The Last American Man

by Elizabeth Gilbert

  And it’s this same reluctance to remain static that made Eustace Conway, only two years after the Long Riders trip had ended, attempt another insanely ambitious horse journey. Because one must always keep pushing. One must always scrutinize and challenge and put one’s limitations under a microscope to examine and reject.

  Of course, Eustace didn’t embark on the same journey. No reason to repeat experience, after all. But a slightly different adventure this time. Having mastered transcontinental horsemanship on a saddle, Eustace decided to hitch his horses up to a lightweight buggy and take them on a lightning-fast tour of the Great Plains of North America, riding a twenty-five-hundred-mile circle across Nebraska, South Dakota, North Dakota, up into Canada, through Manitoba, Alberta, and Saskatchewan, then back down into Montana and Wyoming. He figured he could do it in under sixty days. He had a different partner now. He was riding with his new girlfriend. He had recently allowed himself to fall in love for the first time after having survived the whirling tornado of Carla. It had been a few years, but he was ready. He was excited about this new love of his, and he called me up shortly after he met the girl to tell me all about her.

  “What’s she like?” I asked.

  “Beautiful, intelligent, kind, young. Half Mexican. The most beautiful skin you ever saw.”

  “What’s her name?” I asked.

  “Patience.”

  “It better be!”

  Patience Harrison was a twenty-three-year-old schoolteacher. She was young, but certainly tough enough for a voyage like the one Eustace was about to take. She was a superb athlete, the former captain of the Duke field hockey team, and she was bold; she’d already traveled across Africa under much harder circumstances than she would encounter in Canada. Eustace was mad about her.

  He loved Patience for her brains and for her winning personality and for her physical courage. The first time she came to visit Turtle Island, Eustace took her for a buggy ride. He asked whether she wanted to try driving the horses for a while, and she reached for the reins without a moment’s hesitation, totally game. He thought,Wow, that’s the girl for me. He was also won over by a video he saw of Patience playing collegiate field hockey. In the video, you can see her take a nasty hit by an opponent with a flying stick and then drop to the ground in pain. She had broken her wrist. Then she gets up and tries to run after her opponent, even as her arm is dangling all wrong at her side. Then she’s down again on the ground in pain. Then she’s up for another attempt, hauling ass down the field, teeth gritted, refusing to quit. Forget about pornography; this was the sexiest video image of a woman Eustace had ever seen.

  And he loved Patience, it must be said, for her looks. She was gorgeous. Now, Eustace Conway isn’t ever going to have a girlfriend who isn’t gorgeous, but Patience was, as Eustace later put it, “my ideal. Can you imagine ever being with your ideal? With her Mexican background, she has that dark skin and dark eyes and white teeth that I find to be the most beautiful look in the world. I desire her so much. I’m never with her that I don’t desire her. Everything about her—her hands, her body, her lips, her ears, the gloss of her hair—I worship every cell of that girl.”

  He declared his love to her with his typical fervor.

  “With rainbows in my eyes I see your beauty,” he wrote to her in an early letter. “With sunshine in my heart, I feel love for you. Guided by butterflies I flow toward freedom with you. With the fertile rains of hope I dream of our future. With more passion than you would be comfortable with, I want you.”

  There was certainly no contesting that last statement. Patience Harrison was plenty compelled by Eustace and fascinated by his romantic life, but from the beginning she was cool to his ardor. It took him forever to coax her into physical intimacy in private, and she wasn’t physically attentive to him in public, either, not somebody who would even hold hands when people were watching. She was decidedly uncomfortable with his passion and found it difficult not to look away in embarrassment whenever he tried to gaze deep into her eyes. She disliked it immensely when he called her Baby, and grew annoyed at how fixated he was on her beauty, complaining, “Could you sometimes tell me that I’m intelligent or talented or interesting, instead of just gorgeous?”

  At which Eustace would joke, “You have the most intelligent glossy black hair I’ve ever seen. Your smile and eyes are hauntingly talented. You have the most interesting body in the world.”

  It did not, to most observers, seem a perfect match. Patience was a thoroughly modern young woman who had always kept boyfriends at a distance in order to maintain her independence. (She was so standoffish, she joked, that one of her ex-boyfriends had nicknamed her “Prudence.”) Eustace, who, as always, wanted a seamless union of fiery proportions, was stung by her coldness. Moreover, Patience wasn’t too sure about giving up her life to go live at Turtle Island forever as the new First Lady. But her biggest reservation, she would later admit, was that she was terrified by a comment Eustace had made early on about wanting to have thirteen children with her.

  That’s right: thirteen.

  I just had to ask Eustace about that.

  Actually,my exact question was: “Please tell me you didn’t really say that.”

  His response was, “One hundred years ago a woman wouldn’t have been scared by that idea!”

  Which was such a disappointing answer. Setting aside the perfectly obvious fact that it isn’t a hundred years ago, there is so much else wrong with this statement that I’m not sure where to start dissecting it. Eustace Conway, as a true student of history and anthropology, should know better. Even a hundred years ago, the average birth rate of the American woman had dropped to a mere 3.5 children per lifetime. Women were already using birth control and had publicly begun debating how raising huge families would affect their economic and social standing. You have to look a lot further back than a century, in other words, to find the kind of enthusiastic breeders Eustace was dreaming about.

  And even then there are other considerations. Take Daniel Boone’s wife, for example, the steadfast Ms. Rebecca Boone. Married at seventeen, Rebecca immediately inherited the two orphaned children of Boone’s dead brother. She then had ten children (who lived) of her own out there on the frontier, adopted the six motherless children of her widowed brother, and helped care for many of the thirty-three babies spawned by her four daughters.

  Rebecca Boone lived most of her adult life in a fort. She and her children starved through the winters. Her sons were wounded and killed by Indians; her daughters were merely kidnapped by them. In the middle of her marriage, Rebecca was able to move her family back to her safe and comfortable home settlement in North Carolina for two wonderful years while Daniel was out founding a new colony in Kentucky. When he came back to fetch her, she nearly revolted, almost refusing to return to the deep woods with him. He insisted; she resisted. The marriage, history suggests, came perilously close to ending. Rebecca was a loyal wife, though, and so, in the end, she followed her husband into the wilderness. But she was exhausted. A missionary who came through a Boone settlement in the 1780s remembered meeting Rebecca Boone and sitting with this “quiet soul” in front of her tiny cabin while she wept and told him of her troubles and hardships and of “the distress and fear in her heart.”

  So, yes, Eustace was correct in a sense. Many pioneer women had lots of children. But were they totally into it? Did they absolutely dig having all those babies? Was this some kind of inspired decision? Somehow I can’t picture Rebecca Boone turning handsprings of joy on the day she discovered, deep in the forest and well into her forties, that she was pregnant for the tenth time. Similarly, I can’t picture young Patience Harrison—recent Duke graduate and honor student and ambitious world traveler—getting all giddy with anticipation when Eustace Conway said he wanted to have thirteen kids with her.

  And she didn’t take comfort when Eustace assured her that thirteen kids was only his dream, that he had lots of dreams he never expected to be fulfilled, that he would even
consider having no children at all if that’s what she wanted, or they could adopt children, or there were any number of other options they could discuss. Furthermore, he wanted to know whether Patience had experienced a people, such as the Amish or the Maya of Guatemala, who truly cherished and valued children? Maybe her opinions would change if she could see firsthand, as Eustace had, the inspiring way those cultures fold large families into the greater society with such ease and pleasure. Still, the number echoed in Patience’s head like the vibrations from a great tolling cathedral bell.

  Thir-teen! Thir-teen! Thir-teen!

  That wasn’t the only problem between them, anyway. Patience was cautious and hesitant and remote with Eustace. But he still loved her. He attributed her hesitancy to her youth, and he hoped they would slowly come together over time to burn with a brighter passion. Maybe they could work things out on this adventure. Maybe the buggy ride would make everything better.

  Eustace, even more than on the Long Riders trip, wanted to push himself and his horses to the very edge of endurance. He knew his horses could move a lot faster pulling a buggy than carrying a man, and he wanted to see how fast they could travel. The buggy was light and quick, not a heavy-duty farm rig, and the horses were fitted with slick nylon harnesses that would be more efficient than leather.

  He was demonic about not making the horses carry extra weight. He had to approve of every item of clothing Patience wanted to bring to make sure that a pair of frivolous socks wouldn’t add an ounce of strain to his animals. Patience once stopped at a store in North Dakota and bought a jar of pickles for snacking, and Eustace gave her hell about it. “All that glass and fluid and pickles makes a lot of extra weight for my horses to pull all day,” he ranted, and didn’t let up until the offending item was consumed and discarded. With his horses, particularly on a difficult journey, he was concerned, attentive, vigilant. Miles from a vet and pushing his animals to the limits of their endurance, he was zealously aware of “every step my horses took, everything they ate, everything they drank, every scab, every limp, every booger, the color of their urine every time they pissed, the frequency of their stools, every tiny flick of the ear, everything.”

  Eustace was even more fanatical about speed on this journey than on the Long Riders trip. He was so obsessed with not wasting a moment’s time that when he saw a gate approaching, he’d hand the reins to Patience, leap off the buggy, and sprint ahead to open the gate. Then he’d slam it shut and sprint ahead to catch up with her. He wouldn’t even stop the buggy to relieve himself, choosing, instead, to leap off and piss in the woods while the horses trotted on, then catch up on foot at full speed.

  Eustace and Patience got so that they could change and replace their horses’ shoes—over fifty such stops on the trip—quicker than an Indy 500 pit team, Patience handing Eustace the tools, Eustace fixing the shoe swiftly and flawlessly. They moved across the plains, as Eustace later reported, “faster than a cloud’s shadow across the bent grass.” They stopped for virtually nothing. Eustace had fliers made up with information about the trip—press releases, really—that they handed to people when the inevitable million questions came up and they had to hustle on their way. They had not a moment’s leisure. When some ranchers in Canada invited them to stick around for a few days to enjoy the yearly round-up and branding, Patience wanted to stay, but Eustace said, “There will be lots of brandings and round-ups, but only one chance for us to ever set a world speed record by going twenty-five hundred miles in fifty-six days.”

  The trip was most certainly a success in horsemanship, organization, and safety. But the relationship, already vulnerable, was murdered by it. Eustace and Patience were getting four hours of sleep a night, careening across the prairie, freezing, miserable, intense. The weather was brutal. When it wasn’t a 70 mph wind, it was freezing rain. Their hands stopped working from the cold, so they couldn’t unfasten harnesses and buckles at the end of each day. They ate horrible food or didn’t eat at all.

  There were some unforgettable moments, of course. The scenery was extraordinary. They had a wonderful time for a few days riding through a no-man’s-land—a swath of ownerless land within the Canadian-American border, in which they felt as if they were riding nowhere on the mapped earth. When the rain and sleet abated, they read Cormac McCarthy novels to each other. That was nice. They met many generous people, and Eustace liked sitting back and letting Patience be her gracious, disarming self. He liked watching her win over strangers, who would fall in love with her and then offer them housing, food, help for the horses. And their teamwork with the animals was striking. What was most impressive, though, was that Patience—competitive athlete that she was—never once complained about the physical toll and long hours of the journey.

  “That,” she told me, “was the easy part.”

  The hard part was that they were passing whole days without speaking to each other, except about the horses. And they weren’t sleeping together. No conversation, no physical contact.

  “I never cried because I was tired or in pain,” Patience said. “But I cried a lot toward the end about the relationship with Eustace. It sucked.”

  The journey itself was heroic, in other words, but the situation was unfortunately reminiscent of Ursula K. LeGuin’s sharp observation that “the backside of heroism is often rather sad; women and servants know that.”

  Patience couldn’t stand Eustace’s constant dominance over her. “I used to be a tomboy,” she said. “I used to intimidate men with my strength. I was a modern woman with a lot of confidence in myself before I met him. But slowly he overtook me until I had no power anymore. That’s how it happens with Eustace; you get sucked into the vortex of his goals and his life, and then you’re lost. I disappeared to him. Lots of times, local reporters would ask to join us for the trip, so he’d ride in the buggy with the reporter and I’d follow in the reporter’s car. He’d charm each guy and talk to him all day, but the next day, when I rode beside him for twenty hours, he’d never say a word to me. All he did on that trip was boss me around and tell me what to do.”

  “Of course I told her what to do,” Eustace agreed. “Of course I was in charge, because I knew what had to be done. I had the background and the experience to understand the animals and the realities of long-distance survival and to save her life and my life and the horses’ lives on two thousand different occasions, and she didn’t even notice fifteen hundred of those times. I never had her respect about that. She got more sulky and more immature when we were working together. She had no idea what it took to get us alive across that prairie. We had the goal to set a world speed record. And if I’m going to take on something like that, I’m taking it on a hundred percent, and she needs to respect my knowledge and stop having childish reactions to my leadership.”

  When I asked Eustace whether it would have helped to pull the buggy over for a day to sit in a meadow and talk over the problems they were having, he said, “That wasn’t part of the program. That would have ruined our goal.”

  Patience later complained (just as Judson had complained on the Long Riders voyage) that Eustace acted like his father during this trip. Patience had spent enough time around Eustace’s parents to be upset by the dominance and disdain Big Eustace showed his wife, and now she felt she was getting the same treatment from Little Eustace. The same kind of tyranny, the same level of perfectionism, the same refusal to respond to the needs of anyone else. To both Patience and Judson, Eustace came across on these horse journeys not only as impossible, but as tragic. What could be sadder than a man who literally travels to the ends of the earth but still cannot avoid becoming his father?

  But I’m not convinced that Eustace was becoming his father on these journeys so much as honoring him, trying to prove again that he was worthy, brave, accomplished, and logical. Just as he had tried to prove with all his most daring adventures and mind-numbing accomplishments. As much as Eustace may have wanted to love Patience and his brother, he could not put their needs first wh
en the stake of each of these journeys was so massive—nothing less than the prize of getting his father’s attention at last. He was still concentrating on the older and sadder love story, one that was so bitterly unresolved. Big Eustace had never given his son a word or a nod of recognition despite all his achievements. What more did Eustace have to do to get the man to acknowledge that his son was not a miserable, pathetic, idiotic failure? Would an equestrian world speed record do it?

  Would two?

  One cannot level against Eustace a more hurtful charge than that he is behaving like his father. “I would be glad to put a gun in my mouth and blow my own head off,” he said, “if I ever believed I treated anyone the way that man treated me.” Certainly Eustace opens himself up to more self-doubt and self-criticism than his father has ever done, and he has suffered deeply (no more so than on these long horse journeys) over his troubles in relating to people. He knows of these problems; he sees the patterns; he works to correct the situations. But he does not always know what to do. He is self-aware enough to know that he is, in his word, “damaged,” but he doesn’t know how to repair himself. He knows that he was way over his head with Patience Harrison, that, for whatever reasons, he couldn’t communicate with her on the journey in a way that gave them any chance at a relationship. Maybe it was her immaturity; maybe it was his relentless perfectionism; maybe it was a corrosive combination of their combined weaknesses. But the whole thing was a disaster.

  “Maybe,” he said, “we should have concentrated more on our relationship and less on our goals, but our goals sometimes felt like the only thing we had in common. I don’t know what I should have done. I’m not good at this kind of thing. I just hoped we could work it out later.”