The Last American Man

by Elizabeth Gilbert

  “Eustace,” I said, “nobody can promise you that your own biological children wouldn’t say the same thing someday. In fact, I can almost promise you that they will. You do know that, right?”

  “But the odds would be better with my own children, because I’d be there from the beginning to teach them what’s acceptable and unacceptable behavior. The odds just don’t look good with Ashley’s kids. They’re already undisciplined. Ashley’s a great mother but her children manipulate her and cause all kinds of havoc and destruction. It’s really hard to have her kids around all the time, because they’re not trained. They’re always getting into everything and demanding her attention. She brings them up here and I do things with them, like take them horseback riding, but it’s no fun. It’s fun for them but not for me.”

  Eustace can’t quite let go of Ashley, because she’s beautiful and kind and gives him the deliciously unconditional love he’s been starving for. But he can’t keep her around, either, because she brings too many terrifying variables into his exacting and well-ordered cosmos. He’s been trying to help her bring more order and discipline to her family; he’s lent her books from his library written by the Amish about how to properly “train up” a child, very much as one would train up a horse. Ashley, who is indeed run ragged by her children, studied the books carefully and gratefully, and has taken much of the advice to heart. She’s even passed these old-fashioned lessons about childrearing along to her hippie friends who are mothers, to help them create some stability within their own disorganized families. And it’s been a largely successful education. Using the strict old Amish system, Ashley has gotten her children on a more solid schedule, and there are fewer tantrums and meltdowns. But the children are still a handful, of course. Because there are three of them and because they are children.

  So Eustace doesn’t know what to do about Ashley. In the end, his decision will almost certainly be a showdown between the two things he craves most: absolute love and absolute control. It’s a tough call. Historically, love has always been a pretty fierce contender, but some people in this world need more than love. Eustace has lived without love before; that’s a familiar sensation for him. Whereas he has never lived a moment of his adult life without control.

  So he remains alone and single. And full of questions about what kind of woman he should seek. After all these years, he’s come to think that he should be more careful about whom he selects to love. Maybe he’s been too random in his choices; maybe that’s why it never works out. Taking on the challenge as he would take on any organizational task, Eustace recently sat down and efficiently listed the requirements for his perfect woman. If he could evaluate prospective candidates in each category, he should be able to choose wisely, and surely he would never be hurt or lonely again.

  Very healthy, his list (set forth in no particular order) begins. Then:

  Capacity for intimacy.

  Beautiful.

  Confidence with and passion for sexuality.

  Spiritual belief/direction.

  Excited and motivated to live each day completely and with sacred appreciation for it.

  Nurturing, giving, caretaking, traditional woman sides to personality.

  Leans toward nonmaterialistic lifestyle, values.

  Emotional, confident, centered, energy, positive support, and social skills.

  Independently able self, with capacity to bond deeply in sacred marriage union.

  Multilingual.

  Involved with or appreciation for arts—dance, theater, literature, visual, etc.

  Passion for family a priority.

  Appreciates judicial money management.

  Likes to work at tasks, i.e., farm/land/garden management.

  The list goes on and on. So you can see the problem. You can see how God himself might shake his head when handed such an invoice and say, Sorry, pal, we don’t carry that in stock. But Eustace is way more optimistic than God. And way more lonely than God, too.

  When Eustace first showed me this love list, I handed it back and said, “I’m really sorry, Eustace, but this isn’t how love works.”

  “I don’t know how else to do it,” he said, sounding, for once, helpless.

  It’s true that this list testifies to how enormously unequipped Eustace Conway is when it comes to handling intimacy. Look, we all seek certain traits in a lover, but this list looked to me like a cheat-sheet for an exam that most of us don’t need to study for. Most of us don’t need to match up people’s qualities with an inventory printout; we can tell when we’re in love. But Eustace isn’t sure that he can tell. He has too few of the basic skills to face the mountains and valleys and unpredictable weather patterns of real love between flawed and wonderful human adults. He is, by his own admission, too damaged and sensitive, and I find it astonishingly brave of him to continue trying to open his heart to others at all.

  Whether these troubles can be blamed on the hard-driving masculine iconography he’s absorbed from American culture or whether it’s the fallout of his traumatized childhood, I do not know. But when I see Eustace Conway heading off into the wilderness of intimacy, clutching that exhaustive checklist of his, he looks to me an awful lot like the chubby suburban guy who just bought out the Orvis catalogue for a weekend hunting trip: overpacked, underskilled, and scared to death.

  One of Eustace’s regular gigs over the years has been at Merlefest, a well-established festival of folk music and arts held every summer in western North Carolina. Eustace doesn’t travel and speak as much as he used to; he prefers to stay home at Turtle Island away from the masses. But he still works at Merlefest every year, setting up his teepee on the fairgrounds and speaking to people about natural living. It’s a good job. It pays well and draws an earnest crowd, and Eustace gets to spend the weekend listening to live folk music from Appalachian heroes of his like Doc Watson and Gillian Welch.

  I went to Merlefest with Eustace in the summer of 2000, and saw, in his manner with the public, more world-weariness than I’d ever seen in him before. It wasn’t as if he were telephoning in his performances with people, but he wasn’t the firebrand I remembered from speaking engagements in years past. And it wasn’t hard to understand, during the course of this weekend, why a man could lose his spark in the face of the world’s reality.

  Eustace had been told well in advance that he was to share the stage at Merlefest with another headline speaker, “a real Indian Chief from the Florida Everglades” named Chief Jim Billy. For weeks, Eustace was somewhat nervous and apprehensive about this encounter.

  “I know a lot of Native Americans and I’m usually welcome,” he explained.“ But sometimes Indians have a bad reaction to me, like,Who’s this white guy in the teepee pretending to be? Especially with politicized native people, I can be seen at first as offensive. Of course I understand their hesitation, so I’m always a little cautious; careful to be extra respectful.”

  In this case, he needn’t have worried. Chief Jim Billy turned out to be a big friendly guy in blue jeans with the wide smile and hearty handshake of a born salesman. His tribe had just gotten a massive windfall in the form of gaming profits, and the chief carried himself with the satisfied ease of well-fed wealth. His act, which he did just for fun these days, now that he didn’t need the cash, was to get on stage and sing “rock ’n’ roll–inspired songs for kids” about all the cool and scary animals that live down in the Everglades.

  “Hey, parents!” he warned between songs. “Don’t let your kids go into the woods alone, ’cuz there’s animals back there that will bite you! Bite you? Heck, down in the Everglades, they’ll eat you!”

  When his act was over, Chief Jim Billy sat in the audience and listened attentively to Eustace’s compelling and sober presentation about how to live in harmony with nature. Eustace showed the audience how to weave rope with grass and with their own hair, and displayed baskets and clothing that he had made from natural materials. Chief Jim Billy approached Eustace after the show, extremely impressed.
>
  “I’ll tell you something, man,” he said, hugging Eustace. “You’re great. The stuff you know how to do? It’s great. You gotta come down to Florida and teach my people all this stuff, because nobody down there knows how to do these things anymore. You’re more Indian than any of us! Hell, the only thing people in my tribe know how to do is fly up to Miami and get a tan! I’m just pullin’ your leg here, buddy. But seriously, you should come down and see us on the reservation. We’re doing real good these days. We run a little safari that goes right through the swamp for the tourists, and the tourists would love to see you. You could be a real good attraction, because those people are looking for something authentic, something genuine, and that’s what you got. We try to give them a taste of genuineness on our swamp trip, but we like to have some fun, too. We have one guy who dresses up in a black hairy costume and runs alongside the boat, jumping out at people. I tell you, man, you’d love the hell out of it. Any time you want to come down and visit, just call me. I’ll take care of you, treat you like a king. You got a telephone back there in the woods, Tarzan? Good. Call me. I’m serious. I’ll pick you up in my plane, fly you down for the weekend. I got my own jet, a real nice G-4. It’s even got an indoor outhouse! You’ll love it!”

  Then Chief Billy hugged Eustace again and smoothly handed over his business card.

  “Everything you need to know about me is on this card,” said this gregarious Chief of the Seminoles to Eustace Conway. “Phone, cell phone, beeper, everything. Call me anytime, man. You’re awesome.”

  Together, Eustace and I walked in silence away from the stage and back toward his demonstration teepee, which was set up on the midway, across from the concession stands. There were two nine-year-old boys playing inside when we arrived, dirt bikes parked by the smoke flap, and they nearly tackled Eustace when he showed up.

  “We heard you can teach us how to start fires!” one of them said. One boy was dark-haired and small for his age; the other was overweight and blond, wearing a T-shirt that said earthday.

  Accommodating them, Eustace took two sticks and explained to the boys that “trees hold fire. They get their fire from the sun. Inside every tree is a little bit of the sun that you can release with your own energy.” Eustace ground the sticks together until he got a small bright ember, which he dropped into the center of a tiny nest of dry tinder, cupped in his hand. “What we have here is a baby ember, a newborn piece of fire. If we don’t treat it right and feed it the nice food of oxygen, it will die.” He encouraged the dark-haired boy to blow gently on the tinder, and, like magic, suddenly there was flame. The boy cheered. Then there was a loud electronic squawk in the teepee. The chubby boy in the earthday shirt pulled a walkie-talkie out of his back pocket.

  “What?” he shouted into the receiver, deeply annoyed.

  “Where are you, Justin? Over,” came a woman’s voice.

  “I’m in a teepee,Mom!” Justin yelled back. “Over!”

  “I can’t hear you, Justin. Where are you, Justin?” the walkie-talkie repeated. “Over.”

  Justin rolled his eyes and screamed, “I said I’m in a teepee, Mom! Over! A teepee?A teepee,Mom? Get it,Mom? Over!”

  I stepped outside, away from the clamor, thinking how much work Eustace has ahead of him if he’s really intent on saving this culture. Outside the teepee, I found a middle-aged man in a flannel shirt looking over Eustace’s structure with interest. We set to talking.

  “My name is Dan,” he told me. “I come here to Merlefest every year from Michigan and always try to find Eustace. I like listening to him talk about his life. It appeals to me, although it makes me envious, too. God knows, I’d move into the woods in a minute if I could. But I can’t. I’ve got five kids in school to support right now. I’ve got a good job at Sarah Lee, I’ve got alimony to pay, and I don’t see how I could leave the financial security and health insurance and live like Eustace, but I wish to God I could. I think about it every year when I come here, whenever I meet him. He’s pretty compelling, you know? And look how healthy he is, living in that natural way. Not like the rest of us.”

  Here, Dan smiled with sweet embarrassment and patted his heavy stomach. He continued.“Eustace is always, like, you can do it, you can do it. But I don’t see how I can do it. We just built a big house, you know? It’s full of so much damn stuff, I don’t even know where it came from. I swear to God, I don’t understand how it happened that we own all this stuff. Sometimes I look at my house and wish I could burn it to the ground, walk away from everything, start over somewhere else with nothing. Lead a simple life out in the woods, away from the world. You understand that feeling at all? You ever get that desire? You ever wanna disappear off the face of the earth?”

  “Of course,” I said. “Everyone gets that desire.”

  “Not Eustace Conway, I bet.”

  “Don’t lay your money on it, Dan.”

  All of which is to say that, looking toward the age of forty, Eustace must admit that he has not exactly provoked the kind of change in our world that he hoped to when he was younger. (Indeed, that he was certain he would provoke.) The waves of eager citizens following him into the woods never quite materialized as he’d expected when he was twenty. The world remains what it was, maybe worse.

  Looking back two decades, he told me, “I honestly believed I could change things. My feeling was Just give America to me; let me take it; I’ll fix it myself! I thought all it would require was conviction and hard work, and I knew I was capable of working harder than anyone. I didn’t think the whole country would come streaming back to a more natural way of living, but I figured maybe sixty or a hundred people a year would come to Turtle Island and then take their lessons back to their communities and the message would spread like ripples in a pond and the effect would keep expanding. But I see now how hard it is to make a major difference in this country if you don’t happen to be the president or an important senator and if you have no resources except your energy. How can one person make a difference? It’s impossible and it’s improbable and, most of all, it’s damn tiring.”

  And America’s obsession with devouring land continues, faster and more efficiently than ever. Eustace is glad to see that environmental awareness, once a radical and fringe concept, is now “totally pop and hip.” Still, he can’t see that a little recycling fever is any match for the famished momentum of industry and overpopulation and rampant consumerism that define our culture. It may be that Turtle Island will, a century from now, be as Eustace once imagined it: “A tiny bowl in the earth, intact and natural, surrounded by pavement and highways. People will climb up to the ridges around Turtle Island and peer inside, and they’ll be able to see a pristine and green example of what the whole world once looked like.”

  Maybe that’s true. Maybe what Eustace is doing by saving this little patch of Appalachian forest is what medieval monks once did by copying all those ancient texts. In a dark time, one that does not value knowledge, he is steadfastly preserving something small and precious in the hope that a more enlightened future generation will be grateful to have it. Maybe that’s all he’s doing.

  People used to say to Eustace, “If you touch only one life, you’ve had an effect on the world!” But Eustace was never satisfied with that. It was his intent to alter the very destiny of humanity and never to settle for the meager accomplishment of touching a random life every now and again. He runs into people sometimes these days who’ll say, “You’re Eustace Conway! I remember you! You spoke at my high school fifteen years ago! You were amazing! You changed my life!”

  Then Eustace gets all excited, until the person clarifies that. “Yeah, ever since I heard you speak, I don’t run the water anymore while I’m brushing my teeth. I’m conserving resources.”

  Eustace can only laugh, covering his face with his hands and shaking his head. “I mean, don’t get me wrong,” he’ll tell me. “I want to say to these people, hey, I’m glad you’re not running the water while you’re brushing your teeth. Honestly,
I am. That’s a very nice way to conserve a precious resource and that makes me really happy. But you know what? I kinda had bigger plans for you.”

  Eustace has lost, too, his youthful notion that he could teach absolutely anybody to live in the woods. When he was younger, he never considered turning away a would-be apprentice from Turtle Island. He never believed there was a single person in this country who couldn’t master a more natural life with a little training. But now he’s more cautious, more selective. He doesn’t automatically welcome the ex-convicts and barely recovering drug addicts and angry teenage runaways anymore, because it saps the system to have such people around.

  He’s also found it useful to formalize the apprenticeship program more. It used to be a looseygoosey, sealed-on-a-handshake relationship, the details of which altered from person to person, from year to year. Basically, all a young man or woman had to do was show up at Turtle Island and express some eagerness, and Eustace would sign the kid up, asking only that the apprentice promise to work hard and keep a positive attitude throughout the stay. These days, though, Eustace screens all potential apprentices through a fairly rigorous application process that demands resumés, references, background information, and a written essay. Moreover, tired of the Eustace Conway Whiplash Effect that decimated the morale of his workforce, Eustace now hands out this memo (simply entitled “Re: Relationship With Eustace”) to every applicant:

  “Please don’t expect to develop a close friendship with Eustace or be disappointed by anything other than a working boss, leader, and director-type of friendship. People are attracted to aspects of Eustace’s warm and generous personality and often want a more personal contact than can be expected, or than Eustace is comfortable in allowing. Apprentices have been disappointed when they did not get enough social contact with Eustace. Eustace is comfortable with extending his time to you on a mutually agreed upon expectation level. This clearly defined relationship is between a leader and those who are learning about the chores,methods, and needs of a farm and educational center.”