The Last American Man

by Elizabeth Gilbert

  Lately, Eustace has suffered such crushing disappointments with his workers that he’s considering altogether giving up the apprenticeship program. Two of his apprentices quit this spring after serving out only six months of their year-long contracts, abandoning Turtle Island with the usual complaints that the work was too hard, they were having trouble with Eustace’s leadership, the experience was not what they’d expected, and they “needed to follow their bliss,” even if it meant not honoring their commitments.

  “Does it mean nothing to anybody anymore to sign an agreement?” Eustace asked in wonder. “Is it naïve of me in my antiquated way to think that people should do what they say they’re going to do? How could these kids walk away after six months without caring that they’d promised to stay a year? They had no sense of the bind that put me in, or the fact that I might have made plans around their commitment. They bailed out early and left me high and dry. And why does this keep happening, time and again?”

  What devastated Eustace about the loss of these two young people was not only that their stay at Turtle Island followed such a familiar trajectory (enthusiastic hope followed by bitter disillusionment) but that one of the apprentices, a thoroughly competent and reliable woman named Jennifer, had been, to Eustace’s mind, possibly the best worker he’d ever had. She even rivaled the legendary Christian Kaltrider with her potential. She was smart, dedicated, and uncomplaining, with a serious commitment to learning about primitive farming. She’d been raised in the mountains and had brought skills to Turtle Island that even Eustace didn’t have. He’d trusted her enough to turn over to her the management of the Turtle Island garden (an act of faith he’d made with no small amount of suffering, and largely as a self-experiment, to see whether he could handle the loss of control). And Jennifer had made the garden thrive, even as she was learning about the care of horses and the construction of buildings. She was perfect, and Eustace had come to respect her and rely on her. And now she had up and quit.

  “Look up the word heartbroken in the dictionary and you’ll see a picture of me next to it,” he told me on the phone a week after Jennifer had left. “I was so depressed when she left, I didn’t get out of bed for two days. If somebody like Jennifer can’t make it here for a whole year, who can? Who am I kidding? Why am I bothering? What is Turtle Island for, if that’s how it’s always going to end? It’s something I pour my lifeblood into for the benefit of others, but it’s not working, and the people I’m doing it for keep quitting and failing. I’m closer to giving up than I’ve ever been. I’ve been having fantasies of hanging a little sign on the gate that says: Turtle Island closed. Go away. Of course, I won’t. Or maybe I will. I don’t know anymore . . .”

  And so it goes that Eustace, by hard necessity, is narrowing his vision as he ages,winnowing out some of his youthful ideals, giving up some of his boldest dreams. His latest aspirations are strikingly modest. For now, he’s not taking on any new apprentices but is concentrating his energy on getting a horseback-riding program instituted at Turtle Island. He’s been running ads in the Boone newspapers, inviting people to come up to his property for day trips around his woods. He’s hoping that the money he makes by taking people on horseback rides will help defer the expenses of keeping all those lovely horses of his. And it’s a refreshingly simple human interaction—the customer pays, Eustace provides a simple service, he doesn’t try to convince anyone to move into the forest with him, and everyone goes home at the end of the day satisfied.

  OK, he thinks now, maybe I can’t change the world. Maybe Eustace’s influence will be more modest, affecting small groups and scattered individuals— people like the motorists he waved to from his horse on the Long Riders trip, the kindergarteners he buried up to their necks in the forest, the drug dealers in Tompkins Square Park whom he left to ponder the curious fact that a man can make his clothing from the materials of this earth . . .

  Or consider the young campers who were exploring Turtle Island one day and discovered a beaver dam and were encouraged by their counselors to swim inside the dam through the beaver’s tunnels until they reached the inside of the beaver’s lodge—warm, dry, sacred, and hidden. How many boys in this century have been inside a beaver lodge? That event must have sent an immeasurable and lasting tremor through the consciousness of those boys. To Eustace Conway, with his grand architect’s vision of a transformed America, that may not seem like much. But in this age of increasingly mindless conformity, even the faintest suggestion that the world can be looked at from another vantage point for one fleeting moment, it is much. And maybe that doesn’t satisfy Eustace, but that may be all he gets. He is, in the end, a teacher. And like all teachers, he may have to accept the reality that only a few of his students over a few decades will truly be affected by a few lessons.

  There was once a kid, for instance, named Dave Reckford.

  He was raised outside Chicago, a suburban child with a physician father and a mother who expressed her vaguely hippie leanings by sending her son to Quaker schools and feeding him health foods. When Caterpillar Tractor closed its Illinois factory, Dave’s hometown turned from boom to bust, and his parents moved to North Carolina, where Dave was sent to an expensive private school packed with children from the oldest families in the South. And then his life turned upside down. Dave’s father fell in love with another woman and split. The family was shattered into chaos. Eventually, those shattered bits were re-ordered. After a few hard years, his mother pulled her life together and married a wealthy and kind man, but somehow Dave was left behind in all this. He was thirteen years old and shaken to his guts. Profoundly sad. And searching.

  A few years later, a modern-day mountain man named Eustace Conway came to teach a nature class at the private school where Dave Reckford was a student. “He was all dressed up in buckskin,” Dave remembers, “and he didn’t smell very good. And he started talking, in his quiet way, about his teepee and his blowgun and his life in the wilderness. I was enthralled. He talked about going to the bathroom in the woods. He got on this diversion about how squatting is the natural way to go to the bathroom and how sitting on a toilet seat puts an unnatural strain on the organs of digestion, and we were shocked—this whole room of elite Southern teenagers. We’d never heard anything like it. And then he said, ‘In fact, when I have to go to the bathroom someplace where all they have is toilets, I just jump up on the toilet seat and squat on it like this—’ and he hopped up onto a desk in a squat to show us. He was laughing and we were laughing, and somehow he made it all seem OK and interesting without freaking us out.”

  Later, Eustace set to talking with Dave, and, sensing the level of desperation in the kid, invited him to visit Turtle Island. Dave immediately agreed, and drove his “little rich-boy Mercedes coupe” up there for a weeklong visit. This was in the early, early years. There wasn’t much to Turtle Island yet, except Eustace’s teepee. He hadn’t cleared any land and he didn’t have any livestock. It was still primitive. When Dave showed up, Eustace was sitting by his teepee, talking “with a really pretty woman. He asked me if I could please excuse myself for a half hour so that he could be alone with this girl in his teepee, and then he slipped off with her to have—it was pretty obvious—sex. I was pretty amazed by the openness of his sexuality. He finally came out of the teepee, and the girl left, and then he began to teach me. The first thing he showed me was a bed of coals in his fire pit. He explained that if you keep your deep-set coals warm all the time, you’ll always have fire ready at hand and not have to strike up a new flame.”

  Then he set Dave to work rebuilding the forge in the blacksmith shop. Next, they began digging the foundation for the toolshed Eustace was building. He taught Dave how to make shingles, which was “really hard work, with a sledgehammer.” And so it went, day after day, hard manual labor from a boy who had never experienced such a thing.

  “It wasn’t what I’d expected,” Dave said, “from the quiet-warrior, soft-spoken, Zen-master teacher I thought I had followed up the mo
untain. He was a slave driver. He was relentless and obsessive about detail, and the work made me cry and almost broke my back. It was so hard, I was afraid each day that I wouldn’t survive. But every night, I got to sleep near Eustace in his teepee, on the animal skin rugs by the warm fire, and that was the best and safest sleep I’d had since I was a child. He made me great food and listened to me talk about my family. I don’t think anyone gets this kind of access to Eustace Conway anymore, but this was in the years before he had apprentices and campers everywhere and all his public duties. He was twenty-seven years old and I was a fatherless kid, but it was a profound experience to spend time with a grown man who wanted to talk to me and teach me things.”

  Eustace used his time with Dave to try to have him understand the fundamental essence of his philosophy, which centered on mindfulness. There is no way, Eustace said to Dave, that you can have a decent life as a man if you aren’t awake and aware every moment. Show up for your own life, he said. Don’t pass your days in a stupor, content to swallow whatever watery ideas modern society may bottle-feed you through the media, satisfied to slumber through life in an instant-gratification sugar coma. The most extraordinary gift you’ve been given is your own humanity, which is about consciousness, so honor that consciousness.

  Revere your senses; don’t degrade them with drugs, with depression, with willful oblivion. Try to notice something new every day, Eustace said. Pay attention to even the most modest of daily details. Even if you’re not in the woods, be aware at all times. Notice what food tastes like; notice what the detergent aisle in the supermarket smells like and recognize what those hard chemical smells do to your senses; notice what bare feet feel like; pay attention every day to the vital insights that mindfulness can bring. And take care of all things, of every single thing there is—your body, your intellect, your spirit, your neighbors, and this planet. Don’t pollute your soul with apathy or spoil your health with junk food any more than you would deliberately contaminate a clean river with industrial sludge. You can never become a real man if you have a careless and destructive attitude, Eustace said, but maturity will follow mindfulness even as day follows night.

  Eustace told Dave tragicomic stories about some of the teenage American boys who’d visited Turtle Island and were so oblivious of their environment that they literally didn’t have the sense to come in from the rain. A storm would come up, and the boys would stand there in the downpour, as stupefied as a flock of overbred sheep, unable to reason that they should transport their bodies to a shelter. Or there was the boy Eustace had seen step in a yellow jacket’s nest and then stand stock still and confused as the swarm gathered around him. The boy was patently unable to think that he should get himself out of this situation until Eustace shouted, “Run!”

  Be awake, Eustace said (laughing at the very simplicity of it), and you will succeed in this world. When it rains, find shelter! When you’re being stung by yellow jackets, run! Only through constant focus can you become independent. Only through independence can you know yourself. And only through knowing yourself will you be able to ask the key questions of your life: What is it that I am destined to accomplish, and how can I make it happen?

  What Dave remembered more than anything about that week, though, was the transformative, almost religious, experience of watching Eustace build a fence.

  “Building a fence up here in this rocky soil is hard work. First you have to pound into the ground this metal post, slamming it with a sledgehammer and making a hole for your black locust stake. I almost cut my leg off once, trying to do it. Then you stick that black locust stake into the hole and whale on it with that heavy sledgehammer, drilling it in. I did six of these in a row, and I swear to God I almost died. I can’t describe what hard work that was. I collapsed on the ground and felt that my heart would explode. Eustace then took over for me, and while I tried to catch my breath, he put in the next twenty stakes without pausing once, without even breathing hard.

  “I studied him as he worked. How could he do this? He’s not as big or muscular as I am. I’m a triathlete and I’m big, and I couldn’t do it. His arms are lean. How can it work? But as I watched him, I realized he had an intimate physical relationship with his tools. When he swung that sledgehammer, he didn’t use just his arms; he swung it in one perfectly economical motion, using his whole body. His hips helped him hoist the sledgehammer up, and then he arched back and put all his momentum behind the blow. It was beautiful. It was complete physical attention to one task. It was like watching a dance. The dance of manual labor. And I knew that this was why Eustace could do everything faster and better than everyone else, because of that intensity and grace and perfection of focus.”

  Dave remembers watching Eustace on another day hammering nails into wood—fast, rhythmic, and perfect—and asking, “How come you never miss the nail?”

  “Because I made up my mind a long time ago that I’d never miss the nail,” Eustace replied. “So I don’t.”

  In the end, the grueling pace of the work at Turtle Island was such a shock to Dave’s body that he collapsed. He became physically ill from the eleven-hour days of labor. Eustace, seeing this, stopped the work for a day and drove Dave down to town. “Let’s take a fun trip,” he said casually. He took the kid into a bar and got him a beer—his first. Eustace laughed and joked with the bartender and never mentioned the work that was left behind. On the way back up the mountain that night, Dave broke down and told Eustace he didn’t think he could stay any longer.

  “I told him I wanted to go home. I was probably crying. I’m sure I was homesick, because I was just a kid. Eustace was calm and thoughtful. We sat in his truck and he talked about life and about what it takes to become a man. He imparted wisdom and kindness to me, taking me seriously at an age when nobody ever took me seriously. He told me that one of the reasons people are so unhappy is they don’t talk to themselves. He said you have to keep a conversation going with yourself throughout your life to see how you’re doing, to keep your focus, to remain your own friend. He told me that he talked to himself all the time, and that it helped him to grow stronger and better every day. He suggested some books I should read. Then he hugged me.”

  Fifteen years later, Dave Reckford still couldn’t tell this part of the story without tears brimming up.

  “Listen,” he said, “it was a real hug, long and strong. It was a bear hug. It was the first time I had ever been hugged by a man, and it seemed to cure something inside me that was lonely and hurt. He told me I was free to go home and he wished me luck. But he also told me I was free to come back and stay with him on Turtle Island any time I wanted to, because I had done a good job and because I was a good person. And I did go home, but when I got there, I found that something had changed in me. And the rest of my life was changed.”

  Every man in Dave Reckford’s family is a lawyer, a doctor, a businessman, or a diplomat. That’s what is expected, the way of the family. It’s not Dave’s way, as it turns out. Dave is thirty years old now and has been roaming around, looking for his place. He’s studied history and music. He’s tried his hand at writing. He’s traveled to Cuba and Europe and across America and even joined the army, trying to find where he should place himself for his short time on earth.

  Recently, he finally landed. He solved it. He asked the woman who tends to his parents’ gardens to take him on as her apprentice. She agreed. So now Dave Reckford has become what he believes he was intended to be: a gardener. He takes care of plants. He spends his days thinking about soil and light and growth. It’s a simple relationship, but he is rewarded by it. He tries to understand what plants need and how to help them. He tries to make his every movement careful and precise, to honor his work. He talks to himself all the time, keeping in contact with his personal essence. And every single day of his life he thinks about perfection of focus and about the singular grace of human labor.

  Which means that, every single day of his life, he thinks about Eustace Conway.

 
EPILOGUE

  You can’t fix it. You can’t make it go away.

  I don’t know what you’re going to do about it,

  but I know what I’m going to do about it. I’m just

  going to walk away from it. Maybe

  a small part of it will die if I’m not around

  feeding it anymore.

  —Lew Welch

  The history of Eustace Conway is the history of man’s progress on the North American continent.

  First, he slept on the ground and wore furs. He made fire with sticks and ate what he could hunt and gather. When he was hungry, he threw stones at birds and blew darts at rabbits and dug up roots from the ground, and so he survived. He wove baskets from the trees in his domain. He was a nomad; he moved on foot. Then he moved into a teepee and became a more sophisticated trapper of animals. He made fire with flint and steel. When he mastered that, he used matches. He began to wear wool. He moved out of the teepee and into a simple wooden structure. He became a farmer, clearing the land and cultivating a gar- den. He acquired livestock. He cut paths into the woods, which became trails and then roads. He improved the roads with bridges. He wore denim.

  He was first an Indian, then an explorer, then a pioneer. He built himself a cabin and became a true settler. As a man of utopian vision, he now sustains himself with the hope that like-minded people will buy property around Turtle Island and raise their families as he will someday raise his. The neighbors will till their land with animal-drawn machinery and come to each other’s aid in the time of harvest and join each other for bursts of recreational dancing, and they will ride to each other’s homes on horseback and trade goods.