The Last American Man

by Elizabeth Gilbert

  Eustace Conway, naturally, has made Dumpster Diving into an art. He supported his appetites through college by subsidizing his blowgun game catches with the juicy remains of the supermarket alleys. And he perfected his system because, you can be sure, if he’s going to do it, he’ll do it flawlessly, like everything else.

  “Timing is crucial,” he explained. “You want to pick exactly the right moment of the day to start foraging in the Dumpster. It’s best to hang around the store a bit and scope things out, see what time each day the food goes out so that you can get it at its freshest. It’s also important to walk back to the Dumpster as though you belong there, moving with speed and confidence. Stay low to the ground and don’t dawdle. I always look immediately for a sturdy, wax-covered cardboard box with nice handles, and I grab it and jump into the Dumpster. Leaning over the side and poking around is not an economical use of your time. I waste no time with any produce that is poor quality. Just because you’re eating out of the garbage, doesn’t mean you need to eat garbage. I fly through the produce, throwing aside anything that’s rotten or of low quality. If there’s a crate of spoiled apples, I may find the three perfect apples in there and toss them into my cardboard box. You can often find one perfect melon in a box of smashed melons, and sometimes you can find a whole crate of grapes that were thrown out because they’re off the stem. And meat! I’ve brought home dozens of sirloin steaks, all nicely wrapped in plastic, that were tossed out because they’re one day over expiration. I can almost always find whole trays full of yogurt—I love yogurt—that are perfectly good and were thrown out for the same reason. Isn’t that a sin, what gets wasted in this country? It reminds me of what my old Appalachian neighbor Lonnie Carlton said: ‘We used to live on less than what folks throw away these days.’ ”

  One famous incident occurred when Eustace went into a Dumpster in Boone all alone, on a quiet and routine sortie. Looking confident, keeping low, finding his special cardboard box, he was making quick progress through the Dumpster and compiling “the nicest arrangement of fruits and vegetables you ever saw” when he heard a truck pull up behind the store. Then footsteps. Shit! Eustace ducked down into the corner of the Dumpster and made himself as tiny as he could. And then a man, a nice-looking older gentleman in clean clothes, leaned over the Dumpster and started poking around. A fellow diver! Eustace didn’t breathe. The stranger didn’t notice him, but it wasn’t long before he did notice Eustace’s sturdy, wax-covered cardboard box filled with the finest produce money can’t buy.

  “Hmm,” said the stranger, pleased with the discovery.

  He leaned far over, picked up the box, and walked away with it. Eustace heard the truck start up again and sat there, huddled like a rat in the corner, thinking this over. Should he hide until the truck was gone? Play it safe? Start his search over? But, wait. That man was stealing his produce! It had taken him a good fifteen minutes to find those goods, and they constituted the best food available that day. Eustace couldn’t stand for that. You can’t let a man take food from your mouth! He leaped out of the Dumpster as though he were on springs and took off after the truck. He waved the guy down, yelling as he gave chase. The stranger pulled over, ashen, trembling at this wild apparition that had emerged, running and yelling, from the bowels of a supermarket Dumpster.

  “Good afternoon, sir,” Eustace began, and released one of his most charming smiles. “I have to tell you, sir, that those are my fruits and vegetables you’ve taken.”

  The stranger stared. He seemed to be considering having a heart attack.

  “Yes, my friend, I collected all that food for myself, and it took me some time to do it. I’m happy to share it with you, but I can’t let you take it all. Why don’t you wait here while I find you a box of your own, and I’ll split it up for the two of us?”

  Then Eustace ran to the Dumpster and found another sturdy, wax-covered cardboard box. He ran back, jumped into the bed of the stranger’s pickup, and quickly and evenly divided the produce into two even caches. He grabbed one box for himself, hopped out of the truck, and returned to the driver’s side window. The man gaped at him, dazed. Eustace let fly another big smile.

  “OK, then, sir. You’ve got yourself a nice box of groceries now, and so do I.”

  The stranger didn’t move.

  “You’re good to go now, sir,” Eustace said. “And have a nice day.”

  Slowly, the stranger drove away. He’d never once said a word.

  So. There comes a time in the residency of any Turtle Island apprentice when the skill of Dumpster Diving is introduced. Most of the apprentices take to it like rats to a junkyard, enjoying the opportunity to get into town for a field trip and to stick it to society once more in a subversive way. They call these little shopping expeditions “visits to the Dump Store,” and when the squash mush has been served up for the fourth consecutive week, that forbidden fruit from the A&P starts to look pretty good. This helps account for the odd variety of food I have experienced at Turtle Island. Yes, there is the fine homemade gingerbread with homemade peach butter. Yes, there is the superb spinach, fresh from the garden. But I’ve also dined up there on such decidedly non-Appalachian fare as pineapples, coconuts, chocolate pudding cups, and, on one memorable occasion, something I found in a Styrofoam package labeled “white and dainty cream-filled pastry horns.”

  “In all the months I’ve lived here,” Candice the apprentice told me, “I’ve never once figured out how we survive. I honestly don’t know how we live. Dumpster Diving can take you only so far, you know, and in the winter we starve. Sometimes people bring us food, which is great, because we’re not allowed to buy anything. I’ve been in charge of the cooking most of the time that I’ve been here, and I’ve only ever spent Eustace’s money twice, on real staples, like cornmeal or oil or pepper. Other than that, we scrounge.”

  I once asked Candice what she used for her excellent bread, and she replied, “Whole wheat. Plus”—and ran her fingers through a sandy grain she kept stored in an old coffee can—“I always throw in some of this weird stuff. I got it from one of the horses’ feed bins in the barn. I don’t know what it is, but you can’t taste it in the bread, and it makes the wheat last longer.”

  Another afternoon, I was hanging out with Candice in the outdoor kitchen, helping her cook, when Jason wandered in.

  “Hey, Jason,” she said. “Can you move Barn Kitty for me?”

  Barn Kitty was Turtle Island’s most excellent mouser, a hardworking cat that could usually be found in the granary or on the topmost shelves of the outdoor kitchen. I realized that I hadn’t seen Barn Kitty in a while.

  “Where is she?” Jason asked.

  “Yeah,” I said. “Where is she?”

  “Under the water trough,” Candice replied. “The dogs keep rolling in her and moving her around, and she smells awful.”

  I looked under the water trough. Oh, that’s why I hadn’t seen Barn Kitty in a while. Because Barn Kitty was now a matted, reeking, legless corpse. Candice explained that a bobcat got to Barn Kitty one night a few weeks earlier. Since then, Barn Kitty’s battered remains kept showing up all over Turtle Island, dragged around by various other living creatures. Jason picked up the remains with a stick and threw them up on the tin roof of the kitchen, where the sun could bake them dry and the dogs couldn’t reach them.

  “Thanks, Jason,” Candice said, and added under her breath, “Jeez, I don’t know why we didn’t just eat that old cat. Eustace makes us eat every other damn thing that dies around here.”

  I overheard Eustace one day talking on the telephone to a young man who had called all the way from Texas because he wanted to sign on as a Turtle Island apprentice. The kid sounded promising. His name was Shannon Nunn. He’d been raised on a ranch and claimed to have done farm labor his whole life. He also knew how to fix automobile engines. And he was a star athlete of enormous personal discipline. Eustace tries not to get his hopes up about people, but these few factors alone made Shannon Nunn sound about 1000 pe
rcent more promising than the scores of idealistic, romantic, and incompetent college kids who often arrive at Turtle Island “unable to open a car door.” Shannon said that he’d read about Eustace in Life magazine and was calling because he wanted a new challenge for himself. If he could learn how to live off the land, maybe he’d escape a life in shallow modern American culture, where “everyone is drowning in complacency.”

  Sounded good so far.

  Still, Eustace spent an hour explaining to Shannon what he could expect at Turtle Island. It was a lucid and patently honest speech.

  “I’m not a normal person, Shannon,” I heard him say. “Many people find that I’m not easy to get along with or work for. My expectations are high, and I don’t give my workers much praise. People sometimes come here thinking they already have a lot of valuable skills to offer, but I’m rarely impressed. If you come, you’ll be expected to work. Turtle Island is not a school. There are no classes here. This is not a survivor’s course. I’m not going to take you in the woods for a certain number of hours a day and teach you an organized program of wilderness skills. If that’s the kind of experience you want, please don’t come here. There are plenty of places where you can find that, places that will put your needs and desires first. Outward Bound is good for that, and so is the National Outdoor Leadership School. You pay them; they’ll teach you. I am not about that. I’ll never put your needs or desires first, Shannon. The needs of this farm always come first. A lot of the chores I’ll give you are repetitive and boring, and you’ll probably feel you’re not learning anything. But I can promise that if you stay with the apprenticeship program for at least two years, and if you do what I say, you’ll acquire the hard skills that will give you a degree of self-sufficiency almost unknown in our culture. If I see that you’re willing to learn and able to work, I’ll devote more time to you individually as the months go by. But it will all come very slowly, and I’ll always maintain my authority over you.

  “I’m telling you this because I’m tired. Tired of having people come here with preconceptions that are different from what I’ve just explained to you and then leave in disappointment. I don’t have time for that, so I’m trying to make myself extremely clear. I’ll demand more of you than you’ve ever had demanded of yourself. And if you aren’t ready to work hard and to do exactly what I say, then please stay home.”

  Shannon Nunn said, “I understand. I want to be there.”

  Shannon showed up a month after this conversation, ready to work. He was more excited, he said, than he’d ever been about anything. He was a young man seeking spiritual wholeness in the woods, and he believed he had found his teacher. He was looking, he said, “to drink of that water that—once you find it—you will never thirst again.”

  Seven days later, he packed up his bags and left Turtle Island, deeply angry, hurt, and disappointed.

  “I went there,” Shannon told me over a year later, “because I thought I understood the deal. Eustace promised me that if I worked for him, he’d teach me how to live off the land. I thought he would be teaching me survival skills, you know? Like hunting and gathering. Like how to build a shelter in the wilderness and how to make fire—all the stuff he knows. I’d invested a lot of time and energy to go to Turtle Island. It was scary, because I’d left everything—my home,my family,my school—to go there and be taught by him. But all he had me doing was mindless menial labor! He didn’t teach me anything about living off the land. He had me building fences and digging ditches. And I told him, ‘Man, I could be digging ditches back home and getting paid for it. I don’t need this.’ ”

  Shannon was so disappointed that within a week of his arrival, he went to Eustace to discuss his problems with the apprenticeship program. Eustace heard the boy out. His response was: “If you don’t like it here, go.” And he walked away from the conversation. This made Shannon furious to the point of tears. Wait a minute! Why was Eustace walking away from him? Couldn’t he see how upset Shannon was? Couldn’t they talk about it? Work something out?

  But Eustace had already talked and didn’t feel like talking anymore. He’d had this same conversation again and again with many different Shannon Nunns over many years, and he had nothing more to say. Eustace walked away from the conversation because he was tired and because he had to get back to work.

  He sleeps only a few hours a night.

  Sometimes he dreams about Guatemala, where he saw children who were adept with a machete by the age of three. Sometimes he dreams about the orderly farms and quiet families of the Mennonites. Sometimes he dreams of dropping his agenda for saving the human race and, as he wrote in his journal, “changing Turtle Island into a private ‘for me’ sanctuary to try to survive the ridiculous nature of the world today.”

  But then he dreams about his grandfather, who once wrote, “More enduring than skyscrapers, bridges, cathedrals, and other material symbols of man’s achievement are the invisible monuments of wisdom, inspiration, and example erected in the hearts and minds of men. As you throw the weight of your influence on the side of the good, the true and the beautiful, your life will achieve an endless splendor.”

  And he dreams about his father. He wonders how much more backbreaking success he’ll have to achieve before he earns one word of praise from the old man.

  And then he wakes up.

  Every morning, he wakes up to the same thing, to a national crisis. An impotent nation reflexively ruining everything in its path. He wonders whether there’s any hope of repairing this. He wonders why he’s thrown his life into the breach to save everybody else’s life. Why he allows his sacred land to be overrun by clumsy fools who treat the place so roughly. He wonders how it came to pass that, when all he ever wanted was to be nature’s lover, he feels he has become her pimp instead. He tries to comprehend the difference between what he’s obligated to do with his life and what he’s allowed to do. If he could do only what he truly wanted, he might sell off this whole heavy burden of Turtle Island and use the money to buy a broad parcel of land somewhere in the middle of New Zealand. There, he could live in peace, all alone. Eustace loves New Zealand. What a spectacular country! Free of every kind of poisonous creature, sparsely populated with honest and trustworthy people, clean and isolated. To hell with America, Eustace thinks. Maybe he should drop out of the mountain man rat race and leave his countrymen to their fate.

  It’s a gorgeous fantasy, but Eustace wonders whether he’d have the resolve to act on it. Maybe when he dreams about moving to New Zealand he’s like one of those urban stockbrokers who dream about cashing out and moving up to Vermont to open a hardware store. Maybe, like the stockbrokers, he’ll never make the shift. Maybe, like them, he’s too invested in his lifestyle to ever change.

  “Maybe I’m too late with my message,” he says. “Maybe I’m too early. All I can say is that I think this country is suffering through a mortal emergency. I think it’s a nightmare and that we’re doomed if we don’t change. And I don’t even know what to suggest anymore. I’m tired of hearing myself talk.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  We are great, and rapidly—I was about to say fearfully—growing!

  —John Caldwell Calhoun, 1817

  I get drunk with Eustace Conway sometimes. It’s one of my favorite things to do with him. OK, it’s one of my favorite things to do with almost anybody, but I particularly enjoy doing it with Eustace. Because there’s some measure of peace that the alcohol brings to him—those famous sedative properties at work, I suppose—that tamps down the fires within. The booze helps turn down his internal furnaces for a short while, which lets you stand close to him without getting singed by the flames of his ambitions and blistered by the buckling heat of his worries and convictions and personal drive. With a little whiskey in him, Eustace Conway cools out and becomes more fun, more light, more like . . . Judson Conway.

  With a little whiskey, you can get Eustace to tell his best stories, and he’ll whoop in delight as he remembers them. He’ll imitate any acc
ent and spin the most outrageous yarns. He will laugh at my dumbest jokes. When Eustace Conway is drinking, he’s likely to crack himself up by peppering his dialogue with distinctly un-Eustacian modern phrases he’s picked up over the years, such as “Yadda-yadda-yadda,” or “You da bomb!” or “That’s a win-win situation,” or—my favorite—upon receiving a compliment, “That’s why they pay me the big Benjamins!”

  “So, I’m hiking around Glacier National Park one summer,” he’ll say, soon after the bottle has been opened, and I’ll smile and lean forward, ready to listen. “I’m high up above the timberline, walking across a snowbelt. Nobody knows where I am, and I’m not even on a trail; just a ridge of snow and ice as far as you can see, with steep drop-offs on either side. Of course, I don’t have any decent equipment; I’m up there messing around. So I’m walking along, and suddenly I lose my footing. And it’s so goddamn steep that I start sliding right down the slope, skating down the sheer ice on my back. Most people hiking up there would’ve brought an ice ax, but I don’t have one, so I can’t stop my fall. All I can do is try to dig all my weight down into my backpack, to slow myself, but it’s not working. I’m digging my heels into the ice, but that’s not working, either! Then the snow and ice turn to gravel and loose rock, and I’m speeding thumpa-thumpa-thumpa across the boulders at top speed. I keep falling and falling, and I think, I’m gonna die for real this time! and then—THUD. I slam to a halt. What the hell? I lift my head and realize I have just slammed into a dead mule. I swear to God! This is a dead motherfucking mule! This is a freeze-dried, mummified carcass of a mule, and it’s what stopped my fall. Slowly, I stand up and look out over the mule, and right there, on the other side of his body, is a sheer cliff, dropping down about two thousand feet into the middle of Glacier National Park. I start laughing and laughing, almost hugging the mule. Man, that dead mule is my hero. If I’d dropped off there, nobody would’ve even found my body! Not for a thousand years, until some hikers came across it and then wrote a damn National Geographic article about me!”