The Last American Man (34 page)

Eustace can only laugh, covering his face with his hands and shaking his head. “I mean, don’t get me wrong,” he’ll tell me.
“I want to say to these people, hey, I’m glad you’re not running the water while you’re brushing your teeth. Honestly, I am.
That’s a very nice way to conserve a precious resource and that makes me really happy. But you know what? I kinda had bigger
plans for you.”

Eustace has lost, too, his youthful notion that he could teach absolutely anybody to live in the woods. When he was younger,
he never considered turning away a would-be apprentice from Turtle Island. He never believed there was a single person in
this country who couldn’t master a more natural life with a little training. But now he’s more cautious, more selective. He
doesn’t automatically welcome the ex-convicts and barely recovering drug addicts and angry teenage runaways anymore, because
it saps the system to have such people around.

He’s also found it useful to formalize the apprenticeship program more. It used to be a looseygoosey, sealed-on-a-handshake
relationship, the details of which altered from person to person, from year to year. Basically, all a young man or woman had
to do was show up at Turtle Island and express some eagerness, and Eustace would sign the kid up, asking only that the apprentice
promise to work hard and keep a positive attitude throughout the stay. These days, though, Eustace screens all potential apprentices
through a fairly rigorous application process that demands resumés, references, background information, and a written essay.
Moreover, tired of the Eustace Conway Whiplash Effect that decimated the morale of his workforce, Eustace now hands out this
memo (simply entitled “Re: Relationship With Eustace”) to every applicant:

“Please don’t expect to develop a close friendship with Eustace or be disappointed by anything other than a working boss,
leader, and director-type of friendship. People are attracted to aspects of Eustace’s warm and generous personality and often
want a more personal contact than can be expected, or than Eustace is comfortable in allowing. Apprentices have been disappointed
when they did not get enough social contact with Eustace. Eustace is comfortable with extending his time to you on a mutually
agreed upon expectation level. This clearly defined relationship is between a leader and those who are learning about the
chores,methods, and needs of a farm and educational center.”

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 mountain. 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?