The Last American Man (33 page)

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.”