The Last American Man

by Elizabeth Gilbert

  But when I returned home that evening, I found a message from Eustace on my answering machine. He’d been contemplating the squirrel-bone incident and “hated to think” I didn’t understand the situation. He remembered it now. And he remembered that the reason he’d made Donna dig up the squirrel bones in the middle of the night was the excellent opportunity it gave him to educate her further on the proper way to handle a squirrel carcass.

  “And why waste perfectly good meat?” he went on. “And the fact that it was January was really to our advantage, because the temperature was so low. This meant the meat would have been preserved nicely in the cold ground. Whereas, if it had been the middle of summer, I might have just let it go, because the meat might have been spoiling in the sun and been covered with maggots and insects. I must have taken all this into consideration and realized that the meat was still good and that it was a good teaching opportunity and then I must have decided that it would’ve been a waste to just throw it out, see? So when I asked her to bring the bones back, I was only being logical.”

  Concluding with the hope that this all made more sense to me now, Eustace wished me a pleasant evening and hung up.

  “What is this modern-day Mountain Man trying to prove?” asked one of the many newspapermen who visited Eustace Conway in his teepee during those college years. Then he quoted Eustace’s reply: “Nothing. Most people like to live in houses and watch television and go to movies. I like to live in my teepee and watch the rain or snow falling and listen to the language of nature. If they feel that money and materialism are the major virtues of life, how can I sit in judgment of them? All I ask in return is the same consideration for my life.”

  But it wasn’t quite that simple. Eustace was asking for much more than the inalienable right to be left alone to live his life in peace away from society’s judging eye. Being left alone can be pretty easy—don’t talk to anyone, don’t go out in public, don’t invite newspapermen into your home, don’t tell the world how quiet the sound of the rainfall is, and don’t write papers informing people how to transform their lives. If you want to be left alone, move into the woods and sit there, still and quiet. That’s called becoming a hermit, and until you start mailing out letter bombs, it’s a highly effective means of being ignored. If that’s really what you want.

  But that’s not what Eustace wanted. What he wanted was the opposite of what he’d told the reporter: he wanted people to sit in judgment of him, because he believed he knew of a better way of life for all Americans, one that people should judge with great care in order to see the truth of his vision. He wanted the people who watched TV and movies to see how he lived, to ask questions about his life, witness how content and healthy he was, give his ideas serious contemplation, and try them. He wanted to reach out to them—to all of them.

  Because that’s what Men of Destiny do, and Eustace Conway still had his eye on that Man of Destiny title. As did his mother. When he graduated from college in 1984, with honors, Mrs. Conway wrote her son to congratulate him on his achievement and to remind him that the pressure was not off yet.

  “You have reached a new milestone in your journey—one of outstanding accomplishment from long and hard work,” she wrote. “As one who best understands and appreciates the circumstances under which you attained a college degree with two major studies, I applaud and congratulate you with great pride and awe! But remember, education should be an ongoing process until you die. You have just done a great piece of groundwork—may you also seek wisdom which is greater than knowledge. I pray for God’s guidance, protection, and blessings on you as you continue your journey on this good earth. Your proud and devoted Mother.”

  Not that Eustace needed to be reminded. He was already impatient. “I want to do something great, to feel that I’ve made it, that I’ve arrived,” he wrote in his journal.

  And he was becoming more troubled by what he saw. There was a particularly sad incident one night when a gang of local rednecks came down to his teepee to ask if they could borrow some .22 shells to finish off a big raccoon they’d treed up on the ridge behind where Eustace was living. Seemed they’d been out drinking and hunting and having themselves a ball. But they were such incompetent hunters, they admitted to Eustace, that they’d fired at the raccoon more than twenty times without killing it and getting it out of that tree. Surely the stubborn bugger was wounded up there. Could Eustace give them the ammo to help them finish off the sumbitch once and for all?

  Eustace hated everything about this scene—the dogs baying, the cacophony of gunfire (“It sounded like a war up there,” he mourned later in his journal), the ineptitude of the men, and their total disregard for the animal’s spirit. How could they fire away at a living creature as if it were a plastic target in a carnival game and then leave it to suffer while they dicked around for an hour looking for more ammo? And what kind of sloppy bungling jackasses could miss their shot twenty times? And, by the way, why should he have to deal with these idiots invading his privacy in the middle of the night, when he was trying to live far away from human society?

  Silent on all these concerns, Eustace got up, got dressed. He didn’t have any .22 shells, but he took his black powder rifle and followed the dogs and men and the moonlit forest path to the tree. One shot from his antique gun, and the raccoon was cleanly finished.

  “It wasn’t until I skinned him,” he wrote, “that I realized mine was the only hole in the skin.”

  The rednecks had never even grazed the animal. Not once in twenty shots. Not that the good ol’ boys cared. All they wanted was the pelt, which Eustace skinned for them and handed over so that they could sell it. He almost wept as he skinned the animal, and he kept the meat to eat later, solemnly thanking the raccoon for giving over its life. These rednecks weren’t about to eat no damn raccoon meat.

  The whole incident depressed him. The disregard for nature. The greed. The stupidity. The waste. The disregard for another being’s spirit, the lack of reverence for nature’s laws—it all sickened Eustace,whose mission on earth was to uphold the ancient ideas about life’s inherent sacredness. But where do you start with people so callow and oblivious? People who shoot at animals for drunken sport and don’t even want the meat?

  “Hell damn fire,” he wrote in his journal. “What am I to do? They would just write me off as a Grizzly Adams nature freak if I tried to explain it to them.”

  And that was another thing bugging Eustace. He was getting a little tired of being seen as an eccentric, some Grizzly Adams nature freak, when he had so much more to offer the world. He was becoming more contemplative and agitated and he was no longer gaining satisfaction by making his own clothes or shooting his game with a blowgun. He was ready for something bigger, something bolder.

  “I need something new, fresh, alive, stimulating,” he wrote in his journal. “I need life, close-up, tooth and claw. Alive, real, power, exertion. There are more real, fulfilling, and satisfying things to do than sitting around talking to a bunch of good old boys about the same old things, year after year. I don’t want to talk about doing things, I want to be doing things, and I want to know the realities and limits of life by their measure! I don’t want my life to be nothing, to not make a difference. And people tell me all the time how I am doing so much, but I don’t feel I’m even scratching the surface. Hell no, I’m not! And life is so short, I could be gone tomorrow. Vision, concentration, center . . . what? How to do it? What to do? Can I? Where do I go? Escape isn’t the answer. There is only one way—destiny, destiny. To trust destiny.”

  It wasn’t enough for him, in other words, to sit around his teepee working on moccasins and listening to the rainfall. And, speaking of his teepee, he didn’t want to spend the rest of his life moving it from one piece of someone’s land to another piece of someone else’s land. Every place he had ever set up camp got sold out from under him and developed into neighborhoods right before his eyes. It was dreadful, having this happen. It was like standing on a sand bar and watching
the tide lift. Where could he go that would be invulnerable to commercial development? And he wanted to keep teaching, but on his own terms and not necessarily for the forty-five minutes allotted to him by the principal of whatever public school he was visiting that day. He needed more challenges,more power, more people to reach. He needed more land.

  Years later, when people would ask Eustace Conway why he lived up at Turtle Island and spent so much energy conserving his thousand acres, he would deliver his speech of explanation. It eventually became one of the most powerful segments of his public presentations.

  “There is a book I used to love as a child,” he would begin, “called Return to Shady Grove. It’s about these animals who live in a wonderful forest. Life is perfect and happy and safe for them, until one day the bulldozers come and tear up their home to build a road for humans. They have nowhere to go, and their homes have been destroyed. But then one day the animals get on the boxcar of a train and head West. When they get there, they find a new forest, just like the home they lost, and everyone lives happily ever after.

  “I could always relate to that book, because everywhere I ever lived has been destroyed. When I was a small child, I lived in Columbia, South Carolina, near the wilds and the woods and the swamps. Then the developers came and raped the land and destroyed it. So my family moved to Gastonia,North Carolina, where they bought a house bordering on hundreds of acres of land, divided by a clean and beautiful stream. I fell in love with that forest. I knew that forest better than I have ever known any place, because I spent every day there, playing and exploring. I enjoyed that land during my whole young life. I built forts, developed trails, trained myself to run at breakneck speed through the woods and to roll if I fell and jump up and run some more. I climbed through the underbrush and swung from tree to tree, like Tarzan. I knew the textures of the leaves and the warmth of the soil. I knew the sounds, color, and sensations of the forest.

  “And then one day the surveyor’s stakes started to appear all through the forest. I didn’t know what the stakes were for, but I knew they were bad. I knew it was a violation of nature, and I tried to pull up the stakes wherever they appeared. But I was a child—how could I stop it? The developers tore out my forest and built hundreds and hundreds of homes slowly over the whole area until the land I loved was leveled and the stream was just polluted water. They named the development Gardner Woods, but it was a lie. There were no more woods. Gardner Woods had been decimated. The only thing left of the woods was the name.

  “Then I moved into a teepee on a piece of land owned by some friends near the hardwood forest of Allen’s Knob, and I lived there until the developers cleared away the forest for homes. Then I found an old mountain man in Boone named Jay Miller, and he let me put my teepee up on his beautiful Appalachian land. I loved it there. I lived on the side of Howard’s Knob, a forest filled with bears, turkeys, and ginseng root. There was a natural spring just outside my teepee where I would drink every morning. And it was wonderful there until the day old Jay Miller decided to chase the mighty dollar, and he sold his land for lumber. And the timber company came and set up their sawmill right near me—a mill that got closer and closer as they dropped to the ground every last tree that stood between me and them. I was finishing my senior year of college at the time, and I literally had to wear earplugs in order to study for my exams, the saw was so loud. By the time I left, the forest I had loved, where I had gotten my life and food and clothing, was nothing but a vast field of stumps. And the beautiful spring where I used to drink was spoiled and silted.

  “So what was I to do? That’s when I realized that the moral of Return to Shady Grove was a lie. It’s a bald-faced lie invented to reassure children that there is always another forest for another home somewhere out there in the West, just over the hill somewhere. It’s a lie that says it’s OK that the bulldozers keep coming. But it’s not OK, and we need to teach people that it’s a lie, because the bulldozers will keep coming until every tree is gone. There is no place that is safe. And when I realized that? Well, that’s when I decided to get a forest of my own and fight to the death anyone who ever tried to destroy it. That was the only answer and the most important thing I could do with my life on this earth.”

  It was time to find Turtle Island.

  “The land,” he wrote in his diary throughout the early 1980s, as though he had to be reminded. “I need to get the land. The land! I dream it. I want it. I will sacrifice for it.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  This is the place!

  —Brigham Young, on first seeing the valley

  of Great Salt Lake

  America has always lent herself generously—lent both her body and her capacious character—to the visions of utopians. It could be argued that anyone who ever came to America of free will has been a junior utopian, an individual with a personal idea about creating a measure of paradise in this New World, no matter how modest that idea might be. Of course, it could also be argued that this country had been a utopia for millennia before the Europeans arrived and started wrecking everything to suit their rigid plans for the space. But consider how the country must have looked to those early Europeans—free, endless, empty. Surely it was tempting to think about the kind of a society one could create here.

  Of course Americans didn’t originate the idea of a utopia. As usual, that would be the Greeks. And Europeans were scheming of perfect societies since before the Renaissance. Sir Thomas More, Tommaso Campanella, and Francis Bacon had their visions, as, later, did Rabelais, Montaigne, Hobbes. But what these men didn’t do was turn their blue- prints into reality. They were thinkers and writers, not charismatic leaders. Besides, there was no place on the battle-weary map of the Old World where one could try to found an actual utopia. Politically, geographically, and socially, it was an impossibility. So these were men who designed ships when they’d never seen an ocean. They could imagine their dream vessels to be of any size or shape they wanted; the things would never have to set sail.

  But when America was discovered—or, rather, when the concept of America was invented—that’s when thinkers and writers and charismatic leaders alike started to get themselves in trouble. Because this was the place to do it. If you could get yourself some land and talk enough people into joining you, you could establish your paradise. And so, in addition to the grand utopian schemes of men like Jefferson (schemes that ultimately became known as “government”), we got dozens of smaller and weirder utopian schemes scattered over the land.

  Between 1800 and 1900, more than a hundred such communities rose in waves of enthusiasm across America. The Inspirationist Society of Amana was first envisioned in Germany by a stocking-weaver, a carpenter, and an illiterate serving maid. But their dream became reality only when the Amanists came to the United States, in 1842, and bought five thousand acres outside Buffalo. This strict, mostly silent, highly skilled, sober, and well-organized population thrived, and eventually sold their land at a profit and moved to Iowa, where they prospered until 1932. The Shakers also flourished, longer than anyone might have expected of a celibate community. And the industrious Rappites of Harmony impressively constructed, in their first year in Pennsylvania’s Conoquenessing Valley, fifty log houses, a church, a school, a gristmill, and a barn, in addition to clearing 150 acres of land.

  But most of America’s model communities didn’t do so well. Generally, they crumbled under the decidedly nonutopian realities of bankruptcy, internal power struggles, irresoluble philosophical disagreements, and basic human misery. New Harmony was founded in Indiana around 1825 by Robert Owen, who called his project “a new empire of goodwill,” which would spread “from Community to Community, from State to State, from Continent to Continent, finally overshadowing the whole earth, shedding light, fragrance and abundance, intelligence and happiness, upon the sons of man.” Hundreds upon hundreds of devotees followed Owen, but he had no sound economic plan for his community, and he quickly slunk back to England when things started falling ap
art. His followers went through five constitutions in a single year, split into four rival communities, and finally imploded under the pressure of a dozen lawsuits.

  Bishop Hill was founded by Eric Janson, a Swede, who brought his eight hundred followers to America in 1846 to form a theoretical socialist community. The believers spent their first winter in caves in Illinois, where 144 of them died of cholera in a single fortnight, while Janson watched over them, cheerfully saying, “Go, die in peace” as his flock keeled over, one after another. The Mountain Cove Community of Spiritualists set up their perfect society in rural Virginia, exactly on the spot, they calculated, where the Garden of Eden had once stood. Like Adam and Eve, however, the Spiritualists were cast out of Eden before they knew what hit them; their experiment lasted only two years. The carefree Fruitlanders were founded by Bronson Alcott, a charming believer in “deep discussion,” who thought that work should be done only when the “spirit dictates.” The Fruitlanders may have set a national utopia-dismantling record; their project lasted over the summer of 1843, until everyone went home when it started getting cold.

  The Icarians hurried over here from France. Their leader, Étienne Cabet, sent them off with this proclamation: “The third of February, 1848, will be an epoch-making date, for on that day, one of the grandest acts in the history of the human race was accomplished—the advance guard, departing on the ship Rome has left for Icaria . . . May the winds and waves be propitious to you, soldiers of humanity!” Maybe no soldiers of humanity ever suffered quite as hard as the Icarians, who ended up on 100,000 acres of hot swampland outside New Orleans, decimated by malaria, fatigue, starvation, desertion, and death by lightning.

  Still, everyone’s favorite utopian has to be Charles Fourier. Fourier had it all figured out, as he explained in several enormous books. His followers sprang up everywhere across the United States in the mid-nineteenth century, especially in New England, where a severe economic crisis had put hordes of men out of work. Of the forty separate Fourierist societies formed in America, though, only three lasted for more than two years. Looking back on the phenomenon, it’s hard to imagine that Fourier’s ideas could have spread anywhere beyond the recesses of his own beautifully insane head. Yet there must have been something in the alluring orderliness of his vision that reassured Americans when they needed it most, when people were seeking tidy answers.