The Last American Man (28 page)

Actually, he was wearing flip-flops and shorts and no shirt, and he had a cigarette tucked behind his ear.

“I like to think I’m teaching these people skills that they’ll someday use in their own lives, but when I think of the hundreds
of people who have come through here over the years, I can’t imagine one who could manage a primitive life right now all alone.
Maybe Christian Kaltrider will someday. He was brilliant. He’s building a log cabin on his own land right now, and that’s
good to see. He learned all that here. There’s a kid named Avi Aski, who was a terrific apprentice. He’s looking for land
to buy in Tennessee, and maybe he’ll make it work. Maybe.”

Twig came toward us with the plow, churning up a wobbly path of soil.

“You’re doing a good job,” Eustace told him. “Much better than I expected.”

Eustace delivered the compliment with an expressionless face and an even tone. But underneath the praise I could hear the
scary traces of controlled anger and impatience and disappointment that I usually hear in Eustace’s voice at this time of
evening, when the sun’s going down and the chores haven’t been done and somebody’s screwing up again. Around this time of
evening, it’s pretty obvious that what Eustace really wants to do is line up the lot of us in a neat row and bitch-slap some
sense into our stupid heads.

Of course, he would never . . .

“Nice work, Twig,” he said instead. “Thank you for your focus.”

Eustace regularly gets apprentices who have never before held a bucket. He’ll give them the simplest task in the world—
go fill this bucket with
water
—and then he’ll watch in horror as they try to carry the filled bucket. They don’t know how. They hold the heavy bucket as
far away from their bodies as they can, keeping their arm stretched out in front of them, parallel to the ground, wasting
energy and strength just holding their burden. It makes him wince in pain to watch it. Or hammers. Eustace gets young people
up at Turtle Island who have never before met a hammer. They have no sense of how a hammer works. They come to him because
they claim they want to live “self-sufficiently,” but when he asks them to hammer in a nail, they grab the hammer in a tightened
fist, way up by its head, and then they
punch
at their target.

“When I see that,” Eustace says solemnly, “it makes me want to lie down and die.”

When he’s teaching young children in public schools, he sometimes tries to play this old Indian game with them, where you
roll a hoop and try to throw sticks through it as it tumbles along. But he finds again and again that whole classes of American
children are incapable of figuring out how to roll a hoop.

“It’s a crazy thing for a child not to know how to roll a hoop!” he rants. “I show them how to do it and I hand them the hoop
and they drop it. They kind of randomly throw the hoop and, of course, it lands flat on the ground, two feet away from them.
So they stare at it.
Why
isn’t it moving?
They don’t get it. Even after I’ve showed them once, they can’t figure it out. After a long time, some child might figure
out that a wheel needs momentum to roll, and if I’m lucky, some genius might think,
Ah! Let’s try to spin it!

“I see this played out over and over. I watch these kids and I think, ‘Can this unbelievable crisis be real?’What kind of
children are we raising in North America? Listen, I can guaran-damn-
tee
you that every child in Africa knows how to roll a fucking wheel. It’s a question of understanding natural law. The world
is ruled by a few basic physical laws—leverage, inertia, momentum, thermodynamics—and if you’re out of touch with these fundamental
principles, then you can’t hammer a nail, carry a bucket, or roll a wheel. That means you’re out of touch with the natural
world. Being out of touch with the natural world means you’ve lost your humanity and that you live in an environment that
you completely do not understand. Can you even begin to imagine my horror at this? Can you begin to comprehend what’s been
forgotten in just a few generations? It took mankind one million years to learn how to roll a wheel, but it only took us fifty
years to forget.”

We’ve forgotten, of course, because of the oldest natural law on the books: Use it or lose it. Kids can’t manage the simplest
tools because they have no need to learn. It serves no purpose in their comfortable, well-appointed lives. Their parents can’t
teach them this kind of physical dexterity, because they, by and large, don’t have it, either. Don’t need it, never learned
it, no call for it anymore. But we know things weren’t always this way. Even a century ago, for instance, there wasn’t a man
in America who didn’t carry some kind of knife with him at all times. Whether it was for skinning bears or trimming cigars,
a man needed a knife as a basic tool for living, and he knew how to take care of it and sharpen it and handle it. Who needs
a knife now?

For that matter,who needs a horse? Who even needs to know what a horse is? Eustace found on his horse journeys that it was
the people in their seventies and eighties who were likely to be comfortable around the animals, having grown up with working
livestock as children, or hearing stories about it from their parents. But to each successive generation the idea of a horse
was increasingly foreign, exotic, unthinkable. The younger people had no idea how to behave around the animals, how to protect
themselves, how to grasp the concept of another living being.

“And what will
their
children think?” Eustace wondered. “Twenty years from now, a horse will look like a camel to people, like some crazy zoo animal.”

So it is that the incompetence widens with each generation. Still, Eustace feels he could handle this incompetence if it weren’t
for the one big flaw he sees in modern Americans of all ages: people don’t listen. They don’t know how to pay attention. They
don’t know how to focus. Even if they claim that they
want
to learn, they have no discipline.

“The hardest thing is to get young people to trust me and do as I say,” Eustace said. “If I have four people up here working
with me and I say, ‘OK, everyone. Let’s roll this log on the count of three,’ one will start rolling the log immediately,
two will
pull
the log on the count of three, and the fourth will wander off somewhere and pick his nose. And they’re constantly questioning
my authority. They always want to know
Why are we doing it this way, why are we doing it that way?
Listen,
I
know why, and that’s all that matters, and I don’t have time to explain every decision. They never believe me when I say I’m
right. If I say I’m right, then you can be sure I
am
right, because I don’t make mistakes. If I’m not sure of something, then I’ll say I’m not sure of it, but most of the time
I am sure. People get mad and say, ‘Eustace thinks his way is the only way.’Well, that’s true. My way
is
the only way. And I believe the best work is done when people surrender to one authority, like in the military. That’s the
most efficient and streamlined way to produce labor. If I was the general of an army, for instance, the discipline would be
more organized and I could insist that everyone do exactly what I said, and then things would run properly.”

To make Turtle Island function, Eustace ends up taking control—as his grandfather did with his campers and staff—of every
aspect of his apprentices’ lives.

“It gets to the point,” said one apprentice, “where you feel you have to ask Eustace’s permission to take a shit. Because
God forbid you should be off in the woods taking a shit when he needs to teach you how to use a foot-pedal grinder or forge
a horseshoe.”

Yeah, Eustace wouldn’t deny that. I’ve heard him lecture his apprentices on the proper way to tie their shoes, because why
should people waste time having their shoes come untied when there’s so much work to be done? But that’s how American utopian
communities—the ones that lasted more than a week—have always been run. Discipline, order, and obedience make them endure.
In the bedrooms of female Shakers, back in the nineteenth century, you would have found this instructive sign:

“Each person must rise from her bed at the sound of ‘first trumpet.’ Kneel in silence on the place where you first placed
your foot when getting out of bed. No speaking in the room unless you wish to ask a question of the sister having the care
of the room. In that case, whisper. Dress your right arm first. Step your right foot first. At the sound of ‘second trumpet’
march in order, giving your right side to your superior. Walk on your toes. Fold your left hand across your stomach. Let your
right hand fall at your side. March to the workshop in order. Ask no unnecessary questions.”

Lord, how Eustace Conway would love that kind of order around Turtle Island. But there’s only so much control he can assert
each day. For now, it’s all he can do to get his apprentices to roll a log on the count of three.

Most of the apprentices live in fear of Eustace, to be perfectly honest. They talk about him whenever he’s out of earshot—hushed
and somewhat desperate conversations—huddled like courtiers trying to read the king’s motives and moods, passing on advice
for survival, wondering who will be cast away next. Too intimidated to deal with Eustace directly, the apprentices, unsure
of how to please this demanding master, seek advice from Eustace’s girlfriends or brothers or close friends, asking these
privileged associates:
What does he want from me? Why am
I always in trouble? How can I keep him happy?
Eustace knows this chattering goes on behind his back, and he loathes it. He considers it the ultimate of insubordination.

That’s why he nailed this letter on the Turtle Island community bulletin board in the summer of 1998:

“Turtle Island staff, residents, and associates. I, Eustace Conway, am pissed off. My girlfriend Patience has been here for
five days, and she has been approached by many of you in discussion about your problems with me. This is a challenge and an
unnecessary burden for her and our young relationship. I resent this approach to ‘reaching me.’ If you have a problem with
me, approach me with it, NOT her. If we can’t solve it or you can’t find satisfaction, DON’T work through her. If you can’t
stop talking about negative aspects of your relationship with me, please resign or leave now. I am intolerant of this behavior.
I am hurt, saddened, and full of grief that such would ever happen. I personally would rather beat the living shit out of
you than have you work your problems with me through Patience. If this seems overreacting, well, that is a social-emotional
burden that I will carry. I hope I have made myself clear of my need. Grateful and respectful of your consideration, humbly
yours in trust, Eustace Conway.”

No Shirt. No Shoes. No Fucking Backtalk.

It might seem from all this that the only people who could survive on Turtle Island are those who have no self-will, who are
wimpy and easy to push around, who will meekly do as they’re told for months without a peep of complaint. But this isn’t true.
Wimpy people crumble here and they crumble fast. They try hard to please Eustace, and when they realize they’ll never get
the validation they crave, they break down in mourning, devastated by how violated they feel. (These apprenticeships generally
end in tears:
I gave and gave and gave, but it was never enough
for you!
) The only people who crumble faster than the wimps are the cocky individuals with chips on their shoulders who stubbornly
refuse to bend. They’re the ones who believe they will be personally exterminated if they have to live under someone else’s
authority for even a minute. (These apprenticeships generally end in a big fight:
I am not
your slave!
)

But the people who thrive here—and there aren’t many of them— are an interesting species. They are among the most quietly
self-aware people I’ve ever met. They have in common a profound psychic stillness. They don’t talk a lot, and they don’t seek
praise, but they seem confident of themselves. They are able to make themselves vessels of learning without drowning in it.
It’s as if they decide, when they come here, to take their fragile and sensitive self-identity, fold it up tight, tuck it
away someplace safe, and promise to retrieve it two years later, when the apprenticeship will be over. That’s what Eustace
Conway’s all-time star apprentice Christian Kaltrider did.

“I came here in a very humble state,” Christian explained, “but also extremely fired up and interested, and I was a big-time
sponge. It was my intention to learn, and that was all. Eustace would teach me something, and I’d go off and do it. I didn’t
spend any time talking—just listening and watching and doing what I was told. Of course, he had control over me all the time,
but I didn’t let that frustrate me. I told myself, ‘I am letting him have this control for the purpose of my education. And
he is in control only of my education, not of my identity.’ That’s a subtle distinction. Are you giving yourself to Eustace,
or are you letting him take you? I made the decision to give myself over as a student, and that’s why my experience was so
different from the experience of many others who come here. Other people come here worshipping Eustace. They want to please
him, so they let him take over their entire
selves
, and that’s when the resentment starts to build. It builds slowly, over time. What wears people down here isn’t the physical
labor but the psychological stress of losing their identity. I was never in danger of that.”

“If you don’t protect yourself from Eustace,” explained Candice, another Turtle Island apprentice determined to make her experience
successful, “then he’ll suck you dry. You have to keep some part of yourself—your ego, I guess—where he can’t reach it. And
you have to be quietly stubborn about it. I’ve made my decision. I’m staying here for the full two years of my apprenticeship,
no matter how hard it gets. I refuse to become just another DETI.”