When the ice storm ended, the Long Riders bade farewell to their militia friends and headed west again with their new partner, young Swamper, driving the support vehicle, pushing on toward Texas.
Texas was a highlight for Eustace, because that’s where he bought himself the greatest horse of his life—his beloved Hobo. Hobo was a made-for-travelin’ Registered Standard Breed. Hobo would become a legend, the fastest and smartest and most loyal horse Eustace ever met. Eustace bought Hobo on the road in the middle of Texas from a farmer named Mr. Garland, and what a find that was. The farmer was leaning on his fence when the Long Riders trotted by, and they all set to talking. As Mr. Garland described this horse he was thinking of selling (“he’s kind of thin and fast”) Eustace’s mouth almost started watering. From the brief conversation, he could fill out the whole story. This Texan had bought himself a beautiful and speedy horse because he loved the idea of it, but now he found the animal too fast to handle. Bring it on!
“You want to try him out?” the Texan asked.
Eustace got on Hobo for a test drive and said, “Come up, boy.” In one dizzying nanosecond that horse went from contentedly grazing in the field to a formidable G-force gallop. Eustace’s hat flew off, and he was barely hanging on by his heels.
“I don’t think your brother can manage that horse,” Mr. Garland said to Judson, who was watching from the fence, and Judson said, “Oh, he’ll manage.”
What a day! Eustace was afraid it would be rude and obscene to tell that Texan how good this horse felt between his legs on the test drive, how fine and thrilling it was when Hobo opened up and took off across the pastures “like a born challenger, like a rocket,” how he couldn’t help thinking that nothing in the world had felt so good between his legs except maybe Carla’s body . . .
He bought Hobo right then and there and rode off with him. Eustace and this spectacular horse had the most amazing interaction, right from day one. As Eustace would say, “All I’d have to do is think, and as fast as I could articulate the thought, Hobo would respond.” This was an animal that finally matched Eustace’s will—a true partner, an animal that wanted to go. Hobo was a brilliant addition. The Long Riders needed an eager pace horse like Hobo to keep up their momentum. It was hard sometimes to stay motivated. All of them—horses and horsemen— were suffering from injuries and strain and weariness. Judson always shot off his pistol in celebration as they crossed a state border, for instance, but there was a nasty accident one day when he did this on the Arizona–New Mexico border and Eustace’s horse took off in a panic and threw him. Eustace wasn’t riding Hobo or Hasty that day, but was trying out a horse they’d purchased recently—Blackie, a strong and skittish mustang blend, which apparently had no liking for guns. When Judson shot off his pistol, the horse went ballistic, and Eustace landed on the top of his head on a rock and split his scalp. He was so badly hurt, he could barely see straight, and every step gave him a spasm, but he let the blood clot as a bandage and kept riding, because “What was I gonna do? Not continue on?”
This was no joy ride. They were not sashaying across America. They were burning up the miles, which meant they were tired all the time. They were hungry and hurting. They argued with one another. Sadly, the very opposite of what Eustace had wanted from this trip was happening. He had hoped to strengthen his relationship with Judson, but, instead, Judson was slipping farther and farther away from his hero-worshipping attitude toward his older brother. Judson wanted to have fun on this trip, and resented Eustace’s unyielding fixation on speed, which never allowed them time to stop and take in the surroundings.
“What can I say about Eustace?” Judson asked later. “He’s gotta be goddamn Ernest Shackleton all the time, set every world record, be the fastest this and the best that. He could never relax and have a good time. That’s not why Susan and I took the trip.”
The cross-country journey was turning into a vast canvas on which the differences between the Conway brothers were boldly highlighted. There was Eustace on one side—driven by his ancient mythological themes of heroes and destinies. And there beside him was Judson— driven by his desire to have a good time and armed with a thoroughly modern sensibility about the roles that people play in this world. It was this super self-conscious sensibility of Judson Conway’s (a sensibility, by the way, that he shares with pretty much every modern American except his brother) that enabled him to joke, “Hey, I’m a real cowboy now!” as he fired off his six-shooter. Judson was riding his horse across America because he knew that people used to do that kind of thing and because it was cool and fun to masquerade as an icon. Eustace was riding his horse across America because he wanted the icon to live. For Judson it was a delicious game; for Eustace, it was an acutely serious endeavor.
“Susan and I would’ve been happy to go at half the pace and have more time to hang out and smell the flowers,” Judson said.
“Just because I’m traveling fifty miles a day,” Eustace countered, “doesn’t mean I can’t smell the flowers. I’m smelling the goddamn flowers as I’m speeding by! And I’m smelling fifty miles more of ’em than other people. First of all, we needed the speed on this trip because of scheduling—Judson and Susan had to get back to their jobs, so we didn’t have forever to get to California. Also, I wanted to learn how much we were capable of. Both the horses and the riders. I wanted to push, to scrutinize, to challenge, to bend the realm of the possible. I wanted to put our limitations under a microscope and stare at them, understand them, and reject them. Look, it wasn’t important to me to be comfortable on this trip or to even have fun. When I have a goal, when I’m in the middle of a challenge like this, I don’t need the things other people need. I don’t need to sleep or eat or be warm or dry. I can live on nothing when I stop eating and sleeping.”
“That’s called dying, Eustace,” I said.
“No.”He grinned. “That’s called living.”
It’s hard to see where this urgency fits into Eustace’s more Zen-like philosophies of living in perfect harmony with the gentle rhythms of nature, about “being like water.” This journey was definitely not about being like water; it was about being a cross-country, cross-cutting buzzsaw. And the effect was not calming. Eustace’s partners could hardly stand his unremitting determination. Judson took to drinking whiskey every night on the trip as a way to soften the impact of his brother’s intensity.
“I know Eustace hated seeing me getting drunk and oblivious,” he said, “but it kept me sane.”
Eustace was relentless and his leadership was often oppressive, but he stands by all his decisions, even to this day. “People don’t understand— Judson and Susan didn’t understand—that it was no accident we covered all that distance without getting ourselves or our animals killed or seriously hurt. I know other people who’ve tried to ride a horse across America and got all messed up—horses injured, equipment stolen, mugged, beaten up, hit by cars. That didn’t happen to us, because I was fucking vigilant. I made about a thousand private decisions every day, each one narrowing the odds of hitting trouble. If I decided to cross the road, it was for a reason. If I could shift my horse slightly so that he walked on grass instead of gravel for just four steps, I’d do that, saving his legs four steps of impact.
“At the end of every day, when we were looking for campsites, my computer brain would kick in and evaluate each possibility, taking in about three dozen contingencies nobody else would have considered. What kind of neighborhood is this meadow near? Is there an exit route behind the meadow in case we need to make a quick move? Are there loose wires on the ground that the horses could get tangled up in? Is there fresh grass across the road that’s going to lure the horses to head over the highway in the middle of the night and get hit? Will people see us from the road and stop to ask what we’re up to and waste our energy when we need to be caring for the horses? Judson and Susan never saw this process. They kept saying, ‘How about this spot, Eustace? This looks like a nice place to camp.’ And I’d say, ‘Nope,
nope, nope’ and not bother to explain why.”
Judson and Susan, already chafing under Eustace’s command, mutinied in Arizona. They literally came to a fork in the road. Judson and Susan wanted to veer off the highway and take a wilder route for the day, heading down into a rugged canyon for a shortcut that promised some serious all-terrain adventure. Eustace balked. He wanted to stay on the highway, a duller and less scenic ride that would put more miles on the horses, but considerably less impact. The Long Riders held a group meeting.
“It’s not safe,” Eustace said. “You don’t know what you’ll encounter down there. You could run into a canyon wall or an impassable river and have to backtrack ten miles, lose the whole day. You could get killed. You don’t have a map or any reliable information. You’re going to encounter loose rockslides and poor trails and dangerous creeks that will beat the hell out of your horses. Your animals are already pushed to the edge; it’s cruel to make this demand on them. It’s too dangerous a risk.”
“We’re tired of riding on the highway,” Judson complained. “We came on this trip because we wanted to see the country, and this is our chance to get back down into nature. We want to be more spontaneous, live closer to the edge.”
They took a vote and, of course, Judson and Susan won. Eustace wouldn’t budge. “I’m dead against it,” he said. “You can take the canyon trail if you want to, but I’m not coming.”
It was a devastating moment for Judson. They’d made a pact before setting out on the journey that democratic action would rule the day; if there was ever a dispute over the next move, majority opinion would rule. They would never split up over a disagreement, and now they were doing exactly that. On this heroic twenty-five-hundred-mile journey, there was to be one sad thirty-mile gap in the middle of the country where the inseparable partners separated because they could not reach a consensus.
“I thought we were supposed to be a team,” Judson said to his brother.
And Eustace replied, “I’m happy to be on a team as long as we always do what I know is right.”
Judson and Susan headed off down the canyon.
“It was the coolest day of the whole journey,” Judson recalled. “Wild scenery and nature. We rode through rivers up to our horses’ bellies and we rode through ancient rock spires. We loved every minute of it, laughing and singing the whole time. It was everything I’d imagined the trip could be. We felt like old-time outlaws. And Eustace missed it.”
“Their horses came back limping,” Eustace remembered. “They never should have been down there. They could have been killed, or they could have destroyed their animals. I was right.”
From then on, Judson decided to shut his mouth and go along with Eustace’s commands, because it was more peaceful to submit than to fight. But as he rode alongside his older brother, he endured the dreadful sense of knowing that they would never be the same after this.
They made it to the Pacific by Easter, as they’d planned. No desertions and no deaths. They rode through San Diego to where they could smell the ocean. When they broke over the last highway and got to the beach, Eustace rode his horse right into the surf, as though he’d like to ride Hobo all the way to China. He was in tears, still pushing.
Not so Judson and Susan. They were finished with this brutal trip. It was over, and they were thrilled. Judson went directly to where people were. He rode his horse right into a bar and sat—on his horse!—for several hours, spinning his six-shooter and telling stories while the customers crowded up to him and the bartender bought him round after round. As for Susan, she tied her horse outside the bar and walked into the crowd quietly, garnering no particular attention.
They spent the next week in San Diego, where their mothers came to meet them. Mrs. Conway and Mrs. Klimkowski wanted to take the kids all around the town, to show them Sea World and tour the zoo and eat at fancy restaurants. Judson and Susan were more than happy to be pampered, but Eustace stayed clear of everyone, silent and morose.
“I don’t know how they could turn it off like that,” Eustace said later. “I wanted to tell them, ‘Hey, you guys just had this incredible experience with your horses and you can forget it? One day you’re living life so intensely and the next day you can hop in the car and go get a fucking Tastee-Freez? Like it never happened?’ They didn’t seem to care at all.”
He spent the week alone, brooding, riding his horse every day, all day long, up and down the beach. His companions would ask, “Aren’t you sick of riding yet?” No. Never. Eustace rode the beach for hours, contemplating his journey, facing down the undeniable limitation of the Pacific Ocean, and dealing with the geographical reality of his personal Manifest Destiny: that there was nowhere else to go. The country dead-ended right here. It was over. If only another continent would appear out of the sea so that he could conquer it, too . . .
They drove the horses back to North Carolina in the trailer. Gave them a nice break. Eustace may not have needed to relax after the journey, but he was bent on letting his beloved Hobo relax for a while.
So Hobo got a nice rest in a trailer, riding all the way home to North Carolina like a celebrity. Back at Turtle Island, Eustace gave the horse several months in the pasture to unwind before they started riding together again. Of course, riding was going to be different at Turtle Island from what it had been on the road. Eustace needed Hobo now for farm work more than for speed. He needed to ride Hobo when he was out surveying property and he needed to hitch Hobo up to help drag logs and sleds filled with tools. They worked hard and well together. Hobo had a sweetness that even surpassed his speed.
And then, one day, long months after the Long Riders trip was over, Eustace decided that he and Hobo had earned an old-fashioned joy ride. So they took off from the stress and hubbub of Turtle Island and rode up into the mountains. They climbed and climbed to a high meadow, where, Eustace remembers, he let go of the reins and spread his arms wide and allowed Hobo to open up and run for the sheer delight of it in the high, bright air.
They rode back home, quiet and happy. But when they were almost in sight of the barn,Hobo tripped. He tripped on a tiny rock. You could hardly call it an accident, it was so insignificant. This beautiful horse, which had crossed the continent without injury or complaint, which could scale loose rock and sheer Appalachian slopes without a moment’s hesitation and always responded with intelligence and eagerness to Eustace’s faintest hints of communication, just stumbled over a common stone. Hobo took a funny little step and broke his leg, and the femur snapped nearly in half.
“No,” Eustace said, leaping off his horse.“No, please, no . . .”
Hobo couldn’t put any weight on the leg. He was confused and kept turning around to look at the injured limb. And at Eustace, hoping for an answer to what had gone wrong. Eustace left Hobo there alone and ran to his office, where he made desperate phone calls to his mentors, the hillbilly Hoy Moretz and the Mennonite Johnny Ruhl. He called every veterinarian he knew, and every farrier, but when he described what had happened, all they could do was confirm what he already knew: that nothing could be done. Eustace would have to shoot his friend. After all they’d been through together, to have this happen on a fine afternoon at home, when they were almost in sight of the barn . . .
Eustace got his shotgun and went back to the horse. Hobo was standing there, as before, looking at his leg and then at Eustace, trying to make sense of it. “I’m so sorry, Hobo,” Eustace said, “and I love you so much.”And then he shot Hobo in the head.
The horse buckled to the ground, and Eustace collapsed with him, sobbing. He clung to Hobo’s neck as the horse died, telling him about all the good times they’d had together and about how brave he always was and thanking him. How could this have happened? They were only steps away from the barn . . .
Later in the day—and this was the hardest part—Eustace returned to cut off Hobo’s mane and tail. These would mean much to him in the years to come. Maybe if Eustace ever got a horse someday who was worthy, he could t
ake strands from the mane and tail of Hobo and weave them into a bridle for the new animal, and this would be a fine tribute. To make that first cut, though, to disturb his friend’s body with a knife, was almost impossible, and Eustace cried as if the weight of his grief would fell every tree in the woods.
He left Hobo where he’d fallen. He wanted the vultures to eat him. He knew that the Native Americans believed vultures to be the sacred transport, the means by which a spirit is delivered from the earth up into the sky. So Eustace left Hobo there, where the birds could find him. Which means that, even today, whenever Eustace is working outside and sees vultures drifting in the air, he looks up and says hello, because he knows that’s where Hobo lives now.
When springtime came, Eustace returned to where Hobo had fallen to look over his friend’s bones. He wanted to collect the vulture feathers he found around Hobo’s body and keep them in a sacred place. But his intention was not merely spiritual; Eustace also wanted to examine Hobo’s broken femur, now that the meat was gone from it. He had a suspicion that the break may have been inevitable. He’d often wondered whether Hobo had once been a racehorse and sustained a career-ending injury, and that’s why the farmer in Texas had ended up with him and was willing to sell him for a reasonable price. Maybe Hobo had carried this stress fracture around for years, and there had always been this weakness in the bone, and it had been only a matter of time before it broke again.
And indeed, when Eustace studied Hobo’s bleached bones, he found his suspicion to be correct—the bone had always been cracked; the injury had always been there. This moment, when Eustace knelt on the ground and examined the bone with a scientific eye, is crucial, because it shows how, even in his grief, Eustace Conway always searches for logic and for answers. Life goes on, after all, and one must always seek the lesson even through the sorrow. Never remain static; never stop collecting information.
The Last American Man Page 20
