The Last American Man (15 page)

If a child said, “I don’t want to kill a defenseless animal,” Eustace would smile and explain, “I’ll tell you a little secret,
my friend. You’ll never find in all of nature such a thing as a ‘defenseless’ animal. Except maybe some human beings I’ve
known.”

He finally had his place, a place where he could teach in an interactive and twenty-four-hour environment, with no distractions
and no limits on his time or resources. Everything he wanted to show his students was right on hand. It was as if they were
living inside an encyclopedia.

On a nature walk he might say, “That mushroom right there is lacteria. You have to be very careful with this species, though,
because there are four mushrooms in the world that look just like that. Two of them are poisonous and two of them aren’t.
So don’t make any hasty decisions about which ones to eat! The only way you can tell the difference is to break the mushroom
open and put your tongue to the milky substance right here inside. See that? If it tastes bitter, it’s poison, so stay away
from it.”

Or he might tell them how primitive people took care of their health with witch hazel. “It’s growing right there, and it’s
good for all kinds of wounds.”

Or he’d say, “That’s black birch. Why don’t you chew on that? It tastes good, right? The inner bark is the most valuable part.
It’s what the old-time Appalachian people used to make birch beer out of. Maybe we should do that later.”

He was in bliss over the success of what he had created. There seemed no limit to what he could teach up here. The campers
would return home to their suburban lives, and their parents would write letters to Eustace: “What did you do to my son, that
he’s so much more mature now? What did you teach him that has made him so interested in his world?”

Eustace also held week-long seminars for adults. When he took one such group out for a hike through the forest, they were
walking along a river, and one of the women, who had never been in the woods before, started to scream. She saw a snake swimming
against the current. Eustace was wearing only a breechcloth, so he dove into the water and caught the snake with his hands
and quietly explained its physiology to the woman from the city. He had her touch it and look inside its mouth. Eventually
she held the snake in her hands while her friends took photographs.

On another occasion, Eustace took a small group of kindergarteners for a walk in the woods. He pointed up at the dense overhang
of foliage and told them about the different kinds of trees. He let them drink from a spring, to show them that water comes
out of the ground, not just out of faucets. He let them chew on sourwood, and they were amazed that he was right, that it
did taste like tart candy. As they walked through the forest, he explained how the forest floor works, its circularity. The
leaves fall from the trees and crumble and decompose and turn into soil. He explained how water seeps into the ground and
feeds the roots of the trees; how the insects and animals live on the forest floor, eating each other and all the organic
material they can find, keeping the cycle going.

“The woods are alive,” he said, but he could see that the children didn’t quite get it. Then, he asked a question. “Who wants
to be my helper?”When a small boy stepped forward, Eustace—with the help of the children—dug two long shallow trenches in
the forest floor. And he and the little boy lay down in the trenches and the other children buried them so that only their
faces were sticking out of the ground, looking straight up.

“Now,
we
are the forest floor,” Eustace said. “And let’s tell the others what we see and feel. Let’s explain what’s happening to us.”

They lay there for some time in the soft forest duff, Eustace and a five-year-old child, and described what they saw and felt.
How the sun hit their faces for a little while and then shade came with the waving of branches above them. They described
dead pine needles falling on them and the drops of moisture from past rainfall landing on their cheeks and the insects and
spiders marching over their faces. It was amazing. The children were mesmerized. And then, of course, they all wanted to be
buried. So Eustace took turns burying each of them, transforming each child for a short while into the forest floor and smiling
encouragingly as their sharp voices of comprehension filled the damp, clean air.

“It
is
alive!” they kept saying. “It
is
alive!”

They could scarcely believe it.

CHAPTER SIX

My public engagements consume all my time . . . I was much gratified to
hear that the first editions of my book were entirely sold out . . . I wish
to know if you have an agent in New Orleans and in the towns on the
Mississippi, there it will sell better than other places . . . send me 10
copies as I wish that number for distribution among my immediate
friends. I also wish you to understand that the Hon. Thos. Chilton of
Kentucky is entitled to one equl half of the 62½
percent of the entire
profits of the work as by the agreement between you and myself . . .

—From a business letter written by Davy Crockett
to the publisher of his memoirs

I
n May of 2000, I sat across a desk from Eustace Conway in his sunny office. Between us was a large cardboard box that had
once contained— if its original label was to be believed—
Stilh Chain Saw Bar and Chain
Lubricant
. This is the box where Eustace stores the information about all his land parcels, which now add up to over a thousand acres.
The box is full of manila envelopes marked, in no particular order, “Blank Land Deeds,” “Johnson Maps,” “Land Tax Bills,”
“Cabell Gragg’s Land,” “Right-of-Way Information,” “Forest Management,” and a particularly thick envelope labeled “People
Who Want Land and Land For Sale.”

A few months earlier, Eustace and I had ridden horses together through a foot-deep cover of crisp snow and circled the perimeter
of Turtle Island. The ride took us several hours, and at some points we’d get off our horses to make it up or down the almost
sheer sides of hills, but Eustace didn’t once stop talking during the whole tour. He pointed out each tree and stone that
marked his property line and told me who currently owned the property on the other side of the line, what those people were
doing with their land, and how much he might be willing to pay for it someday. Having seen Turtle Island in the raw, I now
wanted to understand it on a map.

So Eustace pulled out a huge map and unfolded it before him, as if he were a pirate. His land was blocked out in small and
large connected parcels, and he told me how he’d acquired each piece over the years. What emerged was a portrait of genius.
Eustace had put the thing together like a chess master. He first bought the 107 acres that made up the valley of Turtle Island,
and then, as he earned money over the years, he slowly bought the peaks of each hill that surrounded the valley. The peaks
of a hill are the most valuable real estate to developers, after all, since everyone wants a home right on top of a mountain.
By securing these peaks, then, Eustace had made the hills below them much less attractive to any roving land speculator and
therefore much less likely to be sold to someone else before he could afford to grab it.

“I wanted the crests of every ridge around me,” Eustace said. “I wanted to be able to look up from my valley and see no light
pollution, no homes, no erosion to destroy the forest, and I wanted to hear no sounds except nature. The crests of the ridges
were key, also, because ridges are where developers build roads, and once a road has been stuck through a forest, you’re finished.
Roads bring people and people bring destruction, and I needed to prevent that. So I bought up all the crests. If I hadn’t
done that, there’d be a road running past here right now, I can promise you.”

Once he owned the crests, he filled in the gaps, buying the slopes that connected his valley to the surrounding mountaintops.
In this way, he guarded his watershed. What he was doing, actually, was transforming his holdings from a small, flat, low-lying
basin into a large teacup— a perfect valley—which would be protected by mountains on every side. He bought up a crucial 114
acres called the Johnson Land. (“Dick Johnson owned 40,000 acres next to me, and he put it up for sale. Obviously, I couldn’t
afford to buy it all, but I had to secure this one small piece right on the perimeter of Turtle Island, to keep a buffer between
my nature preserve and whatever some developers might do on the other side.” The Johnson Land was an emergency buy; Eustace
had to come up with the cash for it in two days, and he did.) Then he bought another small chunk of land he calls the Whale’s
Tail, because of its shape. (“It’s a beautiful acreage, with a big drop-off vista, and I knew someday somebody was going to
take a look at it and think what a nice place it would be for a house, so I had to secure it.”) Then he bought his most expensive
and tiny piece of land, a mere five acres, for which he paid an arm and a leg. (“I realized that if I bought it, I’d control
the access to the huge property on the other side of me, since this tiny spot is the only place where you can put a road.
I couldn’t afford to buy the big property, but I could afford to quietly buy this little roadblock here. It was just a security
measure. And maybe someday I can buy up the remainder without any serious competition.”)

But the most critical portion of Turtle Island was a 156.16-acre lot called the Cabell Gragg Land. Cabell Gragg was a sly
old Appalachian farmer who owned this small spit of land right behind Turtle Island. It was the last piece Eustace needed
to complete the watershed that would make his valley inviolable. From the first time Eustace had seen these woods, he knew
this to be the place where he would someday build his home. It wasn’t the most alluring 156.16 acres in the world, but if
someone else got hold of it, stripped it, polluted it, or developed it, Turtle Island would be poisoned through proximity.
The piece was critical. It was Eustace’s Achilles’ heel.

“If I couldn’t nail that Cabell Gragg Land,” Eustace said, “my dream was over. If someone else bought the property, that would’ve
been it for me. I would’ve turned around the next day and sold all my land and walked away from this whole vision, because
it would’ve been ruined. I’d just have to start all over again somewhere else. So here I was, waking up every day of my life
for almost ten years and working my brains out to make this place successful—putting up buildings and clearing pastures and
constructing bridges—knowing all the while that if I couldn’t buy the Cabell Gragg Land, all that work would be for nothing.”

From 1987 until 1997, Eustace tried hard to get his hands on those 156.16 acres. You can’t read ten consecutive pages of his
journals from that decade without hitting at least one reference to the Cabell Gragg Land. Eustace wrote Cabell Gragg countless
letters, took him on tours of Turtle Island, sent him gifts, and even, as the years went on, visited him in his nursing home
to negotiate terms. A dozen times Eustace thought he had a deal, and then old Cabell Gragg would back out or double the price
or say he’d found a better offer. It was maddening. Eustace had a bottle of champagne he was keeping to drink in celebration
of buying that land, and after ten years, the bottle had accumulated (as he puts it in his typically Eustacian precise manner)
“1.16th of an inch of dust on its surface.” He was willing to put together any crazy proposal to secure the property. At one
point, when Gragg expressed an interest in a fancy Victorian house down in Boone, Eustace came close to buying it in order
to trade it with Cabell for the land, but the deal fell through.

In the end, Eustace got his precious Cabell Gragg Land. But at a huge personal price and in the most daring and dangerous
of ways.

He got it by sleeping with the devil.

There’s a mountain right next to the mountains where Eustace lives, and for years and years it was nothing but forest. Tens
of thousands of acres of this mountain bumped plumb up against Eustace’s land, and he had a dream from the first time he saw
Turtle Island to buy it all up and multiply his holdings immensely. He didn’t know how he was going to do this, but he had
every intention of figuring out a way. Every time he drove up to Turtle Island on the road from Boone, he passed a particular
lookout point where he could pull his truck over and stand for a while and see over the ravine and valleys to a perfect view
of both his property and the beautiful and enormous and forested mountain right beside it. He could think,
Someday . . . somehow
. . .

And then, one afternoon in 1994, while driving his truck from Boone to Turtle Island, he saw a Cadillac parked at his favorite
lookout point. Four men in suits were standing outside the car, looking through binoculars across the ravine to that beautiful
and enormous and forested mountain. Eustace felt his heart stop. He knew right then that his dream of owning the mountain
was, as of this moment, officially over. He didn’t know who the men were, but he knew damn sure
what
they were, and he knew what they’d come for. It was the moral of
Return
to Shady Grove
repeating itself. There’s no reason on earth that men in suits scrutinize forests with binoculars clutched to their faces
in this distant corner of Appalachia unless they mean to buy something. Eustace pulled his truck up right behind the Cadillac
and got out. Startled, the suits turned. They lowered their binoculars and looked at him. Standing with his hands on his hips,
Eustace stared them down. One of the men flushed nervously, another coughed. It was as though they’d been caught stealing
something or having sex.

“Can I help you with anything, gentlemen?” Eustace asked, grimly.

But it was too late; they were already helping themselves.

They didn’t say a word to Eustace that day, but the truth came out over the next months. A guy named David Kaplan had come
to town looking to buy up all available land in the area in order to build an expensive and exclusive resort called Heavenly
Mountain, where well-heeled believers could come and practice transcendental meditation in the lap of luxury. Heavenly Mountain
would need roads and a helicopter pad and a golf course and a tennis court and lots of property for buildings.

David Kaplan was smart and ambitious and seemed to have all the money in the world. Acre by acre, he acquired the land he
needed. Old farms and lost ravines and clean rivers and pastures and rocky valleys— he bought them all. The joke around the
hollers was that David Kaplan’s land deals went this way: he’d pull up in his Jaguar at some run-down old shack and say to
some run-down old hillbilly at the door, “Hi. I’m David Kaplan. Money is no object. How do you do?”

Well, look. What’s done is done. Spilled milk is exactly that. Eustace put Heavenly Mountain out of his head as far as he
could. He even made jokes about it. When the trees came down and the palatial medittation center went up, Eustace started
calling the land Less-Heavenly Mountain, as in “Doesn’t it look a lot less heavenly now?” He’d also poke fun at his new neighbors
by doing a spot-on impression of the children’s TV host Mr. Rogers, droning, in that unmistakable patter, “Heavenly Mountain
is our neighbor. Can you say ‘
neigh
-bor,’ children? Heavenly Mountain builds roads that are hard on our environment. Can you say ‘
hard
-on,’ children?”

Anyway, he told himself, a transcendental meditation center wouldn’t be the worst neighbor; that was definitely better than
thousands of acres of one-family homes. The transcendentalists were coming to Heavenly Mountain to commune with nature, after
all, and, what with their Vedic architecture and vegetarian lives, they were sincerely seeking a more harmonious relationship
with the universe (even if they were building 4,000-square-foot homes in which to seek that harmony). And David Kaplan would
be developing only 10 percent of his land, saving the rest of the forest from logging, hunting, and road construction. And
since the resort was a place for people to come to seek peace, there would be a builtin interest in keeping the nearby property
wooded and quiet, and that served Eustace’s interests, too. So the arrival of David Kaplan wasn’t the worst possible event
in Eustace’s life.

He came to see it this way: OK, so David Kaplan wanted all the property in the world. Fine; Eustace couldn’t blame him for
wanting it. What Eustace had to concentrate on, instead, was protecting what he already owned. Which meant that David Kaplan
was welcome to buy every inch of North Carolina except the 156.16 acres of the Cabell Gragg Land.

But then Cabell Gragg started getting cute. When Eustace went to discuss the property, Cabell now started saying, “Well, you
know, those transcendental meditation folks are interested in buying it.” Eustace couldn’t imagine this to be true; the land
had no value to anyone but himself. But then he realized what was happening. As Cabell Gragg watched his neighbors get rich
by selling off their valuable farms to David Kaplan, with his slick Jaguar, Cabell decided never to sell to Eustace Conway,
with his beat-up 1974 pickup. Cabell wanted the satisfaction of feeling that he was in on this real estate boom, too. He was
holding out for the richer man’s offer.

Thereupon, Eustace called a summit meeting with David Kaplan. Now, it’s not that David Kaplan and Eustace Conway were exactly
in love with each other. They were direct competitors—the new-age mountain man verses the new-age real estate developer—and
they were probably the two sharpest guys in the county. They’d already had some unpleasant little runins. David Kaplan had
built himself a big fancy house on Heavenly Mountain, and his porch steps were merely four feet away from Eustace’s property
line. Eustace thought that was pretty rude, and said so. Moreover, one of the Heavenly Mountain Resort helicopters kept buzzing
low over Eustace’s nature preserve, day after day, kicking up wind and noise. Christ, how Eustace hated that! How can you
keep the sanctuary of Turtle Island with a helicopter flying low overhead? But no matter how many angry phone calls Eustace
made, it never stopped. He finally got so fed up that he went after the helicopter one day with a shotgun, put the pilot’s
face right in his sights, and shouted,
“Get the fuck off my fucking head!”

Which David Kaplan thought was pretty rude.