The Last American Man

by Elizabeth Gilbert

  The only hope for mankind, Charles Fourier had proclaimed quite clearly, lay in a highly organized social structure—almost insect-like in its detail and hierarchy—of human associations. The smallest association, called a Group, would comprise seven people, two of whom would hover at each wing to represent “ascending” and “descending” extremes of taste, while the other three would stay in the middle to maintain equilibrium. In the ideal society, there would be a Group for every occupation (raising children, tending poultry, growing roses, etc.). Five Groups of seven made a Series, each of which, again, would have a center and two wings. And a Phalanx—the ultimate in human organization— was to be constructed of several Series joined together to create battalions of between 1620 and 1800 individuals. Each Phalanx would cover three square acres of gardens and orchards, and the members of each Phalanx would reside in a splendid Phalanstery, consisting of bedrooms, ballrooms, council chambers, libraries, and nurseries.

  In Fourier’s perfect society, work would be valued according to its usefulness. Therefore, the most unpleasant and necessary work (sewage maintenance, grave digging) would earn the highest pay and the highest esteem. People would work according to their natural affinities. Since children, for example, have a natural affinity for digging around in dirt and filth, they would become special garbage-scavenging groups called the Little Hordes, and they would earn high pay, as well as taking their place at the heads of every parade, where they would regularly be honored by the other citizens with the venerable “Salute of Esteem.”

  Fourier went so far as to claim that he had the entire workings of the universe figured out, in addition to merely understanding the workings of the perfect human society. Every planet, he said, lasted for 80,000 years, and these epochs were naturally divided into stages. When the Earth entered its eighth stage, he speculated that men would grow tails equipped with eyes, that dead bodies would be transformed into “aromatic airs,” that the polar icecaps would emit perfumed dew, that six new moons would form, and that unpleasant beasts would be replaced by their harmless opposites (called “anti-sharks,” for instance, or “anti-fleas”). And it would be during this episode—the glorious eighth stage of Earth—that the Fourier Phalanxes would at last spread over the entire planet, until there were exactly 2,985,984 of them, united in one brotherhood and one language.

  So. As you see, one can take one’s utopian ideals absolutely as far as one wants.

  Still, there seems to have been a time for this kind of dreaming, and that time was the nineteenth century. By 1900, not only had most of America’s idealistic communities vanished, but nobody was talking anymore about buying up land in the middle of nowhere and creating a model society with a handful of believers. As with the decline of so much else in this country, the industrial age was probably to blame. The mass production of goods, the move from an agrarian to an urban economy, the decline of individual craftsmanship—all were eroding away Americans’ idea of self-sufficiency. It was getting harder to believe that one person (or one congregation, or one Phalanx) could break off from the big machine of America. The grid had begun to emerge. Or the noose had begun to tighten, if you prefer to feel that way about it. By the turn of the century, American culture—loud, strong, established, uniform, ubiquitous—hardly seemed worth trying to alter. It would not be until the 1960s, in fact, that Americans would again summon the energy (or the madness) to attempt once more the mass formation of utopian societies.

  The 1960s, of course, really began in the 1950s. It all started with the rise of the Beat movement, which brought a change in music, a questioning of society, a serious interest in experimentation with drugs and sex, and a general attitude of resistance to conventionality. By the middle of the 1950s, those old romantic nineteenth-century American ideas about separating oneself from the corruptions of larger society were starting to look good again. Poets like Allen Ginsberg (heir to Walt Whitman) and writers like Jack Kerouac (who called himself an “urban Thoreau”) set forth to redefine and rediscover ways to live in America without slogging through what Kerouac called the endless system of “work, produce, consume, work, produce, consume . . .”

  The Beats are often associated with city life, particularly with San Francisco. But in the classic nineteenth-century style of Teddy Roosevelt, the Beat poets dutifully turned their backs on the sissifying influence of cities to seek more rugged experiences and make real men of themselves. The poet Lew Welch quit a solid copy-editing job in Chicago in the early 1960s and became a hermit in the foothills of the Sierra Mountains. The young Jack Kerouac found work in the National Forest Service, manning a fire lookout in the Cascade Mountains. (He also worked on a merchant marine ship and was a brakeman on the Southern Pacific Railroad.) Allen Ginsberg and the poet Gary Snyder took jobs on ships in the 1940s and 1950s. (“I’ve held employment on all levels of society,” boasted Snyder. “I can pride myself on the fact that I worked nine months on a tanker at sea and nobody once ever guessed I had been to college.”)

  The Beats were frustrated by the numbing consumer values of contemporary America and found the wilderness and manual labor to be fine ways to, as Kerouac said, “work the blood clots right out of existence.” It was back to the frontier for cleansing all over again. By the middle of the 1960s, these ideas were spreading among a wider and wider range of American youth. Kerouac’s novels alone sent no end of young men scrambling across the country to find their destinies, but Walden—a long-neglected work celebrating both nature and nonconformity— was also rediscovered around this time, as were the essays of the great nineteenth-century naturalist John Muir. A counterculture revolution was brewing once more, and on the heels of that resistance came, almost inevitably, the new utopias.

  From 1965 to 1975, tens of thousands of young Americans tried their hands at idealistic communal-living experiments. The communes were more colorful and outlandish than their nineteenth-century counterparts had been. Most failed quickly, often comically, although it’s hard to not feel affection for their high idealistic notions.

  There was the famous Drop City of Colorado, founded by some wild poverty-loving hippie artists, who built structures out of bottle caps and tarp (I’m not kidding) and whose short-lived utopia was filled with “all kinds of drum music and bell ringing, jingling, jangling, and chanting.” Drop City’s founders so loathed rules and judgments that they insisted on accepting anybody and everybody into their utopia. Which is why the place eventually burned itself out as a crash pad for drug addicts and scary biker gangs. The same fate struck the good-hearted Californians of Gorda Mountain, who founded a wide-open community in 1962, anticipating that their welcoming policy would attract lots of artists and dreamers. Instead, the commune had to close in 1968 after being overrun by junkies, derelicts, runaways, and criminals.

  The great LSD guru Ken Kesey and his Merry Pranksters founded a casual, miniature utopia in his California home (although Kesey eventually grew so tired of his community, calling it nothing more than “a communal lie,” that he put the whole crowd on buses to Woodstock in 1969, with strict orders to never come back). Timothy Leary founded a more elaborate psychedelic utopia. His was on a lush estate in Millbrook, New York, which had once belonged to Andrew Mellon’s family. Leary’s experiment was described as “a school, a commune, and a house party of unparalleled dimensions,” and—while serious academics did come to Millbrook to discuss culture and poetry—nobody did the chores, and the dream disintegrated by 1965.

  Other 1960s communes were defined by a similar lack of internal structure. Black Bear Ranch, initially founded on the notion of no rules whatsoever, finally caved in and created two very strict rules: (1) no sitting on the kitchen counters, and (2) no turning the handle on the cream separator, because, as one old hippie recalled, “it used to drive people crazy when people would sit on the kitchen counter and play with the handle on the cream separator.” Other than that, you could pretty much do what you wanted at Black Bear Ranch.

  It was not easy going,
keeping these utopias running. The kids who founded them were just that—kids. White, middle-class, college-educated kids, most of whom had no practical farm skills. Their communes folded left and right, assaulted from the inside by drug abuse, disorganization, apathy, resentment, and bankruptcy, and attacked from the outside by mainstream America’s values and laws. Morning Star Ranch in California, for example, had no end of trouble from the local sheriff, who, in 1967, arrested the commune’s leader, Lou Gottlieb, for the crime of “running an organized camp in violation of state sanitary regulations.” Gottlieb—who was a fantastic wiseass, in addition to being a utopian idealist—quipped at the time of his arrest, “If they can find any evidence of organization here, I wish they would show it to me.”

  Yes, officer, it would have been difficult to find any evidence of organization in most of these 1960s utopias. It’s all too easy now to look back at them as nothing more than a spastic side effect of a feral youth movement that was really only seeking new and creative ways to avoid adult responsibility. Although, on closer examination, it must be said that not every American commune of the 1960s was a madcap carnival. Some communes were founded on serious religious principles; some had intense political agendas; some were blessed with members who soberly and conscientiously tried to lead the good and simple life. And a few hippie communes did hammer out enough management skills to ensure their long-term survival.

  The simply named Farm has been communally productive in Tennessee since 1971, after some major adjustments in its original policy of total anarchy. Over the years more traditional rules and restrictions have been introduced, and more realistic ideas about maintaining the rights of the individual within the larger framework of utopian communal living have kept its members sane and relatively free of bitterness and resentment. As with any communal experiment that lasts more than a year, the Farm had to trade in much of its early romanticism for a more pragmatic organizational principle. Still, the Farm’s long-running and successful social projects (several environmental teaching programs; a public advocacy law firm) reflect the original founders’ idealistic dreams.

  Indeed, that sense of thriving idealism seems to be as critical a fact tor in keeping a commune alive over the years as good bookkeeping practices and strict visitors’ policies—just as, in a good marriage, a couple will more easily endure the hardships of decades if an original spark of their youthful romance can survive. As one long-term member of the Farm explained, “We’ve been through some pretty hard times together. There’s a certain amount of sentimentality toward seeing it succeed.”

  On such lines, consider the famous Hog Farm of California. Hog Farm is still thriving some twenty-five years after its founding, an endurance largely credited to the charismatic guidance of its great hippie visionary leader, Hugh Romney, AKA Wavy Gravy (proudly the only American utopian ever to have had a Ben and Jerry’s ice cream flavor named in his honor). Wavy Gravy has stubbornly refused over the years to compromise his free-for-all, do-gooder 1960s values, and his dream utopia thrives as a monument to the power of pure idealism. Hog Farm’s summer camp (Camp Winnarainbow) is a flourishing California institution, as is the charitable-works arm of the commune, which has been successfully fighting blindness in Third World countries for years.

  All those who live at Hog Farm today still follow both their charming leader and their serious political agenda steadfastly and with good humor. Their enduring success defies those who insist that conformity to society’s norms is the only way to survive in modern America. For all the concessions and disappointments they may have experienced over the decades, the Hog Farmers still fight the good fight together, insistently holding true to the original irreverent notion of themselves as “an extended family, a mobile hallucination, an army of clowns.”

  Eustace Conway was born at the beginning of the 1960s. He passed his formative years right in the middle of this major counterculture revolution, but the freewheeling values of the time seem to have had little effect on his ideas. Modern-day hippie types respond to Eustace positively because they think he’s one of them. He does seem to be a hippie at first glance, what with his long hair and his thick beard and his back-to-nature ethic and the friendly bumper sticker on his truck that reads “Friends Come in All Colors.” That said, Eustace is actually quite conservative. He loathes drugs and drug-users, has no patience with sexual swingers, and has sometimes been accused of cherishing discipline over freedom. If you wanted to take his gun from him, for instance, you’d probably find yourself prying it out of his cold, dead fingers. So, no, our Eustace Conway is not exactly a mobile hallucination or a tripped-out foot soldier from some army of clowns.

  But what Eustace does share with the hippie utopian dreamers of the 1960s (as well as with their romantic utopian ancestors of the 1860s) is this most American of ideals: that society is both capable of transforming and willing to transform. If you can get yourself a piece of land and some serious motivation, you can start a small project that will grow and inspire a massive change across an entire country. Eustace Conway, like any good utopian, was not afraid to try this. He was not afraid to claim that he had all the answers. He was not afraid to formulate an entirely new world view.

  What he wanted Turtle Island to be was more than just a nature preserve. More than what his grandfather had made of Sequoyah. This land was not to be a summer camp where children could temporarily escape the evils of the city and grow into strong citizens. No, Eustace wanted Turtle Island to be the setting of a colossal utopian experiment in which he would try to do nothing less than change and save America. It was to be the very blueprint for the future. Time and again, he had heard that old touchy-feely adage, “If you touch only one life, then you’ve had an effect on the world.”

  Well, frankly, Eustace Conway thought that was bullshit. No reason to think so small, people! Why be content to touch only one life? Why not save the whole planet? Certainly this must be his destiny.

  “God only made one person in the world like you,” wrote Eustace’s mother, who was always right there on the scene to remind her son of his singular calling. “And He has a special job for you to do, to use the talents He gave you.”

  Eustace couldn’t have agreed more, and by the time he was in his mid-twenties, he was on fire with the desire to found his own utopia. The will was there; all he needed was the land.

  He never expected to find his beloved Turtle Island in North Carolina, where real estate was already getting expensive and overpopulation already a problem. But, as it turned out, hidden up in the mountains behind the college and resort town of Boone were all kinds of shady little hollers where life had not altered in decades. Property was cheap, and people were quiet up there in the hills, so Eustace asked around to see if anyone had a big tract of land for sale. When he heard “the old Alley Church place” was available, he took a ride up there with a former college professor of his who knew a lot about buying land and reading tax maps—two skills Eustace did not have at the time but would soon acquire.

  What they found up at the end of that rugged dirt road was perfection. It was 107 acres of what Eustace describes now as “a classic Southern Appalachian reclaimed hardwood forest,” and it was mind-alteringly beautiful. It had everything Eustace was looking for—fresh spring water, good solar exposure, attractive ridge-to-ridge property lines, level ground for farming, plenty of timber for constructing buildings, and an excitingly diverse ecosystem. It was a mixed woodland landscape, dominated by locust, birch, and sourwood. The air was wet and heavy, and the understory was fern-laden and lush. It was a wonderful climate for poison ivy and also for copperheads, although there were mild species thriving here, too—trout, woodpecker, pink and yellow ladyslipper, ginseng, orchid, bloodroot, rhododendron. . . .

  The soil below his feet was vigorous and black and damp. Like most woodland on the East Coast of America, this was not original-growth forest. It was a second-growth forest that was healing itself, forest that had taken over once again after having be
en cleared more than a century ago, farmed steadily, and then abandoned for decades (in this case, when the local hillbillies were lured down to the town below to work in factories). Wild animals had made a healthy comeback, as had the trees. There were plenty of squirrels and every sign of an increasing deer population. The density of the birds was extraordinary, and, in the damp air of early morning, it sounded to Eustace like a jungle-worthy outcry of life. He suspected that there were mountain lions nearby, too. And bears.

  It was the winter of 1986 when Eustace inspected the land for the first time. The instant he pulled his truck off the main highway, he found himself in serious Appalachia, all of which became more apparent as he climbed higher and higher into the Blue Ridge Mountains. The few people who did live back here were first-growth. Authentic, old-timey, genuine hillbillies. Their homes were tin-roof shacks barely adhering to the walls of these steep mountain hollers. Their yards were full of fossilized appliances and prehistoric cars, and the people kept livestock like rabbits and chickens up on their roofs, up away from the foxes. The word “hardscrabble” doesn’t begin to describe how hard and how scrabbled these lives appeared.

  The roads were winding and unmarked, and Eustace wasn’t sure whether he was in the right location, so he pulled his truck into the yard of one of these beat-down shacks and knocked on the door to ask where the old Alley Church place was. A pale, lightweight woman in a calico apron came to the door and stared at Eustace in pure terror from behind the screen. She had probably never seen a man at her door who wasn’t a family member.