The Last American Man

by Elizabeth Gilbert

  “I hate to say it,”Walton wrote to Eustace back in 1987, after a long stay on a farm in Germany where he’d found work, “but you might be proud of me. When I was working, my hands would get good and grimy, and I’ve got calluses now in places I’d never discovered before.”

  Or this letter from Russia in 1992: “Had a great change of pace digging a cucumber bed way out of the city last weekend. Good shovel work all day long. Thought of you and Tolstoy and of that summer you did construction work—sweeping?—down in hotter-than-hell Alabama. (You see, I’ve lived all your adventures vicariously, through little peepholes.) In general, though, you would hate it here in Moscow. I am surrounded by filth. It is pitiful to see the city, what man has done to himself, what lives are doled out at the front of the lines. I can’t imagine you here. I dream of Turtle Island.”

  But now that Walton lives so close to Turtle Island, he hardly ever visits his brother. This kills Eustace, who dearly wants to spend time with Walton, and who feels wounded because his brother won’t take a larger role in his life.

  “It’s the ego that keeps me away,”Walton said, by way of explanation. “I can’t stand it. Some mornings I wake up and I think, God, wouldn’t it be great to have a brother with all the skills and interests of Eustace, but who was humble, too? I’d love to spend time with somebody like that, to learn from him. I’d like to go hiking with Eustace someday and have a quiet interaction, but this ego thing is really difficult to get around. I always want to say to him, ‘Imagine if one day you went for a horse ride and didn’t have to tell everyone about it? Does every moment of your life always have to be such a public show?”

  As for Eustace’s only sister, Martha? Well, I consider her the most inscrutable of all Conways. She lives so far outside the bold and adventuresome world of her brothers that it is sometimes easy to forget her existence. The big joke in the Conway family is that Martha was a changeling and that nobody can understand how she “got that way.” Martha lives with her husband and two daughters in a tidy suburban development, in a house so clean and sterilized you could use her kitchen as an operating theater.

  “You know how most parents have to hide all the breakable stuff in their house when they have little kids around so that nothing gets wrecked?” Judson asked me, when trying to describe his sister. “Well, in Martha’s house, it’s not like that. She leaves the breakable stuff sitting right out there on the coffee table and tells her daughters not to touch. And you’d better believe they don’t touch.”

  Martha is a devout Christian, considerably more religious than either of her parents. She is also a keenly intelligent woman with an MBA from Duke. I’m certain she could be running General Motors right now if she wanted to, but she focuses all her acumen and organizational ability on being a faultless housewife, an exacting mother, and a vital member of her church. I don’t know Martha well; I spent only one afternoon with her. But I liked her. I found her to be more gentle than I had expected, after hearing reports from her brothers about her famous rigidity. I was moved that she welcomed me into her home, considering how sacred that place is to her. I could see in her eyes how hard it was for her to let me in. I could see the painful edge in her, where her profound sense of Christian hospitality sparred against her cherished sense of privacy.

  When I asked Martha to define herself, she said, “The most important thing in my life is my walk with Jesus Christ. It reflects on everything I do—how I raise my children, how I honor the commitment to my marriage, how I struggle not to put myself first, how I struggle to deal with my emotions and control my voice. Every choice I make is based on my faith. I teach my children at home because of my faith. I don’t want my children in public schools. I feel there are a lot of evils there, ever since they took prayer out of school. I want my children to grow up with serious faith, and they can get that only here with me. Out there in the world, everything is based on relativism, and I don’t want my children to learn that. Out there, nothing is an absolute anymore. But I still believe in absolutes. I believe there is an absolute right and wrong way to live, and I can teach my children that, right here in this house.”

  The other big joke in the Conway family is to point out how different Eustace and Martha are. “Wait until you see how she lives,” I was warned. “You won’t believe that she and Eustace are related!” But I respectfully disagree. As soon as I walked into Martha’s living room, I thought, Sorry, folks. These two are the exactly the same. Eustace and Martha both found the world “out there” to be corrupted and repulsive, so both designed their own worlds, worlds so stubbornly isolated from the greater society that they may as well be living under glass domes. They preside over their personal worlds with an unconditional power, never having to suffer the sting of compromise. Eustace’s world just happens to be a thousand acres, and Martha’s world is closer to a thousand square feet, but they rule with the same impulse. It’s all about absolutism.

  And absolutism is great for getting a lot of work done, but when absolutisms collide, it can be a loud and fatal train wreck. Which is why Eustace and his sister have never managed to be close. This is made sadder because both want to work out some kind of relationship. But they only vex each other. Eustace believes he makes every effort to respect Martha’s values and tightly scheduled life by giving her plenty of warning before he visits and by reading Bible stories to her children and by trying not to mess up her cherished house. Still, she accuses him of being rude and self-centered, which hurts him all the more, considering his perception that Martha—who has brought her family up to Turtle Island only twice, despite repeated invitations—seems to take no interest in his life. Martha, on the other hand, is routinely hurt by what she perceives: a domineering brother who demands that the entire world stop and drop at his feet to worship him whenever he breezes through town. Out of pride, out of habit,Martha refuses to bow.

  So, no, Eustace’s interactions with his family aren’t satisfying. Not on any front. He can’t get past that. What bothers him even more, though, is that he hasn’t begun a family of his own. Now, as when he was thirty, he scans his empire and is shocked to notice that, while he has accomplished much through sheer force of will, he still doesn’t have a wife and children. At this point in his life, he should be well into a family, deep into the process of childrearing and heartily comforted by the solidity of marriage. Where does Eustace go wrong on this? He can’t figure it out.

  Eustace and I drove down his mountain one day to visit his horse mentor, the old hillbilly farmer and genius animal trainer, Hoy Moretz. We had a good afternoon in Hoy’s kitchen, eating cornbread with his wife, Bertha, and listening to wild old lies and paging through Hoy’s photo albums, which contain nothing but pictures of mules, bulls, and horses. Hoy is funny and sly. (When I met him for the first time, I said, “How do you do, sir?” and he said, “Fat and lazy. How ’bout you?”) He’s not book-read—his daddy had him driving teams of bulls at the age of six for the saw mill—but he’s an inspired farmer. His land is three hundred acres of the neatest and sweetest pastures and fields you ever saw. Hoy has no children of his own, and so, over the kitchen table, Eustace got to asking him what would become of that gorgeous land after he and Bertha both passed on. Hoy said he didn’t rightly know, but he imagined “Uncle Sam’ll take it over and sell it to them developers who just put nine hundred houses up on the other side of my mountain.”

  In the car later, I asked Eustace whether he would want Hoy’s land. The Moretz farm is only forty-five minutes from Turtle Island, and it’s gorgeous, and, yes, Eustace said, of course he would want it and of course he would hate to see it developed into a graveyard of suburban homes.

  “But that’s the pattern of the world,” he went on. “First come the roads and then come the farms and then the farmers sell out to developers who chop it up and rape it and put in more roads until it’s all chewed to pieces. I can’t save every acre in North Carolina. I don’t have the power for that.”

  “But what would you do
with Hoy’s property if you could get it?” I asked, thinking he might use it for hayfields or as a place to graze his ever-increasing kingdom of horses.

  “I’d save it and then give it to one of my sons when he was grown so that he could make it a traditional heritage farm,” Eustace said.

  That sentence hung awkwardly in the air for a long moment. There were several assumptions at play here: that Eustace will someday have a bunch of children; that there will be boys among them; that any one of these boys will grow up to give a shit about heritage farming; that Eustace will not find his sons to be as mammoth a disappointment (“the antithesis of what I had expected!”) as his grandfather and his father found their sons to be; that any of his land will still be around in twenty-five years. Even Eustace seemed to hear these doubts.

  “My sons,” he said finally, in self-disgust. “Listen to me talk. Where am I going to get sons?”

  Where, indeed? And with whom as a mother? This is the trillion-dollar question in Eustace’s life, the question that haunts not only him but everyone who knows him, to the point that it’s like a national pastime for people to sit around speculating about who (or if) Eustace Conway would someday marry. Every member of the Conway family has taken me aside at some point in the last few years to utter his or her secret desire that Eustace will never marry and certainly never have children, because he would be, as Martha fears, “way too scary as a father.”

  But Eustace has other friends who are constantly trying to set him up with one mountain-climbing, peace-loving, dark-skinned, modern nature girl after another. Some friends think he should go back to Guatemala and marry the prettiest and quietest fourteen-year-old Mayan girl he can find. Others think he needs the world’s toughest and most modern ballbuster to come in and kick his ass around Turtle Island for a while. And he has one friend, a blunt woman artist, who never stops challenging him with this accusation: “Hey, Eustace. Why don’t you just admit that you don’t really like children? You can’t get away from them fast enough when they’re in the room with you.”

  Like everyone else, I have my own opinions about Eustace’s romantic life. It seems to me that what he really needs is a woman who is both strong and submissive. This may sound like a contradiction, but it wasn’t always the case. Strength combined with submission in women was the norm for centuries, especially on the American frontier. Take a look again at Davy Crockett’s wife, whose thorough competence in the wilderness was matched only by her subservience to her husband. That’s what Eustace needs. But that was 1780. Times, as we’ve all surely noticed, have changed. And so it is my personal opinion that Eustace Conway is not going to have much luck finding himself a wife (or, as he sometimes puts it, “a mate”). As an urban friend of his bemoaned once, in a fake folksy drawl, “A century of goddamn feminism done spoilt all the brides!”

  Like many impressive Men of Destiny before him, it is only in this one most delicate operation of intimate partnership where Eustace doesn’t succeed. All his energies and all his talents become useless in the face of it. As the unhappy Meriwether Lewis wrote to his dear friend William Clark, a few years after they’d crossed and mapped the continent, “I am now a perfect widower with respect to love . . . I feel all that restlessness, that inquietude, that certain indescribable something common to old bachelors, which I cannot avoid thinking my dear fellow proceeds from that void in our hearts which might, or ought to be better filled. Whence it comes I know not, but certain it is, that I never felt less like a hero than at the present moment. What may be my next adventure God knows, but on this I am determined, to get a wife.”

  It’s not as though Eustace doesn’t have plenty of options. The man has a powerful effect on women and has access to loads of them, isolated though his world may seem. There is no end of beautiful and starry-eyed female dreamers who dance through Turtle Island every year as campers, apprentices, and day-trippers, many of whom would be more than happy to have a thrilling roll in the duff with a real mountain man, given the invitation. If all Eustace was after in life was hot sexual gratification, he could easily pick himself an endless supply of lovers, as if picking berries off a bush. He must be given credit, though, for never having used Turtle Island as a personal Free Love Utopia. He has never exploited that crop of lovelies for short-term sexual pleasure. On the contrary, he consciously detaches himself from the many young girls who idolize him for his rugged image, because he doesn’t think it’s appropriate to take advantage of their adoration. Instead, what he endlessly searches for is a robust and sacrosanct monogamous union of Olympian dimensions between two heroic figures. It’s a search informed and inspired by a conception of romantic love that remains doggedly—indeed, heartbreakingly and unbelievably and almost belligerently—naïve.

  “It was so intriguing to meet you and have a chance to share with you,” he wrote in an early letter to one woman who never hung around long enough to even be legitimately listed as one of Eustace Conway’s girlfriends. “I don’t know exactly what you must think about me, but I hope we will have a chance to get to know each other. I am looking for a mate—an energetic, intelligent, adventuresome person like yourself is really attractive to me. I would like to live out my fantasies of a sacred relationship that was filled with a lifetime of love and compassionate care and understanding. I want that ‘perfect’ love-filled American dream ‘fantasy’ relationship, if you will. I am holding out for nothing less than that . . . I have been interested in marriage for 10 years. I have been looking but haven’t found the ‘right one’ yet . . . If you have the vision to see and the care to investigate, you will find me a deep and caring person who is capable and willing to offer you more than you have ever dreamed about in the way of meaningful partnership through this journey of life, ‘the human experiment.’ I offer you that. Please take me seriously on this and not let another protective mechanism keep you from finding in me what your heart truly desires. Insofar as I can offer you my love, truest sentiments, Eustace.”

  But this “stand-in-the-wind-tunnel-of-my-love” approach hasn’t worked, there, either. And it baffles Eustace, this absence, this loss, this failure to create an ideal family to erase his brutal childhood. He’s all too aware that he’s running out of time. Just recently, he got involved with Ashley, a twenty-four-year-old beautiful hippie he’s known for years. She is as warm and loving as any human being I’ve met. Eustace first ran into her six years before, at a party, and stared at her all night, watching her talk to others, thinking that “she was so alive, so full of love, like a waterfall spilling all over the room with the mist boiling up around her, so captivating. I took one look at her and thought, This is the one. I need to marry that girl.”

  But Ashley, all of eighteen at the time, already had a lover. She was on her way out of town, about to step into the world for some wild traveling and adventures, and was in no way ready to be Eustace Conway’s woman. But she has since returned to Boone and she’s single now. Eustace has fallen in love with her once again, and she with him.

  Eustace thinks Ashley is an angel, and it’s not hard to see why. She emanates kindness and humanity. Ashley was driving me through Boone one afternoon when a homeless man approached her car at a red light and asked for money. Ashley, who has been barely surviving for years on food stamps and hope, dug around in the car for spare change, but could find only a few dimes.

  “I can’t give you much money,” she apologized to the homeless man, “but I promise I will give you all my prayers.”

  “Thank you,” he said, smiling as if he’d been handed a hundred-dollar bill. “I believe you.”

  Ashley has a heart big enough to absorb all the love and need and hunger that Eustace thrusts at her without even flinching. But there’s a glitch with Ashley. Somewhere along her journeys she managed to acquire three young children—a five-year-old son and toddler twin daughters.

  When I heard about them, I said, “Eustace, I always thought you wanted thirteen kids. Looks to me as if you’ve got a good start here,
buddy. Three down, ten to go.”

  Eustace laughed. “Sure, but the concept of thirteen kids is a lot different from the reality of three.”

  Ashley is calm, affectionate, funny, attentive, and steady. She brings a much-needed sense of peace and hospitality to Turtle Island. And she can gracefully handle that way of life. She spent several years living on a scrappy Rainbow Gathering commune that made Turtle Island look like a Hilton Resort. This is a woman who went through two pregnancies without seeing a doctor. (“You know when you’re healthy,” she explains, “and I didn’t need anyone to tell me I was doing fine.”) This is a woman who delivered her twins outside in the middle of the night on the cold Colorado ground, barely sheltered under a tarp. This is a woman who could definitely manage a life of hog-butchering and Dumpster Diving.

  Eustace swears he would marry Ashley in a minute if she didn’t already have a family. He has strong reservations about bringing up another man’s freewheeling children, particularly when that other man is a hippie who still has a considerable presence in his kids’ lives. Eustace doesn’t want an undisciplined influence like that anywhere near children he himself might someday be raising. Although he is not as frightened, it should be said, by Ashley’s twin daughters as he is by her energetic and willful young son.

  “How could I adopt that boy when he’s already begun to be formed? He’s already seen too many corrupting things that I can’t control or erase. I had the worst relationship with my father, and if I’m going to have a son, I have to be sure that the relationship is perfect right from the beginning. I don’t want there to be a moment of anger or trouble between us. For all I know, I could spend ten years showing Ashley’s boy the proper path, and then he could turn on me when he’s fourteen and say, ‘Fuck that, Dad. I’m gonna go get high.’ ”