The Last American Man

by Elizabeth Gilbert

  So maybe what happened to the sons was Mrs. Chief’s fault. That’s what Chief probably figured. Both boys busted out of that house the first chance they got. It was Harold, Chief’s firstborn, who caused his father the most trouble. Canst thou not beg? No, Harold Johnson could not beg and could not submit to his father, not from day one. And he couldn’t stand it at home. As Harold’s nephew Eustace wrote in his adolescent diary decades later: “While it would be a dumb thing to run away, I think I would be happier anywhere in the woods if I could only get away. If I do leave, I will try my best not to come back, even if I am starving. Anything is better than this.”

  Harold ran away to Alaska when he was seventeen. Like generations of American boys before him, he headed to the frontier to get out from under the authority of the old man. He could not be in the same house with his father. They had no means of dialogue. His father would never praise Harold, never let up on him, never give him an inch of space within which to move or grow. But Harold wanted to be a big man, and it came to pass that there was not room in this town for the two of them. Harold had to go.

  He’d read some Jack London and got an itch. By the time he made it to Seward, he had only fifty cents in his pocket. He was hungry, scared, and alone, but he damn sure wasn’t going back to Camp Sequoyah. He found work on a road crew. Then he got himself a motorcycle and went to school to learn how to repair engines. And then, on the brink of World War II, he enlisted in the Marines (much to the horror of his father, who had been a committed pacifist ever since witnessing the carnage in the trenches in France). Harold was stationed in Hawaii, where he taught jungle survival to Air Force pilots. After the war, he refused to move back South and founded one business after another up in Alaska—an ice cream shop, a boat dealership, a mail-order color slide developing operation. Then he built and sold generator sets, a lucrative scheme in a state that still had no power grid. Then he set up a diesel engine business and became a millionaire. He was six feet five, strong, and dashing. And was always known as a charming, magnetic, big, controlling, and powerful man who worked endless hours, had a genius for self-promotion, and did not easily give praise or welcome the opinions of others.

  When Chief Johnson died at the age of eighty, there was nobody to take over Camp Sequoyah. Neither of Chief’s sons wanted to run the camp. Harold hated the South and had his own empire to manage up in Alaska. Bill, the younger and more troubled child, had become a real estate developer, of all heretical things. It was his wish to sell off some of the beautiful forested dynasty of Camp Sequoyah, which his father had preserved over so many decades, for housing and lumber.

  Something crucial must be noted here about the Johnson family. What seems never to have been discussed was the possibility that Chief’s daughter might take over the camp. Despite Karen’s deep commitment to her father’s vision and her competence in the wilderness, she was never considered a candidate for leadership. Not seen as strong enough, perhaps. But Karen’s husband very much wanted to run that camp, was dying for the chance. And we know, of course, that her husband was Eustace Robinson Conway III.

  That was Big Eustace, who had come to Camp Sequoyah after MIT to work with children and to live in nature. One of Chief’s star counselors, brilliant, energetic, dedicated, and physically adept, Big Eustace loved the wilderness, held the camp’s endurance hiking record, and was a gifted teacher and a patient leader of boys. He was adored at Camp Sequoyah. (I went to a Camp Sequoyah reunion once and met there a number of grown men who said, when I mentioned Eustace Conway, “Is he here? My God, I would give anything to see him again! He was the best nature educator I ever had! I worshipped him!” It took me some time to do the math and estimate the ages and realize that these old guys were talking about my Eustace’s father.) With his calculating intellect and passion for nature, Big Eustace believed he had the brains and the spirit to take over Sequoyah one day. And, as he freely admitted to me, he married Karen Johnson “halfway because of the person that she was and halfway to get my hands on that camp of her father’s.”

  The fact is, he would have been great at running the place. As one old Sequoyan remembered, Big Eustace was “as straight-laced, as dedicated, and as competent as Chief himself. We all assumed he’d take over the camp one day. He was the closest thing we ever saw to someone with the capacity to keep it running up to Chief ’s standards.” But when Chief died, he left no such word in his will. And Harold and Bill declared that they would fight to the death to keep the camp out of their brother-in-law’s control. They hated their sister’s husband. They hated him for his intellectual arrogance and his dismissiveness of them. They thought him an opportunist and wouldn’t let him near the place.

  So the camp floundered through years of substandard management, run by lesser men from outside the family. As for Big Eustace, he gave up his dreams of becoming a nature educator and worked as an engineer at a chemical plant. Living in a box, working in a box, driving from box to box in a box with wheels. He never again set foot near Se-quoyah. And when Little Eustace turned out to be a willful and wild boy who preferred the woods to school, Big Eustace would regularly attack him with the accusation that he was “irregular, abnormal, stubborn, and impossible, just like your Johnson uncles.”

  The camp finally withered to nothingness. The solid handmade log cabins lay empty. When the camp was finally abandoned in the 1970s, Little Eustace Conway was a teenager. He was already a skilled woodsman and a fierce leader, the one who had every kid in his neighborhood working on regulated shifts around the clock to tend to his extensive personal turtle collection.

  “I want Camp Sequoyah,” Little Eustace said. “Give it to me! Let me run it! I know I could do it!”

  Of course nobody listened to him. He was just a kid.

  Summer, 1999.

  When Eustace Conway returned to his thousand acres of Turtle Island after his adventures crossing America on horseback and in buggies, he found his paradise to be, well, a mess.

  There was a lot more to Turtle Island after years of Eustace’s improvements and developments; the place was no longer a rugged nature preserve but a highly organized and highly functional primitive farm. It was dotted with buildings, all of which Eustace had built in various traditional styles. There was his private passive solar office, yes. But he’d also built several public structures, including a comfortable bunkhouse for visitors called “Everybody’s,” the design of which he borrowed from a neighbor’s traditional barn.

  He’d built a handsome toolshed, crafted perfectly in line with the buildings of Daniel Boone’s era, what with its hand-split oak door and handmade hinges and chinks filled with manure and clay. He based this design on buildings he’d seen at historic sites. And a hog pen of half-dovetailed logs, notched in the traditional Appalachian style. And a chicken house with a foundation of stone sunk nine inches into the ground to keep predators from digging in and stealing eggs. And a corn crib with nice pungeon floors and, although “a hundred years from now, someone might wish I hadn’t used pine, so be it. I needed to get the job done.”He’d built a blacksmith shop of locust and oak, right on the site of a blacksmith shop that stood there two hundred years ago, when what is now Turtle Island was the only thoroughfare for this whole section of the Appalachian Mountains. He used the stones of the original building to make forges,where he now does all his own smithing. He’d created an outdoor kitchen. And, over the course of a summer, with a team of dozens of young people who’d never worked construction before, he’d crafted a forty-foot-tall locust and pine and poplar barn, put together without a single sawn board, containing sixty-foot-long beams and boasting a cantilevered roof, six horse stalls, and thousands of hand-split shingles.

  And more, too.

  In the middle of this building spree, a North Carolina anthropology professor heard about this gifted young man who lived up there in the mountains, made buildings without the use of nails, farmed with livestock, and survived off the land. Intrigued, she sent a student to Turtle Island o
ne day to ask Eustace whether he’d consider coming down from the mountain to speak to her class and explain how he had done all this. Dutifully, Eustace considered the offer. Then he sent the student back down the mountain with a simple message for the good professor. “Tell her I did it by working my fucking ass off.”

  Turtle Island was by now a vast and complicated place. Aside from organizing the educational programs, the mere running of the farm was an enormous job. There were horses and cows and turkeys to tend to, barns to keep up, fences to mend, pastures to plow, gardens to cultivate, and hay to bale. It took a tremendous amount of work to keep the place running, and Eustace had left it all in the hands of his apprentices. He did so with the greatest trepidation. Before he went on his horse journeys, he gave his apprentices lists and lectures to make sure they understood exactly how to care for the property, but, in the end, he narrowed his commands down to two basic components: “Please,” Eustace begged. “Just don’t kill any of my animals and don’t burn down any of my buildings.”

  Well, they hadn’t killed any of his animals. They hadn’t burned down any of his buildings, either. But when Eustace returned, he found Turtle Island to be in extreme disorder. Gardens were overrun by weeds; bridges needed repair; goats were in the wrong pasture; the paths were overgrown. Nobody had been handling publicity and scheduling, which meant that not one single school group was on the schedule to visit Turtle Island that fall, which, in turn, meant that money would be short throughout the winter.

  Eustace’s workers were willing and hard-working people, but the fact is that Eustace had never found anyone he trusted to manage Turtle Island so that the institution would thrive in his absence. Of course, it’s hard to imagine that there’s anyone able or willing to put in the hours that Eustace did. He’d had some apprentices who were good with people and some who were good with livestock and some who were good at manual labor and some who had a slight talent for business. But no one could do everything Eustace could, which was everything. And no one was willing to work all day on building a barn and then sit up all night making phone calls and writing land deeds.

  What he needed was a clone.

  In lieu of that, he had hired a program manager, a gifted young naturalist who could take over the duties of running the camping and educational side of Turtle Island, so that Eustace could focus on his own baby, the apprenticeship program. Eustace believed that it was through this intense tutorial program that he would have the most healthy effect. He had long ago begun to wonder whether dealing with group after group of random campers was really going to change anything about American society.

  “I’m sitting under the walnut tree in the parking lot on the freshly cut grass,” he had written in his journal during one such crisis of conscience, not long after Turtle Island had opened. “I need to be cooking supper for the delinquents here from the ‘youth at risk’ group. I don’t want to face them. Let them suffer and die is the attitude I have quickly developed in the face of their disruptive disrespect. I am feeling weak . . . I don’t know if I really want to make this place what I dreamed. I know I could. I could make it succeed, but do I want that?”

  He had decided that the answer was to keep the camping and day programs, but put someone else in charge of them so that he could focus on the apprentices. He wanted to throw his energy and ability behind the intimate, long-term, one-on-one teaching relationships he would develop with his direct trainees. Then they would take their skills out into the world and teach others, who would teach others, and so the change would come, more slowly, perhaps, than Eustace had dreamed when he was twenty years old, but still the change would come.

  He was almost certain of it.

  * * *

  There was a girl. She was a hippie. Her name was Alice. Alice loved nature more than anything, and she wanted to live in the woods and be self-sufficient, and her sister, who knew Eustace Conway, said, “Alice, this is the man for you.” Alice got in touch with Eustace and told him that she wanted to live close to nature, just as he did. One afternoon, she visited Turtle Island, and Eustace gave her a tour and some of his brochures and told her to think about whether she’d like to work as an apprentice. She took one look at the babbling brooks, the swaying trees, the farm animals grazing in the fields, and the peaceful, welcoming sign at the front gate (No Shirt, No Shoes, No Problem!), and thought she had surely reached paradise.

  Swiftly, Alice wrote to Eustace, assuring him that, “my instincts say YES! From the little I’ve seen and read, Turtle Island holds certain qualities that feel truest to my heart. It’s like a dream come true. I’m also grateful for your open welcome and would be honored to come to live, learn, work, and play with you and the land. I remember as a young girl watching ‘Little House on the Prairie,’ dreaming of someday living it instead of watching it. Dedication to family, living in harmony with nature. Ah . . . sweet life.”

  After seven months at Turtle Island, Alice wrote Eustace a different kind of letter.

  “When I first got here, I asked for a day off a week. You told me I didn’t deserve it. Yet Jennie’s second weekend out she got a day off. You showed her how to skin a deer, when I had to work my butt off for you to even recognize me as a student . . . you make me work so hard . . . make me feel unworthy . . . I feel unappreciated and unwanted . . . you say the more you get to know me the more disappointed you are in me . . . you’ve been working me ten to twelve hours a day . . . maybe I shouldn’t be here.”

  And then Alice was gone. Fired. Dismissed.

  What was the problem? What happened in the seven months between “sweet life” and “maybe I shouldn’t be here”?

  Well, according to Eustace, the problem was that Alice was a hippie, a dreamer, and a lounge-about. She’d done a whole lot of drugs in her life, and maybe that was why her brain worked slowly and she was absent-minded and she had trouble learning how to do things right. She didn’t work quickly or efficiently. She couldn’t absorb skills, no matter how many times she was shown the correct procedure. And she took up too much of Eustace’s emotional energy, always wanting to sit in his office and talk about nature and her feelings and the dream she had last night and the poem she’d just written.

  And Eustace was afraid that Alice might accidentally kill somebody or herself. Alice routinely pulled cockamamie stunts like leaving candles burning unattended on the windowsills of wooden buildings. Several times she wandered, daydreaming, into the path of falling timber as Eustace was clearing away pastureland. Worst of all, one day when Alice was working with Eustace as he was getting into his buggy to train a young horse, she released the animal from its tether before handing Eustace his reins. The horse, young and skittish, took off on a wild ride, and Eustace was stuck in the buggy, empty-handed, powerless to control the animal. The horse tore through the woods while Eustace held on for his life, trying to think of the softest place to bail out and save himself. He ended up taking a header right into a bush at twenty-five miles an hour, landing right on his face and hurting himself seriously. The horse wrecked the buggy into the side of the blacksmith shop and sustained injuries of its own.

  “I had been rebuilding that buggy, which was a Mennonite antique, for months,” Eustace recalled, “and it was completely destroyed. That cost me $2000. And I wouldn’t take $10,000 for the psychological damage it did to the horse to be in a bad wreck like that at such a young age. It took me nearly a year to get that horse to a place where he could relax pulling a buggy again. And it was all because of Alice’s carelessness.”

  Two weeks later, she made the same mistake again. That’s when Eustace told her she had to go. She was too senseless and dangerous to keep around, lost as she always seemed to be in her “Little House on the Prairie” fantasyland.

  Dismissing apprentices is never easy, particularly since it’s a point of pride for Eustace Conway to claim that anyone can learn to live this primitive life and that he is that man who can teach anybody. It’s a failure of the dream to have to tell somebody, “Yo
u must leave here because you are incapable of learning.” Or, “You must leave here because you are impossible to have around.” It’s a terrible moment when Eustace Conway’s refrain turns from “You can!” to “You can’t!”

  I once asked Eustace what percentage of the apprentices had left Turtle Island under angry or bitter circumstances. Without hesitating, he said, “Eighty-five percent. Although my program manager would probably say it was closer to ninety-five.”

  OK, let’s round that off to 90 percent. It’s hard to look at such an attrition rate without pinning the label of bad leadership on Eustace. Turtle Island is his world, after all, and he is accountable for what happens in his world. If he can’t keep his world populated, then something is clearly wrong with the scheme. If I were a stockholder in a company where 90 percent of the employees were quitting or being fired each year, I might consider asking the CEO some hard questions about his management policies.

  On the other hand, maybe the number makes perfect sense. Maybe it shouldn’t be easy to stay on Turtle Island. Maybe only 10 percent of the population are able to cut it. What if the comparison model was the Navy SEAL training program? How many of those guys do they lose each year? And who’s left after everybody else quits? The strongest, right? The people who are going up to Turtle Island, though, are not necessarily the people most suited for the place.

  “Again and again,” Eustace said, “I attract people who have dreams of nature but no experience with nature at all. They come up here, and the only comparison they make is ‘Wow, it looks just like the Nature Channel.’ ”