Henry wasn’t hiking; she was sitting on the edge of the trail, taking a break because her relatives had demanded one. There she sat, trying not to listen to her aunt and her cousin bitch about their sore feet and sore legs and sore backs, and along comes Eustace Conway.

  By this point, Eustace had begun to shed whatever possessions he considered useless. As he raced farther south and closer toward Georgia, he’d become tired of carrying stuff, so—operating on the old favorite principle of “the more you know, the less you need”—he’d slowly rid himself of everything but his sleeping bag, a knife, some rope, and a small cooking pot. He even shed some of his clothing. He completed the last thousand miles of his journey wearing nothing but two bandanas knotted together to cover his private bits. He didn’t keep so much as a jacket for warmth. As long as he was walking, he wasn’t cold; when he wasn’t walking, he was sleeping. When it rained, he wore a garbage bag. When he grew tired of his tedious pace (even the pace of a man burning through almost thirty miles a day), he sprinted along the trail at full speed.

  So this was the apparition that loomed before Do
nna Henry that day on the trail: a lean, brown, bearded, and feral creature, stripped nearly bare, wearing sneakers, and tearing through the woods like a coyote. He was skinny, sure, but he rippled with muscle. And he had a terrific face. He stopped running when he saw Donna. She said hello. Eustace said hello. Then he let fly one of his world-class smiles, and Donna felt her aunt and her cousin and her heavy backpack disappear in the glow of that smile, all replaced by the certainty that her life was never going to be the same.

  Now, I have a habit of speculating about the sex life of every single person I meet. Call it a hobby; call it a perversion—I’m not defending myself. I’m stating a fact. Still, I must confess that I spent months contemplating Eustace Conway before I gave the slightest thought to the possibility that he might actually be a carnal being. Particularly in comparison with his brother Judson, who is nothing but a carnal being, Eustace seemed somehow above such worldly and corporeal nonsense. As if he didn’t need it.

  The first time I saw the two brothers together, I noted that extreme contrast. There was Judson in the East Village bar, flirting and dancing with every female who moved through his line of vision, and there was Eustace, sitting upright in the corner, earnestly telling me about the pleasure of drinking water straight out of the ground, and about how the quality of sunlight filtered through Appalachian foliage changes your body’s chemistry, and about how only those who live in the wilderness can recognize the central truth of existence, which is that death lives right beside us at all times, as close and as relevant as life itself, and that this reality is nothing to fear but is a sacred truth to be praised.

  I am the Teacher of all the People, he seemed to say as he drifted out of his world and hovered over ours. I am to be trusted and I am to be followed but I am not to be frenched . . .

  And he does, after all, bathe in icy streams, so the whole libido problem is a little hard to picture. Still—and this is what got me—Eustace Conway presented himself as an epic American masculine hero, and the whole notion of romantic or sexual love is something that is entirely missing from the classic American masculine epic.

  As the writer Leslie Fielder pointed out in his seminal tome Love and Death in the American Novel, we Americans have the only major culture in the known world that never held romantic love to be a sacred precept. The rest of the world gets Don Juan; we get Paul Bunyan. There’s no love story in Moby-Dick; Huckleberry Finn doesn’t get the girl in the end; John Wayne never dreamed of giving up his horse for the constraints of a wife; and Davy Fuckin’ Crockett doesn’t date.

  Whatever conflict and whatever evolution these men undergo, they do it in the company of their one true love, nature, and they do it by themselves or with the help of a trusted male sidekick. Women are for rescuing and also for tipping your hat to as you ride off into the sunset without them. And sometimes this leads to an odd circumstance— namely, that while the women in most of world literature are depicted as carefully protecting their sacred virginity, in American heroic stories, the men are just as often steadfastly chaste.

  Consider, as a textbook example, James Fenimore Cooper’s Deer-slayer. Handsome, wise, brave, and eligible Natty Bumppo never marries, because if he did, he would have to leave his world of perfect solitude at the edge of the frontier, where he is always free. Not only does the Deerslayer not marry; he doesn’t really seem to like girls. When the drop-dead gorgeous and spirited and brave heroine, Judith Hutter, basically throws her slim, brunette, and flashing-eyed self at his feet, he politely declines her advances, even though he’s been holed up in the mountains without female company for an awfully long time. True, he does proclaim that he will always respect her and will always be on call to save her life should she need him.

  Judith, of course, doesn’t get it. What an inscrutable man is this wild, buckskin-clad hero! So unlike the dashing city-born captains of the guard who live in the barracks nearby and who love to flirt and dance! She even offers to live in the middle of the woods with Natty forever, far away from the comforts of civilization, and he still turns her down. Has Deerslayer never known love?

  “And where, then, is your sweetheart, Deerslayer?” Judith wants to know, trying to make sense of the situation.

  “She’s in the forest, Judith,” Deerslayer replies (in a speech that exemplifies not only the relationship of the epic American man toward women and the environment, but also exemplifies really bad writing), “hanging from the boughs of the trees, in a soft rain—in the dew on the open grass—in clouds that float about in the blue heavens—the birds that sing in the woods—the sweet springs where I slake my thirst—and in all the other glorious gifts of God’s providence!”

  “You mean that, as yet, you’ve never loved one of my sex, but love best your haunts and your own manner of life?” Judith asks. (The women in these novels may be a little dense sometimes, but they’re terribly helpful with exposition.)

  “That’s it—that’s it,”Deerslayer replies.

  And thus he sends fair Judith on her way to go slake her thirst at some other guy’s sweet spring.

  So. I’m fairly well read and I’m extremely impressionable. Who could blame me for imagining at first glance that Eustace Conway would be the same man as Natty Bumppo, the Deerslayer? They even look alike (“about six feet in his moccasins, but his frame was comparatively light and slender, showing muscles, however, that promised unusual agility”) and dress alike. And Eustace, remember, is the man who used to write me letters packed with such sexy-but-chaste news as “Daybreak found me looking down on my saddled horse from atop a tree full of ripe cherries—mouth full and hands full of them—and plenty more to pick.” Yes, the wilderness must be Eustace’s only love and God’s providence his only need.

  Well, I was mistaken.

  So there’s Eustace Conway on the Appalachian Trail in 1981, crossing paths with Donna Henry. Donna, healthy and friendly and cute as all get-out, caught Eustace’s eye, and likewise. There was the greeting, then the smile. Donna didn’t know why he was wearing those two handkerchiefs, but she offered him food right away, fascinated. Partly, her motive in feeding Eustace was to get him to stick around longer, because she was immediately attracted to him; partly, she wanted to lighten the packs of her crybaby aunt and whining cousin. Whatever food she gave Eustace, he ate. He ate bottomlessly, as if he was starved. Which he was.

  When he said he had to fill his water bottle, Donna said,“Me, too!” and they hiked a mile to a nearby stream while he talked of the adventures he’d had on his hike from Maine. Engrossed, Donna Henry invited him to stay with her and her relatives that night for dinner. Again, he ate them out of pack and sack, all the while telling more about his daring escapades and his teepee and his primitive lifestyle.

  Donna told Eustace he was welcome to camp with them that night, too. He accepted the invite, and when the sky was good and dark and the fire was good and low, Eustace crawled into Donna’s tent and sidled his long, lean body right up to hers. And she was done for.

  The next day, now officially in love, Donna sent her aunt and cousin down the trail with all their gear, and she hiked the next twenty-five miles with Eustace. She was in great shape—she had hiked the previous summer with some college friends—so she had no trouble keeping up with him. They talked and walked and ate blackberries right off the bushes, and Eustace taught her about every plant and rock and twig they passed along the way.

  At the end of the hike, Donna had to get back to her real life in Pittsburgh, but she didn’t want to leave. Eustace told her they were a good team, and she agreed—yes, they were! And the timing was good, too. Because, as it turns out, Eustace was about to lose his traveling partner. Frank Chambless was bowing out of the journey because he missed his girlfriend Lori so much and Frank felt he had a chance right now to make their love work, if he could just get out of the hike and dedicate his energy to reconciling with her. Eustace understood and accepted his friend’s sincerest apologies for quitting. Still, he was very sorry to lose his traveling c
ompanion when there were still 1000 miles left to finish off. So—of course—seeing what a good hiker Donna was (not to mention a charming tent-companion), he had an inspiration. Eustace asked Donna if she might want to meet up with him in Virginia in a few weeks and join the hike. She was all for it. Donna Henry, at this moment, would have gladly agreed to hike to Islamabad for the chance to see Eustace Conway again.

  A few weeks later, she got on a bus in the middle of the night with her backpack and sleeping bag and headed south to meet him. Her mother was so angry with her for running off on a whim with a skinny man dressed in bandanas that she wouldn’t even say goodbye.

  Well, tough. That’s what people turn nineteen for.

  Here’s what Donna thought it would be like to hike the Appalachian Trail with Eustace Conway—more talking and walking and berry-picking and nature observations and romance and so on for the rest of time. And, yes, on the first day of the hike, Eustace did stay right beside her, and he taught her many things about trees and flowers. On the second morning of their journey, though, he woke up early and said, “I’m going on ahead of you today. I want to cover thirty miles. I’ll meet you at our campsite for dinner.” And they never hiked together again. Day after day, she didn’t see him on the trail. He’d take off at dawn, and she’d follow. Their only communication was the instructive little notes he’d leave for her along the trail: “Donna—there’s water 20 ft. down to the left. This is a good place to rest.” Or, “I know this is a hard climb—you’re doing great!”

  Late each evening, she’d catch up with him at the camp he’d already set for them. They’d eat whatever scavenged or hunted or rotten food was on hand and then they’d sleep. Sometimes Eustace would stay up and talk deep into the night about his dreams of changing the world, which she loved to hear. Donna was never happier than at those moments, except maybe when Eustace told her with pride that she was his “tough little Italian.”