The Last American Man

by Elizabeth Gilbert

  A few months earlier, Eustace and I had ridden horses together through a foot-deep cover of crisp snow and circled the perimeter of Turtle Island. The ride took us several hours, and at some points we’d get off our horses to make it up or down the almost sheer sides of hills, but Eustace didn’t once stop talking during the whole tour. He pointed out each tree and stone that marked his property line and told me who currently owned the property on the other side of the line, what those people were doing with their land, and how much he might be willing to pay for it someday. Having seen Turtle Island in the raw, I now wanted to understand it on a map.

  So Eustace pulled out a huge map and unfolded it before him, as if he were a pirate. His land was blocked out in small and large connected parcels, and he told me how he’d acquired each piece over the years. What emerged was a portrait of genius. Eustace had put the thing together like a chess master. He first bought the 107 acres that made up the valley of Turtle Island, and then, as he earned money over the years, he slowly bought the peaks of each hill that surrounded the valley. The peaks of a hill are the most valuable real estate to developers, after all, since everyone wants a home right on top of a mountain. By securing these peaks, then, Eustace had made the hills below them much less attractive to any roving land speculator and therefore much less likely to be sold to someone else before he could afford to grab it.

  “I wanted the crests of every ridge around me,” Eustace said. “I wanted to be able to look up from my valley and see no light pollution, no homes, no erosion to destroy the forest, and I wanted to hear no sounds except nature. The crests of the ridges were key, also, because ridges are where developers build roads, and once a road has been stuck through a forest, you’re finished. Roads bring people and people bring destruction, and I needed to prevent that. So I bought up all the crests. If I hadn’t done that, there’d be a road running past here right now, I can promise you.”

  Once he owned the crests, he filled in the gaps, buying the slopes that connected his valley to the surrounding mountaintops. In this way, he guarded his watershed. What he was doing, actually, was transforming his holdings from a small, flat, low-lying basin into a large teacup— a perfect valley—which would be protected by mountains on every side. He bought up a crucial 114 acres called the Johnson Land. (“Dick Johnson owned 40,000 acres next to me, and he put it up for sale. Obviously, I couldn’t afford to buy it all, but I had to secure this one small piece right on the perimeter of Turtle Island, to keep a buffer between my nature preserve and whatever some developers might do on the other side.” The Johnson Land was an emergency buy; Eustace had to come up with the cash for it in two days, and he did.) Then he bought another small chunk of land he calls the Whale’s Tail, because of its shape. (“It’s a beautiful acreage, with a big drop-off vista, and I knew someday somebody was going to take a look at it and think what a nice place it would be for a house, so I had to secure it.”) Then he bought his most expensive and tiny piece of land, a mere five acres, for which he paid an arm and a leg. (“I realized that if I bought it, I’d control the access to the huge property on the other side of me, since this tiny spot is the only place where you can put a road. I couldn’t afford to buy the big property, but I could afford to quietly buy this little roadblock here. It was just a security measure. And maybe someday I can buy up the remainder without any serious competition.”)

  But the most critical portion of Turtle Island was a 156.16-acre lot called the Cabell Gragg Land. Cabell Gragg was a sly old Appalachian farmer who owned this small spit of land right behind Turtle Island. It was the last piece Eustace needed to complete the watershed that would make his valley inviolable. From the first time Eustace had seen these woods, he knew this to be the place where he would someday build his home. It wasn’t the most alluring 156.16 acres in the world, but if someone else got hold of it, stripped it, polluted it, or developed it, Turtle Island would be poisoned through proximity. The piece was critical. It was Eustace’s Achilles’ heel.

  “If I couldn’t nail that Cabell Gragg Land,” Eustace said, “my dream was over. If someone else bought the property, that would’ve been it for me. I would’ve turned around the next day and sold all my land and walked away from this whole vision, because it would’ve been ruined. I’d just have to start all over again somewhere else. So here I was, waking up every day of my life for almost ten years and working my brains out to make this place successful—putting up buildings and clearing pastures and constructing bridges—knowing all the while that if I couldn’t buy the Cabell Gragg Land, all that work would be for nothing.”

  From 1987 until 1997, Eustace tried hard to get his hands on those 156.16 acres. You can’t read ten consecutive pages of his journals from that decade without hitting at least one reference to the Cabell Gragg Land. Eustace wrote Cabell Gragg countless letters, took him on tours of Turtle Island, sent him gifts, and even, as the years went on, visited him in his nursing home to negotiate terms. A dozen times Eustace thought he had a deal, and then old Cabell Gragg would back out or double the price or say he’d found a better offer. It was maddening. Eustace had a bottle of champagne he was keeping to drink in celebration of buying that land, and after ten years, the bottle had accumulated (as he puts it in his typically Eustacian precise manner) “1.16th of an inch of dust on its surface.” He was willing to put together any crazy proposal to secure the property. At one point, when Gragg expressed an interest in a fancy Victorian house down in Boone, Eustace came close to buying it in order to trade it with Cabell for the land, but the deal fell through.

  In the end, Eustace got his precious Cabell Gragg Land. But at a huge personal price and in the most daring and dangerous of ways.

  He got it by sleeping with the devil.

  There’s a mountain right next to the mountains where Eustace lives, and for years and years it was nothing but forest. Tens of thousands of acres of this mountain bumped plumb up against Eustace’s land, and he had a dream from the first time he saw Turtle Island to buy it all up and multiply his holdings immensely. He didn’t know how he was going to do this, but he had every intention of figuring out a way. Every time he drove up to Turtle Island on the road from Boone, he passed a particular lookout point where he could pull his truck over and stand for a while and see over the ravine and valleys to a perfect view of both his property and the beautiful and enormous and forested mountain right beside it. He could think, Someday . . . somehow . . .

  And then, one afternoon in 1994, while driving his truck from Boone to Turtle Island, he saw a Cadillac parked at his favorite lookout point. Four men in suits were standing outside the car, looking through binoculars across the ravine to that beautiful and enormous and forested mountain. Eustace felt his heart stop. He knew right then that his dream of owning the mountain was, as of this moment, officially over. He didn’t know who the men were, but he knew damn sure what they were, and he knew what they’d come for. It was the moral of Return to Shady Grove repeating itself. There’s no reason on earth that men in suits scrutinize forests with binoculars clutched to their faces in this distant corner of Appalachia unless they mean to buy something. Eustace pulled his truck up right behind the Cadillac and got out. Startled, the suits turned. They lowered their binoculars and looked at him. Standing with his hands on his hips, Eustace stared them down. One of the men flushed nervously, another coughed. It was as though they’d been caught stealing something or having sex.

  “Can I help you with anything, gentlemen?” Eustace asked, grimly.

  But it was too late; they were already helping themselves.

  They didn’t say a word to Eustace that day, but the truth came out over the next months. A guy named David Kaplan had come to town looking to buy up all available land in the area in order to build an expensive and exclusive resort called Heavenly Mountain, where well-heeled believers could come and practice transcendental meditation in the lap of luxury. Heavenly Mountain would need roads and a helicopter pad and a golf course and a tennis c
ourt and lots of property for buildings.

  David Kaplan was smart and ambitious and seemed to have all the money in the world. Acre by acre, he acquired the land he needed. Old farms and lost ravines and clean rivers and pastures and rocky valleys— he bought them all. The joke around the hollers was that David Kaplan’s land deals went this way: he’d pull up in his Jaguar at some run-down old shack and say to some run-down old hillbilly at the door, “Hi. I’m David Kaplan. Money is no object. How do you do?”

  Well, look. What’s done is done. Spilled milk is exactly that. Eustace put Heavenly Mountain out of his head as far as he could. He even made jokes about it. When the trees came down and the palatial medittation center went up, Eustace started calling the land Less-Heavenly Mountain, as in “Doesn’t it look a lot less heavenly now?” He’d also poke fun at his new neighbors by doing a spot-on impression of the children’s TV host Mr. Rogers, droning, in that unmistakable patter, “Heavenly Mountain is our neighbor. Can you say ‘neigh-bor,’ children? Heavenly Mountain builds roads that are hard on our environment. Can you say ‘hard-on,’ children?”

  Anyway, he told himself, a transcendental meditation center wouldn’t be the worst neighbor; that was definitely better than thousands of acres of one-family homes. The transcendentalists were coming to Heavenly Mountain to commune with nature, after all, and, what with their Vedic architecture and vegetarian lives, they were sincerely seeking a more harmonious relationship with the universe (even if they were building 4,000-square-foot homes in which to seek that harmony). And David Kaplan would be developing only 10 percent of his land, saving the rest of the forest from logging, hunting, and road construction. And since the resort was a place for people to come to seek peace, there would be a builtin interest in keeping the nearby property wooded and quiet, and that served Eustace’s interests, too. So the arrival of David Kaplan wasn’t the worst possible event in Eustace’s life.

  He came to see it this way: OK, so David Kaplan wanted all the property in the world. Fine; Eustace couldn’t blame him for wanting it. What Eustace had to concentrate on, instead, was protecting what he already owned. Which meant that David Kaplan was welcome to buy every inch of North Carolina except the 156.16 acres of the Cabell Gragg Land.

  But then Cabell Gragg started getting cute. When Eustace went to discuss the property, Cabell now started saying, “Well, you know, those transcendental meditation folks are interested in buying it.” Eustace couldn’t imagine this to be true; the land had no value to anyone but himself. But then he realized what was happening. As Cabell Gragg watched his neighbors get rich by selling off their valuable farms to David Kaplan, with his slick Jaguar, Cabell decided never to sell to Eustace Conway, with his beat-up 1974 pickup. Cabell wanted the satisfaction of feeling that he was in on this real estate boom, too. He was holding out for the richer man’s offer.

  Thereupon, Eustace called a summit meeting with David Kaplan. Now, it’s not that David Kaplan and Eustace Conway were exactly in love with each other. They were direct competitors—the new-age mountain man verses the new-age real estate developer—and they were probably the two sharpest guys in the county. They’d already had some unpleasant little runins. David Kaplan had built himself a big fancy house on Heavenly Mountain, and his porch steps were merely four feet away from Eustace’s property line. Eustace thought that was pretty rude, and said so. Moreover, one of the Heavenly Mountain Resort helicopters kept buzzing low over Eustace’s nature preserve, day after day, kicking up wind and noise. Christ, how Eustace hated that! How can you keep the sanctuary of Turtle Island with a helicopter flying low overhead? But no matter how many angry phone calls Eustace made, it never stopped. He finally got so fed up that he went after the helicopter one day with a shotgun, put the pilot’s face right in his sights, and shouted, “Get the fuck off my fucking head!”

  Which David Kaplan thought was pretty rude.

  So for Eustace to request a favor of David Kaplan was quite an event. It wasn’t just a favor; it was a plea. Eustace, recognizing that he had no other choice, just rolled over and showed his neck to his adversary. He told David Kaplan all about the Cabell Gragg Land. He told him exactly how much acreage there was and how much it cost and how many years he had wanted it and why he needed it and what he’d do if he didn’t get it. He gave this information, remember, to a man who was openly trying to obtain every inch of land he could get. Then Eustace asked David Kaplan to please buy the Cabell Gragg Land. After which, Eustace would buy the land from David Kaplan. Cabell would have the satisfaction of selling to a rich developer; Eustace would have the land he needed to preserve his dream; and David Kaplan would have . . . ? Well, there wasn’t anything in this deal for David Kaplan at all, but it sure would be nice of him to do it.

  David Kaplan agreed. The two men didn’t sign a single piece of paper; they shook hands on the deal. “If you screw me,” Eustace explained politely, “I’m finished.” And he walked away, knowing that his life was in the hands of his biggest rival. It was a trapeze act. It was Russian roulette. It was like betting the farm on a pair of deuces. But it was this risk or no chance. Anyhow, he secretly suspected that David Kaplan was a decent man. Not only decent, but surely smart enough to know better than to make a lifelong enemy of a guy like Eustace Conway.

  In the end, the gamble worked. David made his offer to Cabell Gragg—the same offer Eustace had been making for years—and Cabell took the bait. David Kaplan bought that crucial piece of land and two days later turned around and sold it with complete honor to Eustace.

  Whose empire was now safe.

  Granted, Eustace Conway may not be very current. He may not read the newspapers or listen to the radio, and it is true that he did once reply, when asked by a schoolchild in 1995 whether he knew who Bill Clinton was, “I believe Bill Clinton is an American political figure, but I’m not certain.” So he’s not up to the minute on the latest information, but that doesn’t mean he’s not as adept a businessman as any guy in a suit with a subscription to the Economist. Eustace is a shrewd, keen, and potentially ruthless operator—in the best sense of that word.

  Still, this business side is an aspect of Eustace that people generally do not see, not unless they happen to be the people who draw the tax maps down in the Town Hall of Boone, North Carolina. People don’t see that calculating side of Eustace Conway because he doesn’t talk about it as much as he talks about listening to the sound of the drizzling rain and how to start a fire without a match. Hey, that’s not what he’s getting paid to talk about. But that’s not the only reason people don’t see it. For the most part, people don’t see that hard business edge of Eustace because they don’t want to see it. Because they’re afraid that if they look too closely at that side of him, it might spoil the nice image of the buckskin, the teepee, the single shot with the antique musket, the hand-carved wooden bowl, and the wide-open and peaceful smile. That’s the image they need today, the image they’ve always needed.

  “Chivalrous in the manners and free as the winds,” as the British travel writer Isabel Lucy Bird described the men of the nineteenth-century American West.

  “My Primitive Pagan Savage,” as Valarie Spratlin said, back when she was first falling in love with Eustace.

  It’s what we all think to ourselves, back when we’re first falling in love with Eustace. Those of us who do, anyway. And we are legion. I know the feeling. I too had that moment of thinking this was the first truly authentic man I’d ever met, the kind of person I’d traveled to Wyoming as a twenty-two-year-old to find (indeed, to become)—a genuine soul uncontaminated by modern rust. What makes Eustace seem, on first encounter, like the last of some noble species is that there is nothing “virtual” about his reality. This is a guy who lives, quite literally, the life that, for the rest of the country, has largely become a metaphor.

  Think of the many articles one can find every year in the Wall Street Journal describing some entrepreneur or businessman as being a “pioneer” or a “maverick” or a “c
owboy.” Think of the many times these ambitious modern men are described as “staking their claim” or boldly pushing themselves “beyond the frontier” or even “riding into the sunset.” We still use this nineteenth-century lexicon to describe our boldest citizens, but it’s really a code now, because these guys aren’t actually pioneers; they are talented computer programmers, biogenetic researchers, politicians, or media moguls making a big splash in a fast modern economy.

  But when Eustace Conway talks about staking a claim, the guy is literally staking a goddamn claim. Other frontier expressions that the rest of us use as metaphors, Eustace uses literally. He does sit tall in the saddle; he does keep his powder dry; he is carving out a homestead. When he talks about reining in horses or calling off the dogs or mending fences, you can be sure that there are real horses, real dogs, or real fences in the picture. And when Eustace goes in for the kill, he’s not talking about a hostile takeover of a rival company; he’s talking about really killing something.

  I remember one time when I was at Turtle Island helping Eustace with some blacksmithing. Eustace’s little blacksmith shop is always in action. He’s a competent smith in the old-style farm manner, which is to say that he’s not crafting fine iron filigree; he’s repairing his farm equipment and fitting shoes to his horses. On this day, Eustace was heating iron rods to fix a broken piece on his antique mower. He had a number of irons cooking in his forge at the same time and, distracted by trying to teach me the basics of blacksmithing, he allowed several of them to get too hot, to the point of compromising the strength of the metal. When he saw this, he said, “Damn! I have too many irons in the fire.”