“Very interesting,” I said.
Only after dinner did Eustace bandage his savaged hand. He mentioned the incident just once, saying, “I’m lucky I didn’t saw my fingers off.”
Later that night I asked Eustace what his most serious injury had been, and he said he’d never been seriously injured. One time he did slice open his thumb in a careless moment while dressing a deer carcass. It was a deep, long cut “with the meat hanging out and everything,” and it clearly needed stitches. So Eustace stitched it, using a needle and thread and the stitch he knows well from sewing buckskin. Healed just fine.
“I don’t think I could sew up my own skin,” I said.
“You can do anything you believe you can do.”
“I don’t believe I could sew up my own skin.”
Eustace laughed and conceded, “Then you probably couldn’t.”
“People have such a hard time getting things done out here,” Eustace complained in his journal in 1992. “The environment is so new. It really isn’t a problem for them. It is my stress over their slow, ignorant pace that bothers me. They’re blissfully enjoying every minute.”
Challenges were coming at Eustace from every direction. A friend pointed out that it was a mistake for Eustace not to carry personal health insurance. “But I’m healthy!” he protested. So his friend explained that if Eustace were to be seriously injured in an accident and needed intensive care, the hospital could raid all his assets, including the value of his land, to cover the expense. Jesus Christ! Eustace had never thought of such a thing before. Plus he had no end of taxes to manage and surveying to pay for. Plus he had to deal with poachers on his land. He ran down on foot some dumb young kid who dropped a buck out of season with an illegal gun just a few hundred feet from Eustace’s kitchen. Even more horrifying, he himself had been accused of poaching.
He was teaching a class of eighty young students one afternoon when four government cars and eight lawmen pulled up and arrested him for poaching deer. Tipped off by a resentful neighbor, the game warden went straight to Eustace’s cache of dozens of deerskins and accused Eustace of having killed the animals without a permit. In fact, the skins had been given to Eustace by people who wanted them tanned. It was a terrifying moment.
Eustace had to spend the next month collecting letters of evidence from every person who had given him a deerskin, as well as documents from environmentalists and politicians across the South swearing that Eustace Conway was a committed naturalist who would never hunt more than was legally allowed. On the day of his trial, though, he had the balls to wear his deerskin pants to the courtroom. Why not? It’s what he always wore. He strode into his trial looking like Jeremiah goddamn Johnson. Ma-Maw, the elderly Appalachian neighbor who lived down the holler and who hated the Law as much as the next hillbilly, came with Eustace to give him moral support. (“I’m afraid the judge might take these buckskin pants right off me and throw me in jail,” Eustace joked to Ma-Maw, who said sternly, “Don’t you worry. I have my bloomers on under this skirt. If they steal your pants, I’ll just take off my bloomers and give ’em to you. You can just wear my bloomers to jail, Houston!”) Ma-Maw loved all the Conway boys, but she never could get their names quite right . . .
When his time came to speak, Eustace gave the judge the most eloquent and impassioned earful about his life and dreams and visions of saving nature, until the judge—amazed and impressed—said, as he was signing the papers to dismiss the poaching charges, “Is there anything I can do to help you with Turtle Island, son?”
Eustace also had to deal with such trials as a letter that the Triangle Native American Society sent to the mayor of Garner, North Carolina. The letter expressed the society’s concern over “information we have received about an individual who will be participating in an event being sponsored by your town on October 12. The person in question is Mr. Eustace Conway . . . It is our understanding that Mr. Conway presents information to the general public and special interest groups on how to survive and live off Mother Earth in as simple a way as possible. He has also been known to set up structures commonly known as tepees. Indians living in the Northeast and Southeast sections of this country never lived in tepees. North Carolina Indians lived in structures called ‘long houses.’We are seriously concerned that individuals attending the special event will leave it with three very wrong impressions: (a) Mr. Conway is a Native American, (b) Mr. Conway represents and speaks for native people, and (c) North Carolina Indians lived in tepees. We humbly ask that Mr. Conway not be allowed to erect the structure commonly known as a tepee for the reasons cited above.”
This was exactly the kind of shit Eustace had no time for. For the love of God, if there was anyone on the planet who knew that North Carolina Indians didn’t live in teepees, it was Eustace Conway, who had studied the languages of most North Carolina Indian tribes, who could dance the most obscure dances of North Carolina Indian tribes, who regularly fed himself using the hunting techniques of North Carolina Indian tribes and who was always careful to explain to his audiences that he himself was the product of modern white American culture (in order to prove that anyone could live as he does) and that the teepee was a housing method of the Great Plains. Also, as he explained in his reply, “I am more than just ‘an Anglo imitating the ways of the Native American,’ not just a ‘hobbyist.’ I have a deep understanding and peace with the Indian way. . . . I guess you can’t convey such feelings in a written letter . . . but in passing the pipe, living on Mother Earth, and listening to the winged ones of the air and the four-legged ones of the ground, I am honoring all the powers of the universe.”
And then there were the goddamn health inspectors.
“One of the first days of camp,” he wrote in his journal in July 1992, “Judson came running up to get me. I thought someone was hurt. Instead, the health inspectors in suits were coming up to inspect camp. Well, I put on a white shirt and went down to meet the demons. I kept my attitude positive—explained how this was a unique camp. I showed them all around—the camp sites, latrine, kitchen (which was very clean)—and charmed them as much as I could. They got an admiration of what we are doing. David Shelly, a young camper, gave them a knife-sharpening demonstration and lesson—impressive. They told me they would ‘sleep on it’ to see if they could figure out a way to accept our nonstandard situation.”
His work was endless. For all his love of the winged ones of the air and the four-legged ones of the ground, he hardly had time to write his nature observations in his journals.
“I really enjoy seeing the pileated woodpecker fly over in its dipping flight,” he managed to finally scribble down one morning at four a.m. when his day’s work had ended. “I hear them all day long, it seems. Nice to have this treasured bird as background music. Crows aplenty and an occasional hawk. Ruby-crowned kinglets are about; one almost flew into my face when I was up on the sacred spot above the meadow-to-be. Deer tracks around, but I haven’t seen any turkey this year. I enjoy the change of seasons. I look forward (and I don’t say or think this enough) to the days I will be free to enjoy many of the subtle daily changes of weather and life of the Appalachian valley, here where my heart is, here where I am planting roots, here where I am fighting, here where I hope to die.”
For now, though, that was a distant dream. A more typical entry was, “I called and verified several school bookings last night, always doing paperwork. I think I could do 3 hours a day and not keep caught up. I had to tell a lady last night that I couldn’t do the program in the spring for her school. I had a strange feeling of pride to know I am in enough demand to have to turn work down, but I’m afraid I did not feel proper empathy for her position. I must understand the other side of the picture.”
He was getting so overbooked for speaking engagements that he spent some money on producing a 45-minute video called All My Relatives: The Circle of Life, which he described in a letter to school principals across the South as “a classroom resource that can be used any time of the y
ear.” The video allowed Eustace to be in two places at once. “Not only for history classes, All My Relatives is also well suited for life sciences such as ecology and biology as well as anthropology,” Eustace wrote in the covering letter. “The enclosed flier provides more information, but reading about it does not do it justice; it needs to be seen. I am very pleased with the production and happy that it can be offered to your school at such a reasonable price.”
The fact is, though, that Eustace was becoming less convinced that his speaking tours were doing any good. For a man who had honestly thought he could change the world if he could borrow enough people’s ears for a long enough time, the numbing routine of brief classroom visits was no longer satisfying.
“I met with a sixth-grade class today,” he wrote after one unsettling encounter. “I could not believe the lack of education and inspiration I met with! They [the schoolchildren] were pitiful. . . . No motivation whatsoever. No understanding of their world. Just robots going through an established pattern of living to get by. We are truly on a survival level here—no arts or creativity. No passion. Just a slow monotone existence in oppressed ignorance. I asked if they knew what the word ‘sacred’ meant. They didn’t know. They put money, new cars, and telephones on their lists of what was valuable to them. One out of the fifty had an idea of sacredness. The boy said, ‘Life.’ One small soul in the class was on the right track away from greed as a motivator, and thank goodness for him . . . I was passionately challenged by the situation and gave it a big push, trying to get them to wake up and think, but I don’t feel I got very far. So here we are in the 1990s, where children are now less than human.”
Only two short years after founding Turtle Island, Eustace was starting to burn out. He wrote in his journal in July 1991, “I realize that I really crave time spent alone. I don’t want to be around people. The pressure of this community of folks here at Turtle Island is wearing on me. They take up my time and consume my life . . . The office—everyone wants to sit around, and I can’t get any work done. Yesterday while I was trying to do paperwork, Valarie, Ayal, and Jenny came in and started having a staff discussion. What an invasion of my space! Last night someone turned off the answering machine so it wouldn’t answer— after I have spent 200 hours working on the phone lines. I got ready to take a cold creek bath this morning to cool down but someone had taken my bucket from its place by the creek. I found a rotting sock in the yard. . . . The lambs were left in their pen today (not my responsibility). I let them out and thought of the day I had spent building the pen, and now nobody wants to take responsibility for the lambs.
“What am I to do? I need to figure out how to manage myself and my site so it won’t be so emotionally draining. One impulse is to quit all of the activities that we do here. That would solve the problem, but that would not be good for the camp and the purpose of the center. . . . What is important? Boundaries (personal) are at stake here. Should I please others or myself? I have worked very hard to make this place what it is. What have they done? What investment have they ever made in anything that is a challenge? How am I to put up with them? Should I? Money transfers is a way that people can help—to give something to me that I need . . . It is shocking how this takes a toll on me. I am back now after a six-hour depressed nap in the middle of the day . . . What to do? Ideas—delegate authority—get everyone aware of my needs emotionally and give them responsibility for keeping clear. I guess I could not even be here. That’s an idea. Imagine that. So many people to deal with . . . Well, good luck, Eustace.”
By the next year, Eustace was feeling plumb out of luck. He was too exhausted and disillusioned even to complain in his diary. He wrote only one bleak entry for the entire year: “What I feel inspired to write today is this deep emotional dissatisfaction with the reality of our times—corruption of government—fake people—sick values and unconscious people living meaningless lives.”
And, on the next page, written exactly twelve months later, this message: “Ditto, or is it spelled diddo, whatever, from last year’s entry. Except worse. Maybe more cynical.”
Worst of all, he was losing Valarie.
Consumed with his business and frequently on the road, Eustace was rarely with his girlfriend. She was working hard, too, and she was still in love with Eustace, but she was increasingly feeling that she had lost herself in him.
“I still love this man,”Valarie told me, looking back on the relationship with fifteen years of distance. “I still have every gift he made for me, from a knife sheath decorated with beads to a little hatchet I always used up at Turtle Island to a beautiful pair of earrings. If I died tomorrow, I’d want to be buried in those earrings. I loved learning from Eustace. I loved how he always gave me do-it-yourself birthday gifts. I told him one time that I wanted a pipe of my own for ceremonies and praying, and I came home one day to find a beautiful piece of soapstone on the kitchen counter. ‘What is that?’ I asked. He said, ‘It’s your pipe, Valarie.’ ‘I don’t get it,’ I said. ‘Where is it?’And he grinned that wonderful Eustace Conway grin and said, ‘It’s inside the stone, honey. We just have to get it out of there together.’
“I loved him, but I lost my identity in his, because he’s so overwhelming and powerful. I had my own thing going in life before I met him, but I quickly became the person who was beneath him, and my world started to revolve around his. He was and is a loving but intolerant person. Someone else’s opinion was never welcome. He was obsessed with making money, with buying land, with success, and he was always on the road. It got to the point where I never saw him. The only time we spoke was when he gave me orders.”
Valarie and Eustace had a good mutual friend, a Native American guy named Henry, who often went to powwows with them and who taught at Turtle Island. After a few years of loneliness and dissatisfaction, after feeling more and more that she was nothing but “the First Lady of Turtle Island,”Valarie had an affair with Henry. She hid the relationship from Eustace and denied that it had ever happened, even when, suspicious, he had asked her directly. Eustace, knowing something was up, took Henry off for a private evening to smoke a ceremonial pipe, and asked point blank whether he’d slept with Valarie. It is the most sacred tenet of Native American spiritually not to lie when smoking the pipe, but Henry looked Eustace in the eye and denied the affair.
Eustace was in torment. He knew in his heart that something was wrong and that he didn’t have all the facts. Devastated, he broke up with Valarie because he felt he couldn’t trust her. A few months after they split, Valarie came back, told him the truth, and begged for forgiveness.
But you don’t lie to Eustace Conway and then get a second chance. He was too horrified to even consider taking her back or transcending the injury. It blew him apart to learn that he could not find trust in this most intimate of relationships. And after all the pain he had suffered from his father, he had promised himself to banish from his life immediately anyone who would deliberately hurt or betray him. She would have to go. Eustace meditated and anguished for a year over the question of whether he could ever trust her again, and in the end he acknowledged that he could not reach that point of forgiveness.
“Truth is sacred to me,” he wrote to Valarie, telling her why they could no longer be together. “It is me. I live by it. I die by it. I asked you for the truth. I told you that you should always tell me the truth . . . that I did not care how much it would hurt. I begged for the truth. . . . You shit on me, you shit on our truth. What does this show about your ability to fulfill my needs? Go to hell. Goddamn! This is enough . . . How much abuse can I take? I have already witnessed my Dad’s cruelty . . . I needed your support—I got a backstabbing. I love you so much. You are precious. I could just hold you and pet your sweet head forever, but my truthful self has said, enough is enough!”
And as for his friend Henry?
“To smoke the pipe with me when I was coming in need and praying and asking for the truth? And you lied like a motherfucker. You need to die. Break th
e pipe in half and shove the stem through your heart and you will share an inkling of the pain I know. Now the woman I wanted to marry is a whore. You don’t deserve to be a human being. Fuck yourself and die.”
“I do see and understand,” Valarie wrote to Eustace, months after they’d separated, “how you can feel the need to avoid accepting any responsibility for the disintegration and ultimate failure of our relationship, because that would mean that you would have to admit that maybe, just maybe, you own a part in creating the pain which you and I now experience. To admit that might force you to take a good, hard look at yourself, and, as we both know, you don’t have the time, the willingness, or even, excuse my bluntness, the humility to consider this. Believe me, I’m not trying to lessen my responsibility for what I did, but only trying to help you see the whole picture. And, yes, it’s much easier to place all the blame for pain on another: ‘My folks made me this way,’ ‘The government is screwing up the planet,’ or ‘Valarie broke my heart’ . . . Your wanting to break up with me, because, as you said, ‘I shit on your heart,’ and you can’t go back on your promise to yourself not to accept anything but truth sounds great to you, I’m sure . . . But if love is real it endures all, forgives all, and even survives all. . . . In the process of going through a painful experience, you could have gained a woman who finally realized how to love and be loved, a woman who understood you, loved you, believed in you, supported you and gave up everything to be a part of your dream. Don’t you realize that you’re throwing away the greatest gift? A woman who accepts your faults, shortcomings, mental cruelties, and, yes, even your weirdness, and still loves you through it all. YOU GODDAMN STUPID CONCEITED ASSHOLE.”
The Last American Man Page 16
