Which was the first time I had ever heard that expression used in its proper context. But such is the satisfaction of being around Eustace; everything suddenly seems to be in its proper context. He makes true a notion of frontier identity that has long since passed most men of his generation, most of whom are left with nothing but the vocabulary. And the frontier vocabulary has outlived our actual frontier, because we’ve based our American masculine identity on that brief age of exploration and romantic independence and westward settlement. We hold on to that identity, long after it has any actual relevance, because we like the idea so much. That’s why, I believe, so many men in this country carry a residual notion of themselves as pioneers.
I think particularly of my Uncle Terry, who was born on a farm in Minnesota and raised by the children of American pioneers. Terry, a sensitive and intelligent baby boomer, couldn’t get off that homestead fast enough. He came East, started his own business, and now spends his days working as a computer expert. Several years ago Terry got into the computer game called Oregon Trail. The idea of the game was that you, the player, are a nineteenth-century American pioneer, heading West on a wagon trail with your family. To win the game, you have to make it to the Pacific, surviving a large number of virtual hardships, including disease, unexpected snowstorms, attacks by Indians, and starvation across rugged mountain passes. The better prepared you are—in terms of having packed the correct supplies and having selected the safest route—the better your chance of survival.
Uncle Terry loved this game and spent hours at the computer struggling to virtually head westward, much as his grandparents had struggled to literally head in the same direction a century earlier. But there was one thing that frustrated Terry about the game: the computer program didn’t allow him to improvise in the face of disaster. He’d suddenly get a message on the screen telling him that the axle on his wagon had broken and that he was going to die because he couldn’t proceed. The computer had proclaimed this virtual pioneer a failure. Game over, Terry would stand up from his desk and head to the refrigerator, cursing in annoyance. He’d fetch himself another beer and disparage the game’s designers, comically offended.
“If I were really out there on the Oregon Trail, I know I could solve this!” he’d say. “I could figure out how to fix a damn axle. I’m not an idiot! I’d cut down a tree, rig something up!”
He probably could. Not only was Terry raised on a farm; he spent his idealistic youth tramping through the wilderness of America seeking his own kind of independence. Faced with the trials of the Oregon Trail, Terry probably would survive. But he’s not out there proving this all day long. On the other hand, Eustace Conway is. Eustace does take his animals across the continent, does endure all manner of hardship, does figure out how to rig something up when the axle snaps.
Where it gets tricky is our deciding what we want Eustace Conway to be, in order to fulfill our notions of him, and then ignoring what doesn’t fit into our first-impression romantic image. My initial reaction on witnessing Eustace Conway’s life was relief. When I first heard of his life and his adventures, all I could think was Thank God. Thank God somebody in America was still living this way. Thank God there was at least one genuine mountain man, frontiersman, pioneer, maverick out there. Thank God there was one truly resourceful and independent wild soul left in this country. Because, at some deep emotional level, Eustace’s existence signified to me that somehow it’s still true, that we Americans are, against all other available evidence, a nation where people grow free and wild and strong and brave and willful, instead of lazy and fat and boring and unmotivated.
Or that’s how I felt when I first met Eustace, and that’s how I’ve since witnessed dozens of other people react when they first meet him. The initial reaction of many Americans, particularly men, when they catch a glimpse of Eustace Conway’s life is: “I want to do what you’re doing.” In fact, on closer examination, they probably don’t. While they’re a little embarrassed by the ease and convenience of their modern lives, chances are they’re not that ready to walk away from it all. Not so fast, buddy . . .
Most Americans probably don’t want to live off the land in any way that would involve real discomfort, but they still catch a thrill from Eustace’s continual assurance that “You can!” Because that’s what most of us want to hear. We don’t want to be out there in a snowstorm on the Oregon Trail, fixing the broken axle of a covered wagon; we want to feel as though we could do it if we had to. And Eustace lives as he does in order to provide us with that comforting proof.
“You can!” he keeps telling us.
And we keep believing him, because he does!
He is our mythical inner self, made flesh, which is why it’s comforting to meet him. Like seeing a bald eagle. (As long as there’s one left, we think, maybe things aren’t so bad, after all.) Of course, embodying the mythical hopes of an entire society is a pretty big job for one man, but Eustace has always been up for it. And people also sense that in him; they sense his self-assurance of being large enough to serve as a living metaphor, of being strong enough to carry all our desires on his back. So it’s safe to idolize him, which is an exciting experience in this callow, disillusioned age when it’s not safe to idolize anybody. And people get a little dizzy with that excitement, a little irrational. I know, because I’ve been there.
One of my favorite pastimes is to go back and reread the entry in my own journal from about the time Eustace and Judson Conway came to visit me in New York City. I especially like the part where I first meet Eustace and describe him as “Judson’s charming and wild and completely guileless older brother.”
Charming? No doubt.
Wild? Absolutely.
Guileless? Guess again, sister.
There is nothing remotely guileless about this guy, and nowhere is that more evident than in his land deals. People who go up the mountain to see Eustace Conway and his land seldom ask themselves where that land came from. Turtle Island matches Eustace so completely that people believe it grew out of him or he grew out of it. Like everything Eustace represents to the public, his land seems detached from the corruptive processes of our degraded modern society. Against all reason, people find Turtle Island to be a tiny last parcel of the American frontier. And Eustace certainly couldn’t have done anything as crass as buying the place; he must have just claimed it.
We can see Eustace through the eyes of Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, a nineteenth-century Argentine intellectual who once visited America long enough to see how “this independent farmer looks for fertile lands, a picturesque spot, something beside a navigable river; and when he has made up his mind, as in the most primitive times in the world’s history, he says, ‘This is mine!’ and without further ado takes possession of the land in the name of the Kings of the World: Work and Good Will.”We love this idea so much that thinking any differently about Eustace or about how he nailed his domain would ruin our marvelous and reassuring vision of him as the Last American Man. But the story of Eustace Conway is the story of American manhood. Shrewd, ambitious, energetic, aggressive, expansive—he stands at the end of a long and illustrious line of the same.
There’s nothing anachronistic about his savvy ways. We want Eustace to be Davy Fuckin’ Crockett? Well, fine. Who exactly do we think Davy Crockett was? He was a congressman, that’s who. He was from the backwoods, sure, and he was a gifted hunter who had killed a bear with a knife (although probably not when he was a toddler), but he was also slick as all hell and he knew how to exploit his backwoods charisma for political advantage. In a debate with an aristocratic political opponent, the Tennessee woodsman was asked whether he agreed that there should be a radical change “in the judiciary at the next session of legislature.” Crockett (dressed in rugged buckskin) won over the local crowd by drawling innocently that he had no idea there was such a thing as a creature called “a judiciary.” Which was charming and funny, sure, although probably not true, since Crockett had been working in and around the judici
ary for years—as a justice of the peace, a court referee, a town commissioner, and now as a member of the state legislature.
Crockett was a brilliant self-promoter who could always be counted on to give a reporter a witty, hillbilly sound bite or a dramatic tall tale about an encounter with some wild and dangerous “varmut.” He was cunning enough to carefully time the release of his heroic memoirs, The Life and Adventures of Colonel David Crockett of West Tennessee, to coincide with his 1833 congressional election campaign. “What a miserable place a city is,”moaned Crockett. And then went to live in Washington, D.C., anyhow, where he willingly got in bed with his Northeastern Whig rivals in order to see that, appropriately enough, his beloved land bill was passed.
In fact, these famous backwoods American guys all got to be famous backwoods American guys through their intelligence and ambition and carefully styled self-representations. Daniel Boone, the very model of a free-living frontiersman, was a real estate speculator (indeed, a developer) of the highest order. He founded the Kentucky town of Boonesborough and subsequently filed over twenty-nine legal claims to land, eventually owning thousands of acres. He embroiled himself in litigation over border disputes, including one nasty case that he fought through the colonial court system for more than twenty-three years. (Even in the eighteenth century, even for Daniel Boone, the process of landownership was more bureaucratically complicated than the statement “This is mine!” Boone knew how the world worked. As he wrote to one fellow settler, “No Dout you are Desireous your Land Bisness Should be Dunn, but that is a thing impossible without money.”)
There happen to be a lot of heroic moments in American history that would have been impossible without money. The reason Daniel Boone became famous was that he entered into a business deal with a schoolteacher from Pennsylvania named John Filson, whose family also owned a lot of land in Kentucky and who was looking for a way to publicize the state and thus increase the value of his property. Filson ended up writing a thrilling book, The Adventures of Colonel Daniel Boone, which became a best seller and, as intended, a lure for settlers to come down to Kentucky and buy up all that good Boone-and Filson-owned land. It was a vastly profitable and clever venture on Boone’s part, and it also made him an icon in his own lifetime.
Both Boone and Crockett were much sharper businessmen than you might have guessed by watching their TV shows in the 1950s. (“The rippin’est, roarin’est, fightin’est man the frontier ever knew!”) And they weren’t the only clever ones. Kit Carson had dozens of adventure novels written about him and published in New York City while he was still alive (Kit Carson: Knight of the Plains; Kit Carson: The Prince of the Goldhunters, among others). And Carson’s old boss, the explorer John Frémont, was smart enough to add a little romantic dash to his congressionally commissioned exploration reports to make them national best-sellers. Even Lewis and Clark knew how to sell it. When they were returning from their famous expedition, they outfitted themselves all rugged and cool when they sailed up the river into St. Louis to be welcomed by a thousand cheering residents and no small number of newspaper reporters, one of whom wrote, with admiration, “They really did have the appearance of Robinson Crusoes—dressed entirely in buckskin.”
So when Eustace Conway hustles himself “a slick little business deal” or when he trades land for land or when he writes in his journal, “I just put together a big packet of news articles for publicity; there are probably 35 major news articles done on me over the years—this will be an impressive packet for selling myself,” or when he exploits his mountain man persona to get himself an audience, he is not betraying his frontier American forefathers in any way; he’s honoring them. They would recognize immediately what he’s up to, and they would admire it, because running that kind of savvy operation is what success has always been about on this continent.
“Working seven days a week, all hours of the day for a year now,” Eustace wrote in his journal after Turtle Island had been open a few years. “I guess I am a good example of striving for a high goal, dependent not on immediate returns but on the vision of the future, totally a part of my social and philosophical upbringing. My granddad set an example in many ways with Sequoyah. Even now, a horned owl calls, reminding me of him as the warmth of the fire lives with me.”
He didn’t owe his father money anymore (“and it is truly a happy day to be releasing this burden”), but there was no end of other chalt lenges facing him. It was an effort of organization to get Boys’ Camp and Girls’ Camp running at Turtle Island every summer. And there were the realities of dealing with the kids themselves. Someone would cut his hand on sharp obsidian and need stitches; someone would get poison ivy; someone would get caught smoking pot and have to be sent home because of Eustace’s lifelong straight-edge intolerance for drugs.
Not to mention the issues of staffing. His personal standards of excellence being what they were, Eustace soon realized it was going to be one difficult task to find solid workers whom he could trust. For a while, his brothers, Judson and Walton, worked for Eustace as counselors. They were great, but they had their own lives going and couldn’t be relied on to teach at Turtle Island forever. Walton had finished college and was heading to Europe, where he would live for several years. Judson was already yearning to spend his summers in the West and would soon take off on his own adventures, riding boxcars and hitchhiking. (“I was recently backpacking in the Wind River Range of Wyoming,” Judson wrote to Eustace in a typically exuberant postcard. “I fought an early blizzard for 15 miles above the timberline—12,000 feet. It came close to taking my life. It was great fun. I hope camp is going good. Oh, by the way, I’m a cowboy now.”)
Aside from his brothers, it was extremely tough for Eustace to find people who would work as hard (or nearly as hard) as he did and still give him the respect he felt he deserved. For a man who often said that he found the idea of a mere eight-hour workday “disgusting,” Eustace was rarely satisfied with his employees’ efforts. They would come to Turtle Island “awed, amazed, and in love with this place” (as one ex-employee wrote) and then seem shocked that they had to work so hard. Again and again, he lost his team, either by their deserting or by his firing them.
He wished he could magically have the staunch staff his grandfather had worked with at Camp Sequoyah back in the 1930s, instead of these petulant modern kids with all their feelings and needs. His grandfather had demanded purity and perfection, and, by and large, he got it. If Chief so much as heard a rumor that a counselor had been seen smoking a cigarette in town on his day off, that counselor would come back to camp and find his bags packed for him. Chief never concerned himself with trampling on people’s feelings or being labeled as “unfair.” He had ultimate authority, which was all Eustace was asking for. That, and a commitment from people to try to work as hard as he did. Which was a tall order.
I’ve worked with Eustace Conway. Nobody gets to visit Turtle Island without working. I spent a week up there one autumn helping Eustace build a cabin. There were three of us on the job—Eustace, myself, and a quiet and steadfast young apprentice named Christian Kaltrider. We worked twelve hours each day, and I don’t recall lunch breaks. Silent, steady work. The way Eustace works, it’s like a march—numbing and constant. You get the feeling you’re in a platoon. You stop thinking and just give in to the pace. Eustace is the only one who speaks at all when it’s work time, and that’s to issue commands, which he does with unassailable authority, although every command is polite. There was only one moment in the process where he stopped working. Eustace asked me to please go to his pile of tools and fetch him an adz.
“I’m sorry,” I said, “I don’t know what that is.”
He described the adz for me—a tool that resembles an ax, but with a curved blade set at a right angle to the handle, used for dressing wood. I found the tool and was walking back toward the cabin to return it, when Eustace suddenly put down his hammer, stood up, wiped his forehead, and said, “I’m pretty sure I’ve seen the word ‘adz�
�� used in literature. Wasn’t it Hemingway who wrote about the sound of the adz coming from a front yard where someone was building a coffin?”
I slapped a horsefly on my neck and offered, “Are you possibly thinking of Faulkner? I think there’s a scene in As I Lay Dying where Faulkner describes the sound of someone building a coffin in a front yard.”
“Yes, of course,” Eustace said. “Faulkner.”
And he returned to work. Left me standing there with an adz in my hand, staring at him. Yes, of course. Faulkner. Now, back to work everybody.
Eustace wanted to finish the floor of the cabin by sundown that day, so we were working fast. He was so eager to get the job done that he used a chain saw to cut up the bigger logs. Eustace was sawing through a log when the chain saw hit a knot, kicked back, and jumped up toward his face. He deflected it with his left hand, sawing into two of his fingers.
He made one quick sound like “Rah!” and pulled back his hand. The blood started pumping out. Christian and I froze, silent. Eustace shook his hand once, sending out a shower of blood, and then recommenced sawing. We waited for him to say something or try to stop the bleeding, which was fairly prolific, but he didn’t. So we both kept at our work. He continued bleeding and sawing and hammering and bleeding and sawing more. By the end of the day, Eustace’s entire arm, the logs, the tools, both of my hands, and both of Christian’s hands were covered with blood.
And I thought, Ah, so this is what’s expected of us.
We worked until dusk and headed back to base camp. I walked next to Eustace, and his arm hung down, dripping. We passed a flowering bush and, always the teacher, he said, “Now, that’s an interesting sight. You don’t usually see jewelweed with both orange and yellow blossoms on one plant. You can make an ointment out of the stem, you know, to relieve the itching of poison ivy.”
The Last American Man Page 15