The Last American Man

by Elizabeth Gilbert

  When all that happens, Eustace will have become a villager. That’s what he wants—to create a town. And when that is all firmly in place, he will build his dream home. He’ll move out of the cabin and into a large and expensive show house full of walk-in closets and appliances and family and stuff. And he will have finally caught up with his time. At that point, Eustace Conway will be the paradigm of a modern American man.

  He evolves before our eyes. He improves and expands and improves and expands because he is so clever and so resourceful that he cannot help himself. He is not compelled to rest in the enjoyment of what he already knows how to do; he must keep moving on. He is unstoppable. And we are also unstoppable. We on this continent have always been unstoppable. We all progress, as de Tocqueville observed, “like a deluge of men, rising unabatedly, and driven daily onward by the hand of God.”We exhaust ourselves and everyone else. And we exhaust our resources— both natural and interior—and Eustace is only the clearest representation of our urgency.

  I remember driving back to Turtle Island early one evening with him, after a visit to his grandfather’s old empire of Camp Sequoyah. We were almost home, passing through Boone, and stopped at an intersection. Eustace suddenly spun his head and asked, “Was that building there two days ago when we left for Asheville?”

  He pointed at the skeleton of a small new office building. No, I hadn’t noticed it there two days earlier. But it looked almost finished. Only the windows needed to be popped in. A battalion of construction workers were leaving the site for the day.

  “Couldn’t be,” Eustace said. “Can they really put up a building that fast?”

  “I don’t know,” I said, thinking that, of all people, he ought to know. “I guess they can.”

  He sighed. “This country . . .” he said.

  But Eustace Conway is this country. And, that being the case, what remains? What remains after all this activity? That’s the question Walt Whitman once asked. He looked around at the galloping pace of American life and at the growth of industry and at the jaw-clenching rush of his countrymen’s ambitions and wondered, “After you have exhausted what there is in business, politics, conviviality, and so on—have found that none of these finally satisfy, or permanently wear—what remains?”

  And, as ever, dear old Walt gave us the answer: “Nature remains.”

  That’s what Eustace is left with, too. Although, like the rest of us (and this is his biggest irony), Eustace doesn’t have as much time as he wishes to celebrate the natural world.

  As he told me one winter evening over the phone, “We had a snowstorm up at Turtle Island this week. A friend of mine came to visit and said, ‘Hey, Eustace, you’ve been working too hard. You should take a break and build a snowman. Ever think of that?’Well, hell, of course I’d already thought of that. All I had to do was take one step outside my door that morning to see that it was perfect snow for a snowman. I’d already visualized the snowman I would build, if I were to build one. I quickly analyzed the consistency of the snow and decided exactly where to put the snowman for best presentation, exactly how big it would be, and where in my blacksmith shop I could find charcoal for the eyes. I pictured every detail of the snowman right down to the carrot nose, which I had to think about for an instant: Do we have enough carrots to spare that I could use one for this snowman? And after the snowman is over, could I get the carrot back and put it in a stew so that it wouldn’t be wasted? Or would an animal get at the carrot first? I ran through all this in about five seconds, estimated how much time it would take out of my busy day to build the snowman, I weighed that against how much pleasure building a snowman would bring me—and decided against it.”

  More’s the pity, because he does enjoy being outside and he might have gotten more pleasure from the snowman than he was able to logically calculate. Because he does love nature, for all his commitments and obligations. He loves it all—the cosmic scope of the woods; the stipple of sunlight slanting down through a verdant natural awning; the loveliness of the words locust, birch, and tulip poplar . . . More than loving it, he needs it. As Eustace’s grandfather wrote, “When the mind is tired, or the soul is disquieted, let us go to the woods and fill our lungs with the rain-washed and the sun-cleansed air, and our hearts with the beauty of tree, flower, crystal, and gem.”

  The best man that Eustace can be is the man he becomes when he is alone in the woods. That’s why I drag him out of his office whenever I come to Turtle Island and make him lead me on a walk. Even though he generally doesn’t have time for it, I make him do it, because we don’t get ten steps into the forest before he says, “That’s bee balm. You can make a straw out of its hollow stem and suck moisture up from pebbles in streams where it might be too shallow to drink.”

  Or, “That’s Turk’s Cap, a flower that looks a lot like a tiger lily, only more exotic. It’s extremely rare. I doubt there are five of these plants on all thousand acres of Turtle Island.”

  Or, when I complain about my poison ivy, he takes me down to the river and says, “Come join me in my pharmacy.”He pulls up some jewelweed, and opens it to the ointment inside, spreads it on my bumpy wrist, and suddenly everything feels better.

  I love Eustace in the woods because he loves himself in the woods. It’s that easy. Which is why, one day when we were walking, I said to him out of the blue,“Permission to introduce a revolutionary new concept, sir?”

  Eustace laughed. “Permission granted.”

  “Have you ever wondered,” I asked, “if you might benefit the world more by actually living the life you always talk about? I mean, isn’t that what we’re all here for? Aren’t we each supposed to try to live the most enlightened and honest life we can? And when our actions contradict our values, don’t we just fuck everything up even more?”

  I paused here and waited to get punched. But Eustace said nothing, so I continued.

  “You’re always telling us how happy we could be if we lived in the woods. But when people come up here to live with you, what they end up seeing is your stress and frustration at having so many people around and being overwhelmed with responsibilities. So of course they don’t absorb the lesson, Eustace. They hear your message but they can’t feel your message, and that’s why it doesn’t work. Do you ever wonder about that?”

  “I wonder about it constantly!” Eustace exploded. “I’m totally fucking aware of that! Whenever I go into schools to teach, I tell people, ‘Look, I am not the only person left in this country who tries to live a natural life in the woods, but you’re never going to meet all those other guys because they aren’t available.’Well, I am available. That’s the difference with me. I’ve always made myself available, even when it compromises the way I want to live. When I go out in public, I deliberately try to present myself as this wild guy who just came down off the mountain, and I’m aware that it’s largely an act. I know I’m a showman. I know I present people with an image of how I wish I were living. But what else can I do? I have to put on that act for the benefit of the people.”

  “I’m not so sure it’s benefiting us, Eustace.”

  “But if I lived the quiet and simple life I want, then who would witness it? Who would be inspired to change? Only my neighbors would see me. I’d influence about forty people, when I want to influence about four hundred thousand people. You see the dilemma? You see my struggle? What am I supposed to do?”

  “How about trying to live in peace for once?”

  “But what does that mean?” Eustace was roaring now, laughing and totally losing it. “What does that fucking mean?”

  Of course, that’s not my question to answer. All I can tell with any certainty is when the man appears to be most at peace. And that usually isn’t when he’s firing apprentices or spending six straight hours on the telephone haggling with tax lawyers, school boards, newspaper reporters, and insurance companies. When he appears to be most at peace is when he is experiencing the closest and most personal liaison with the wilderness. When he is right in
side nature’s stupefying theater, he is closest to happy. When he is—as much as is humanly achievable in our modern age—living in communion with whatever is left of our frontier, he gets there.

  Sometimes I’m lucky enough to have a glimpse into that best part of Eustace Conway in the most unlikely instances. Sometimes the moment just finds him. There was this one evening when we were driving back from Asheville, trucking along in silence. Eustace was in a quiet mood, and we were listening to old-time Appalachian music, taking in the sad twang of hard men who had lost their farms and hard women whose husbands had gone down into the coal mines and never returned. It was drizzling rain, and as we moved from superhighway to freeway to two-lane macadam to the dirt road of his mountain, the rain lightened up, even as the sun was going down. We bounced and trundled up toward Turtle Island under the gloom of steep, overgrown hollers.

  Quite suddenly, a family of deer leaped out of the woods and onto the road before us. Eustace hit the brakes. The doe and her fawns skit-ted sideways into the darkness, but the buck stayed, staring into our headlights. Eustace honked. The buck stood. Eustace jumped out of the truck and let out a loud whoop into the damp night, to chase the buck back into the woods, but the buck stood where it was.

  “You’re beautiful, brother!” Eustace shouted at the deer.

  The buck regarded him. Eustace laughed. He made fists and shook them wildly in the air. He whooped and howled like an animal. Again, Eustace shouted to the buck, “You’re beautiful! You rule! You da bomb!”

  Eustace laughed. Still the buck held his ground, unmoving.

  And then Eustace, too, stopped moving—enchanted into a temporary paralysis. For a long while he stood as stock still and silent as I’d ever seen him, barely illuminated by the spilled bath of his shadowy headlights, staring at that buck. Nobody budged or breathed. In the end, it was Eustace who broke first, throwing his fists up into the air again and shouting out into the night with all the voice he could summon:

  “I love you! You’re beautiful! I love you! I love you! I love you!”

  Acknowledgments

  I would like to thank the extraordinary Conway family for their openness and hospitality during this project, and particularly Eustace Conway for his courage in letting me proceed with this work unfettered.

  It has been an honor to know you all, and I have tried to honor you here.

  There have been many people in Eustace’s life—past and present—who gave generously of their time to help me formulate the ideas behind this book. For their tolerance in being incessantly interviewed, I thank Donna Henry, Christian Kaltrider, Shannon Nunn,Valarie Spratlin, CuChullaine O’Reilly, Lorraine Johnson, Randy Cable, Steve French, Carolyn Hauck, Carla Gover, Barbara Locklear, Hoy Moretz, Nathan and Holly Roarke, the Hicks family, Jack Bibbo, Don Bruton, Matt Niemas, Siegal Kiewe, Warren Kimsey, Alan Stout, Ed Bumann, Pop Hollingsworth, Patience Harrison, Dave Reckford, Scott Taylor, Ashley Clutter, and Candice Covington. And a special note of thanks to Kathleen and Preston Roberts, who are not only lovely and gracious people, but who let Eustace and me sit on their porch and drink beer and shoot off guns all night long. (“I never fired a gun when I was drunk before,” Eustace said, and Preston shouted, “And you call yourself Southern?”)

  I am grateful to the authors of the many books and histories that have guided this endeavor. Among others, I found inspiration in John Mack Faragher’s biography of Daniel Boone, David Roberts’s biography of Kit Carson, James Atkins Shatford’s biography of Davy Crockett, David McCullough’s biography of the young Teddy Roosevelt, Rod Phillips’s analysis of forest Beatniks, and Stephen Ambrose’s compelling account of Lewis and Clark’s journey to the Pacific.

  Anybody interested in reading more about American utopias should get Timothy Miller’s encyclopedic The 60’s Communes: Hippies and Beyond, and anybody interested in a surprisingly funny book that happens to be about American utopias should hunt down a copy of Mark Halloway’s brilliant Heavens on Earth: Utopian Communities in America, 1680–1880. The statistics quoted in Chapter Seven on the decline of males come from The Decline of Males, by Lionel Tiger. I also owe thanks to R. W. B. Lewis for his wise study The American Adam, and to Richard Slotkin for his equally wise The Fatal Environment. And my bottomless thanks (and eternal admiration) go to the living library that is Doug Brinkley, for telling me to read all these books.

  Thanks also go to Powell’s Bookstore of Portland, Oregon, for having—when I was seeking books about the impressions of nineteenth-century European visitors to America—an entire shelf labeled “Impressions of 19th Century European Visitors to America.” There is no better bookstore in America, and this proves it.

  I am fortunate to have great friends who are also great readers and editors. For their help and valuable assistance in editing various versions of this book, I thank David Cashion, Reggie Ollen, Andrew Corsello, John Morse, John Gilbert, Susan Bowen (the speed-reading Georgia Peach), and John Hodgman (who invented just for me the essential new editing abbreviation CWRBS, meaning “Cut the Will Rogers Bullshit”). I thank John Platter, who found the strength to read an early draft of this book in his final days of life, and whom I miss terribly every time I walk to my mailbox and remember that I will never receive another letter from him.

  I thank Kassie Evashevski, Sarah Chalfant, Paul Slovak, and the hugely incredible Frances Apt for their sure-footed guidance. I thank Art Cooper at GQ for believing me four years ago when I said, “Trust me— you just gotta let me write a profile about this guy.” I thank Michael Cooper for saying long ago, when I was in doubt about writing the book, “Wouldn’t you rather make a mistake by doing something than make a mistake by not doing something?” Again, I thank my big sister Catherine for her preternatural genius about American history and for her steadfast support. Again, I thank my dear friend Deborah for being open twenty-four hours a day to dispense her wisdom on the human psyche. This book would be virtually barren of ideas without the inspiration of these two amazing women.

  There are not enough thanks in the world to offer the Ucross Foundation for giving me 22,000 acres of privacy in the middle of Wyoming during what I will probably always remember as the most important thirty days of my life.

  And lastly, there are not enough ways in the world for me to say this:

  Big Love

  A NOTE ON THE AUTHOR

  Elizabeth Gilbert is the author of a short story collection,

  Pilgrims (a finalist for the Pen/Hemingway Award), a

  novel, Stern Men, and a book of non-fiction, The Last

  American Man (nominated for the National Book

  Award and a New York Times Notable Book for 2002).

  For many years she wrote for American GQ, where she

  received three National Magazine Award nominations

  for feature writing. Her most recent book, Eat, Pray,

  Love – a memoir about the year she spent travelling

  the world after a bad divorce – is an international

  bestseller, with over five million copies in print.

  Elizabeth Gilbert lives in New Jersey.