The Last American Man

by Elizabeth Gilbert

  All this nature stuff was new to Donna (she once asked Eustace, while they passed a herd of cattle in a mountain pasture, “Now, are those cows or horses?”), but she was open to it and was completely game. One day, after hiking twenty-five miles, they were eating dinner together while the sun was setting, and the sky looked pretty. Donna said, “Hey, Eustace, let’s run up that mountain and watch the sun go down!” After hiking twenty-five miles! She was, as he often told her, “a solid sculpture of muscle” as well as a trouble-free traveling companion. There was nothing she wouldn’t do to keep up with her man. Moreover, Donna believed in every dream Eustace Conway had and wanted to help him achieve it. She was inspired and invigorated by him. When morning came, he’d strike out ahead of her on the trails, and again she’d follow without hesitation or questions—and that, Donna says now, “was symbolic of the relationship.”

  “I just snapped right into it,” she remembers. “I was drawn along behind him like a magnetic force, walking twenty-five, thirty miles a day. I was lean and mean and eager to show him that I could keep up. I was completely in love with this man. I’d have followed him to the ends of the earth.”

  When Eustace Conway casts his mind back on his trip down the Appalachian Trail, it’s not Donna Henry or Frank Chambless whom he pictures. While he’s quick to give his traveling companions their due for hauling ass and never complaining, what he mostly remembers about those wonderful months in the woods are images of himself, alone. At last—alone. Out of his family’s house and out from under his father’s thumb and finally on his own.

  He remembers his feet aching so much that tears fell down his face as he hiked, but he never stopped walking, because he had taught himself as a child to endure physical pain like an Indian brave. He remembers times when he was so dehydrated, he’d see spots before his eyes. He remembers hiking into the town of Pearisburg, Virginia, which is right along the trail and has a hostel as well as a general store. He had been famished for so long that he decided—what the hell—to treat himself to a meal. A real meal, paid for with American currency, not some damn survivalist meal of half-digested baby rabbit borrowed from the stomach of a rattlesnake. Here’s what he bought:

  “The ripest, biggest, most beautiful cantaloupe you ever saw. I bought a flat of eggs, which is two and a half dozen. These were not small eggs. These were not medium eggs. These were not large eggs. These were extra large eggs. I bought a loaf of the heartiest wheat bread I could find. I bought a gallon of milk and a container of yogurt. I bought a round of margarine, a brick of cheese, and one big yellow onion. Then I went to the hostel kitchen and I sautéed the onion in the margarine and I scrambled up those eggs into a huge omelet, which I filled with half the brick of cheese. I ate that. Then I toasted every slice of the loaf of bread and shredded the remainder of the cheese on the toast. Then I drank the gallon of milk. Then I ate the yogurt. And then I ate the beautiful ripe melon. When I was finished, all the food was gone, but I wasn’t stuffed. I just felt satisfied for the first time in months. I felt, Yes, now I’ve finally had enough to eat.”

  He remembers another long day in Virginia, when he ended up hiking late at night to make his allotted daily miles, hiking along a dark country road in the most rural countryside. It was a Friday evening, so all the local rednecks were driving around in their trucks, listening to music and drinking and heading to parties. They kept stopping to see what Eustace was up to.

  “You need a ride, son?” the good ol’ boys asked.

  “No, thanks,” Eustace answered.

  “Where you walkin’ from?”

  “Maine.”

  That answer didn’t make much of an impression on the good ol’ boys.

  “Well, where you headed to?”

  “Georgia,” Eustace told them, and the guys positively flipped out, whoopin’ in disbelief.

  “This damn fool’s walkin’ all the way to Georgia!”

  Clearly, they had never heard of Maine.

  Then, feeling sorry for Eustace, they gave him a beer and drove off. Eustace walked along in the dark, drinking the beer and humming to himself and listening to the night insects of Virginia sing. About the time he finished the beer, along came another truckload of rednecks.

  “You need a ride, son?”

  And the conversation was repeated, word for word, right down to the punch line. “This damn fool’s walkin’ all the way to Georgia!”

  Eustace finished hiking the trail in September 1981, right around his twentieth birthday. It had taken him four and a half months to complete the journey. He wrote himself a letter of congratulations—a dramatic letter such as a man can write only on his twentieth birthday, proud and earnest and swollen with amazement over the magnitude of what he’d just accomplished.

  The sun has gone behind the ridge and the shadows are starting to play games in the forest. This is the last night on the Appalachian Trail, a “Long Journey of Always and Forever.” It was so long ago I started, it seems only a foggy dream. My ways have changed. I have become a man. In the Indian way, I have taken a new name—it is Eagle Chaser. I am aspiring to the highest goals and morals of the King of the Winged Beings. Many tales I can tell. I have seen many places, I have seen many people, all different but mostly good. I have learned to pray often and have accepted many gifts from the most Holy Provider. I believe God helped plan this trip before I even knew of it . . . My reason for doing the trail started out fairly simple and grew in depth with time and experience. I originally wanted to get close to nature in a good whole- some way and, number two, to find more of myself. I believe that I have done well at both of these. I am very satisfied. I wish the light of day would give me more strength to finish these written thoughts but the night is rising and the shadows are no longer visible. The night animals are out and I must go forth into the cycle that I have chosen.

  Eustace R. Conway.

  And, indeed, he did go forth into the cycle that he had chosen. Every other voyage and accomplishment in his life would grow out of this one. For instance, when Eustace found himself a few months later sitting on a picnic table in North Carolina, skinning a raccoon, a man came up to him and said, “You’re Eustace Conway, right? The last time I saw you was on the Appalachian Trail and you were skinning a snake. I remember talking to you about wilderness adventure.” The man introduced himself as Alan York, and the two talked for a while, and then Alan said, “Hey, let’s hike across Alaska together.” Eustace replied, “I don’t think it’s possible to hike across Alaska, but I’m pretty sure you can kayak it,” and that’s what they did. Eustace and Alan glided across the state, fighting cold and brutal surf, hovering inches over herring and salmon and kelp and whales.

  After that, how hard could it be to travel into rural Mexico to study pottery and weaving? And that successful trip to Mexico gave the enterprising young man the confidence to fly to Guatemala, step off the plane, and ask, “Where are all the primitive people at?” It all started with the Appalachian Trail, though. And what Eustace particularly pictures when he thinks about being nineteen years old on the Appalachian Trail is one moment, a moment he will always hold as the happiest of his life.

  He is in New Hampshire. He has made it out of Maine without starving or freezing to death. He comes over a ridge. Everywhere he looks, he sees exquisite pink morning light cast over snow and ice and granite. That’s all. A typical view of the White Mountains in late winter. As the years pass by, Eustace will travel to many places more interesting than this, and he will see some of the spectacular views of the world, from Alaska to Australia to Arizona, so perhaps this is not the most beautiful sight he will see. Nor is it as heroic and chest-thumping a moment as he’ll experience when he completes the trail months later, down in Georgia, where he can haul out the heavy-duty “many-tales-I-can-tell” rhetoric. But this is better. Because this is the backdrop for the moment when Eustace Conway first comprehends that he is free. He’s a man, and he is exactly where he wants to be, accomplishing what he’s always known h
e could accomplish if he made his own decisions. He’s humbled and exalted and simplified and purified and saved by this moment, because it holds the realization that—so far up here on this handsome mountain—his father isn’t anywhere in sight. His father can’t reach him anymore. Nobody can reach him. Nobody can control him and nobody can ever punish him again.

  Eustace stands there, paralyzed by joy, patting himself down in wonder. He feels like a man who has walked away from a firing squad whose guns have jammed, and he’s checking himself for bullet holes— and there are none. The air smells sweet and he can feel his own heartbeat and he’s laughing and laughing at the realization that he’s intact.

  It’s the best moment of his life, because it’s the moment when Eustace Conway first grasps the concept that he has survived.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  We are a little wild here with numberless projects of social reform. Not a reading man but has a draft of a new community in his waistcoat pocket.

  —Ralph Waldo Emerson

  When Eustace Conway got back to North Carolina in the autumn of 1981, he started looking for a new place to set up his teepee. He knew he could find a great spot if he took the time to search. During these years of his early adulthood, whenever Eustace needed to settle down for any significant period, he found it easy to live on (and live off) the land of people who were kind enough to let him squat there.

  “I am unique in that I live in an Indian teepee,” Eustace wrote in an unsolicited letter, by means of introducing himself to a North Carolina landowner whose fine acreage he had just spied. “While looking for a piece of land to stay on this coming fall I came upon your place and I would like to know if you would consider letting me set up my camp beside the creek on your property. I don’t have a lot of money, but would be able to pay a small rent. I could look after your property as a caretaker. I would be very respectful and understanding of your wishes. I have enclosed a self-addressed, stamped envelope for you to respond with. I have also enclosed a newspaper article for benefit of more information on my lifestyle.”

  It must have been quite a chore for Eustace to decide exactly which newspaper article to send the man; many had recently been written about him. He was getting lots of public attention and was the darling of the North Carolina reporters, who liked to visit this “quiet, unassuming, very modest young man” living “more severely than a Spartan, not even allowing himself the luxury of matches for his campfire.”

  The press loved him because he was perfect. Eloquent, intelligent, courteous, intriguing, and blessedly photogenic, young Eustace Conway in his teepee was the dream of any human-interest story editor. He lived off the land like an old-time mountain man, but he wasn’t some scary supremacist refusing to pay his taxes and ranting about the imminent extinction of the white man. He was gentle and idealistic about nature, but he wasn’t a wimpy hippie, encouraging people to take off their clothes and make out with trees. He was attractively isolated from society, but he was no hermit on the run, as his gracious welcome of the press always showed. Yes, he challenged his peers to question the assumptions of modern Americans, but he was polite and well-spoken, and could hold up his status as a straight-A college student to prove his respectability.

  That’s right—a straight-A college student. Interestingly, Eustace had decided to go to college after he finished hiking the Appalachian Trail. Strange choice for someone who’d hated school as much as Eustace had. But he’d always believed he could be a decent scholar if he could get his father’s foot off his neck, and, indeed, he got perfect grades in college from the start, even in the math courses. It’s probably safe to assume there were no other students at Gaston Community College quite like Eustace. He was a celebrity around campus, what with his teepee and his frontier clothing and calm voice and tales of adventures in the mountains and along the Mississippi River. From his fellow students, he began to get the kind of reaction he could expect for the rest of his life. The chicks, I don’t know how else to say it, absolutely dug him; the guys wanted to be just like him. He was growing into his looks, becoming both more unusual and more cool in appearance—broad facial bones and a strong mouth, wide-set and hooded dark eyes, and a long, arched nose. His body was in superb shape—a friend who saw Eustace after he got off the Appalachian Trail said he looked like “a tall, hard rock”—and his hair was more black than brown. His skin was dark; his teeth were white. There was no ambiguity in this face; it was all slant and shadow and plane. He was a creature of striking vigor, one who looked to have been carved from hardwood. He smelled like an animal, but like a clean one. He turned heads. He was popular and interesting.

  Scott Taylor, a student with Eustace during those years, remembers seeing him around campus with “that big smile and that buckskin and he seemed like the coolest guy in the world. I was dying to see his teepee, but you don’t just invite yourself to a man’s teepee.” Over time, Scott did wrangle himself an invitation on a “beautiful, rainy fall day,” and Eustace had Scott sit by the creek and cut up vegetables for stew. Scott had never done anything like this before and was electrified by it. He was a conservative suburban kid who had married young and was going to college to study chemistry, and he was shocked and awakened by everything Eustace said or did.

  Scott remembers, “I was nineteen and so was my wife, and we had this little apartment we were trying to set up to look like the home of a typical middle-class American married couple. We were imitating our parents, not even thinking about our lives with any kind of depth. Then I invited Eustace Conway over one day, and he walked around quietly, looking at everything, and said, ‘Man, you guys have a lot of material possessions.’ I’d never once considered that there was any other way to live. Eustace said, ‘Just imagine if you took all the money you’ve spent on these things and traveled around the world with it, instead, or bought books and read them. Think about how much you’d know about life.’ I’m telling you, I’d never heard ideas like this. He loaned me books about carpentry, tanning, woodworking, to show me that I could learn skills and build things on my own. He’d say, ‘You know, Scott, there are things you can do in your summers away from school besides just work in an office. You can hitchhike across America, or you can go see Europe.’ Europe! Hitchhiking! These were the most exotic words I’d ever heard!”

  In his two years at Gaston Community College, Eustace achieved strong grades and was able to transfer to the four-year Appalachian State University, located in the mountain town of Boone, North Carolina. He was nervous at first about how he would do at ASU, knowing that the institution would ask more of him intellectually than the community college had, and was still feeling a little hamstrung by the years of criticism from his father, and intimidated, too, by the prospect of having so many classmates.

  On the first day of classes, he didn’t even wear his buckskin; he was that afraid of drawing attention to himself. He dressed in street clothes, jumped on his motorcycle, and left his teepee early enough to have time to check out the campus and orient himself. As he was riding down into Boone, though, he noticed a freshly roadkilled rabbit on the side of the highway and, out of habit, stopped and picked it up. (Eustace had long since made roadkill a staple of his diet. His rule of thumb was that if the fleas were still alive and jumping on the pelt, the meat was fresh enough to eat.) He stuck the rabbit in his backpack, drove on, and was the first one to arrive in class, Archeology 101. He was the first to arrive by a whole hour actually, because he’d been so intent on having time to find his way around. With some major time to kill, and not eager to sit around doing nothing, he wondered if he should go ahead and skin the rabbit.

  Then he had an inspiration! He remembered that his mother had often told him that “school is only what you make of it.” So he decided to make something of it. He did some asking around, tracked down the professor whose class he was about to take, and introduced himself. He must have startled her. She was Professor Clawson, right out of Harvard University, and this was not only her first day of
class, it was her first teaching gig ever, as well as her first time living in the South.

  “Listen,” Eustace said, “I know this is your class, but I have an idea. I thought maybe we could teach something interesting about archeology together today if I explain that I live in a primitive, traditional manner, you know? And I’ve got this rabbit that I just found dead on the side of the road and it needs to be skinned so that I can eat it tonight. How about you let me skin the rabbit in front of the class as a lesson? I’ll use the tools that I’ve made out of rocks, just like the ones ancient people used. I could even make the tools right in front of the class. That would be a great archeology lesson, don’t you think?”

  She stared at him for a good, long time. Then she recovered herself and said, “OK. Let’s do it.”

  They hiked down to the geology lab, found some good, flinty rocks, and headed over to the class. When the other students arrived, Professor Clawson introduced herself, handed out some paperwork, and said, “And now I’m turning the class over to one of your fellow students, who’ll show you how to skin a rabbit in the primitive manner.”

  Eustace jumped up out of his seat, pulled the rabbit from his backpack with the polish of a practiced magician, picked up his rocks, and started talking enthusiastically as he chipped away to form the tools. “Careful you don’t get any of those chips in your eyes, now, people!” he said, and explained how primitive man flint-napped rocks to achieve an edge so sharp that he could dismember and butcher an adult deer with two small stones; Eustace himself had done that many times. In fact, the Aztecs, he told his classmates, used to get their stone tools sharp and precise enough to perform brain surgery on one another—“Successful brain surgery!” For archeologists, Eustace said, the study of these stone tools is crucial not only for their own significance, but also because an animal butchered with them bears a specific pattern of marks on its bones, and that can help researchers determine whether the ancient creature had died a natural death or had been killed and eaten by humans.