The Complete Elizabeth Gilbert: Eat, Pray, Love; Committed; The Last American Man; Stern Men & Pilgrims (100 page)

And more, too.

In the middle of this building spree, a North Carolina anthropology professor heard about this gifted young man who lived up there in the mountains, made buildings without the use of nails, farmed with livestock, and survived off the land. Intrigued, she sent a student to Turtle Island one day to ask Eustace whether he’d consider coming down from the mountain to speak to her class and explain how he had done all this. Dutifully, Eustace considered the offer. Then he sent the student back down the mountain with a simple message for the good professor. “Tell her I did it by working my fucking ass off.”

Turtle Island was by now a vast and complicated place. Aside from organizing the educational programs, the mere running of the farm was an enormous job. There were horses and cows and turkeys to tend to, barns to keep up, fences to mend, pastures to plow, gardens to cultivate, and hay to bale. It took a tremendous amount of work to keep the place running, and Eustace had left it all in the hands of his apprentices. He did so with the greatest trepidation. Before he went on his horse journeys, he gave his apprentices lists and lectures to make sure they understood exactly how to care for the property, but, in the end, he narrowed his commands down to two basic components: “Please,” Eustace begged. “Just don’t kill any of my animals and don’t burn down any of my buildings.”

Well, they hadn’t killed any of his animals. They hadn’t burned down any of his buildings, either. But when Eustace returned, he found Turtle Island to be in extreme disorder. Gardens were overrun by weeds; bridges needed repair; goats were in the wrong pasture; the paths were overgrown. Nobody had been handling publicity and scheduling, which meant that not one single school group was on the schedule to visit Turtle Island that fall, which, in turn, meant that money would be short throughout the winter.

Eustace’s workers were willing and hard-working people, but the fact is that Eustace had never found anyone he trusted to manage Turtle Island so that the institution would thrive in his absence. Of course, it’s hard to imagine that there’s anyone able or willing to put in the hours that Eustace did. He’d had some apprentices who were good with people and some who were good with livestock and some who were good at manual labor and some who had a slight talent for business. But no one could do everything Eustace could, which was
everything
. And no one was willing to work all day on building a barn and then sit up all night making phone calls and writing land deeds.

What he needed was a clone.

In lieu of that, he had hired a program manager, a gifted young naturalist who could take over the duties of running the camping and educational side of Turtle Island, so that Eustace could focus on his own baby, the apprenticeship program. Eustace believed that it was through this intense tutorial program that he would have the most healthy effect. He had long ago begun to wonder whether dealing with group after group of random campers was really going to change anything about American society.

“I’m sitting under the walnut tree in the parking lot on the freshly cut grass,” he had written in his journal during one such crisis of conscience, not long after Turtle Island had opened. “I need to be cooking supper for the delinquents here from the ‘youth at risk’ group. I don’t want to face them. Let them suffer and die is the attitude I have quickly developed in the face of their disruptive disrespect. I am feeling weak . . . I don’t know if I really want to make this place what I dreamed. I know I
could
. I
could
make it succeed, but do I want that?”

He had decided that the answer was to keep the camping and day programs, but put someone else in charge of them so that he could focus on the apprentices. He wanted to throw his energy and ability behind the intimate, long-term, one-on-one teaching relationships he would develop with his direct trainees. Then they would take their skills out into the world and teach others, who would teach others, and so the change would come, more slowly, perhaps, than Eustace had dreamed when he was twenty years old, but still the change would come.

He was
almost
certain of it.

* * *

There was a girl. She was a hippie. Her name was Alice. Alice loved nature more than anything, and she wanted to live in the woods and be self-sufficient, and her sister, who knew Eustace Conway, said, “Alice, this is the man for you.” Alice got in touch with Eustace and told him that she wanted to live close to nature, just as he did. One afternoon, she visited Turtle Island, and Eustace gave her a tour and some of his brochures and told her to think about whether she’d like to work as an apprentice. She took one look at the babbling brooks, the swaying trees, the farm animals grazing in the fields, and the peaceful, welcoming sign at the front gate (
No Shirt, No Shoes, No Problem!
), and thought she had surely reached paradise.

Swiftly, Alice wrote to Eustace, assuring him that, “my instincts say YES! From the little I’ve seen and read, Turtle Island holds certain qualities that feel truest to my heart. It’s like a dream come true. I’m also grateful for your open welcome and would be honored to come to live, learn, work, and play with you and the land. I remember as a young girl watching ‘Little House on the Prairie,’ dreaming of someday living it instead of watching it. Dedication to family, living in harmony with nature. Ah . . . sweet life.”

After seven months at Turtle Island, Alice wrote Eustace a different kind of letter.

“When I first got here, I asked for a day off a week. You told me I didn’t deserve it. Yet Jennie’s second weekend out she got a day off. You showed her how to skin a deer, when I had to work my butt off for you to even recognize me as a student . . . you make me work so hard . . . make me feel unworthy . . . I feel unappreciated and unwanted . . . you say the more you get to know me the more disappointed you are in me . . . you’ve been working me ten to twelve hours a day . . . maybe I shouldn’t be here.”

And then Alice was gone. Fired. Dismissed.

What was the problem? What happened in the seven months between “sweet life” and “maybe I shouldn’t be here”?

Well, according to Eustace, the problem was that Alice was a hippie, a dreamer, and a lounge-about. She’d done a whole lot of drugs in her life, and maybe that was why her brain worked slowly and she was absent-minded and she had trouble learning how to do things right. She didn’t work quickly or efficiently. She couldn’t absorb skills, no matter how many times she was shown the correct procedure. And she took up too much of Eustace’s emotional energy, always wanting to sit in his office and talk about nature and her feelings and the dream she had last night and the poem she’d just written.

And Eustace was afraid that Alice might accidentally kill somebody or herself. Alice routinely pulled cockamamie stunts like leaving candles burning unattended on the windowsills of wooden buildings. Several times she wandered, daydreaming, into the path of falling timber as Eustace was clearing away pastureland. Worst of all, one day when Alice was working with Eustace as he was getting into his buggy to train a young horse, she released the animal from its tether before handing Eustace his reins. The horse, young and skittish, took off on a wild ride, and Eustace was stuck in the buggy, empty-handed, powerless to control the animal. The horse tore through the woods while Eustace held on for his life, trying to think of the softest place to bail out and save himself. He ended up taking a header right into a bush at twenty-five miles an hour, landing right on his face and hurting himself seriously. The horse wrecked the buggy into the side of the blacksmith shop and sustained injuries of its own.

“I had been rebuilding that buggy, which was a Mennonite antique, for months,” Eustace recalled, “and it was completely destroyed. That cost me $2000. And I wouldn’t take $10,000 for the psychological damage it did to the horse to be in a bad wreck like that at such a young age. It took me nearly a year to get that horse to a place where he could relax pulling a buggy again. And it was all because of Alice’s carelessness.”

Two weeks later, she made the same mistake again. That’s when Eustace told her she had to go. She was too senseless and dangerous to keep around, lost as she always seemed to be in her “Little House on the Prairie” fantasyland.

Dismissing apprentices is never easy, particularly since it’s a point of pride for Eustace Conway to claim that anyone can learn to live this primitive life and that he is that man who can teach anybody. It’s a failure of the dream to have to tell somebody, “You must leave here because you are incapable of learning.” Or, “You must leave here because you are impossible to have around.” It’s a terrible moment when Eustace Conway’s refrain turns from “You
can
!” to “You
can’t
!”

I once asked Eustace what percentage of the apprentices had left Turtle Island under angry or bitter circumstances. Without hesitating, he said, “Eighty-five percent. Although my program manager would probably say it was closer to ninety-five.”

OK, let’s round that off to 90 percent. It’s hard to look at such an attrition rate without pinning the label of bad leadership on Eustace. Turtle Island is his world, after all, and he is accountable for what happens in his world. If he can’t keep his world populated, then something is clearly wrong with the scheme. If I were a stockholder in a company where 90 percent of the employees were quitting or being fired each year, I might consider asking the CEO some hard questions about his management policies.

On the other hand, maybe the number makes perfect sense. Maybe it shouldn’t be easy to stay on Turtle Island. Maybe only 10 percent of the population are able to cut it. What if the comparison model was the Navy SEAL training program? How many of those guys do they lose each year? And who’s left after everybody else quits? The strongest, right? The people who are going up to Turtle Island, though, are not necessarily the people most suited for the place.

“Again and again,” Eustace said, “I attract people who have dreams of nature but no experience with nature at all. They come up here, and the only comparison they make is ‘Wow, it looks just like the Nature Channel.’”

One of my favorite Turtle Island apprentices was an intelligent and soft-spoken young guy named Jason. He hailed from a well-to-do suburban family, had been raised in comfort, and been carefully educated in expensive private schools. When I asked Jason why he wanted to commit the next two years of his life to studying under Eustace Conway, he said, “Because I’ve been unhappy, and I didn’t know where else to go to get happy.”

Saddened by the unexpected death of his beloved father, angry at his mother for her “narrow-minded Christianity,” annoyed by his “useless professors,” disgusted with his peers, “who ignorantly refuse to listen to my songs and their warnings about environmental destruction,” Jason had recently dropped out of college. When he heard about Eustace, he thought that a stay at Turtle Island would provide the enlightenment he sought. He saw Eustace as a larger-than-life hero who “goes out in the world and meets his destiny without fear of obstacles, and who can make things work where most people are satisfied to see something stay broken and die.”

In a dramatic gesture, Jason decided to walk to Turtle Island all the way from Charlotte during Christmas vacation, but he got only about five miles down the road. It was freezing rain and he was overpacked and couldn’t figure out where he was going to camp that night or how to stay dry. Demoralized and hungry, he called his girlfriend from a gas station, and she drove him the rest of the way to Turtle Island.

Jason’s dream was to achieve perfect self-sufficiency. He didn’t want to deal with phony Americans and their materialistic stupidity. He planned on moving to Alaska and homesteading up there in the last frontier. He wanted to live off the land, and he hoped that Eustace would teach him how to do it. He dreamed that life would be better in Alaska, where “a man can still hunt for food to feed his family without going through the bureaucracy of getting a hunting license.”

“Have you ever
been
hunting?” I asked Jason.

“Well, not yet,” Jason said, grinning sheepishly.

Jason was the very model of the young guy who typically comes to Eustace Conway for guidance. He was trying to discover how to be a man in a society that no longer had a clear path for him. Just as Eustace Conway had struggled as a teenager to find rituals to lead
him
into manhood, Jason was struggling to find some ceremony or meaning that would help define his own ascension. But he had no role models, his culture had no satisfying coming-of-age ritual for him, and his background had provided him with none of the manly skills that were so attractive to him. He was, by his own admission, lost.

This is the same disturbing cultural question that Joseph Campbell spent years asking. What happens to young people in a society that has lost all trace of ritual? Because adolescence is a transitional period, it is an inherently perilous journey. But culture and ritual are supposed to protect us through the transitions of life, holding us in safety during danger and answering confusing questions about identity and change, in order to keep us from getting separated from the community during our hardest personal journeys.

In more primitive societies, a boy might go through an entire year of initiation rites to usher him into manhood. He might endure ritual scarification or rigorous tests of endurance, or he might be sent away from the community for a period of meditation and solitude, after which he would return to the fold and be seen by all as a changed being. He will have moved safely from boyhood into manhood, and he will know exactly when that happened and what is now expected of him, because his role is so clearly codified. But how is a modern American boy supposed to know when he has reached manhood? When he gets his driver’s license? When he smokes pot for the first time? When he experiences unprotected sex with a young girl who herself has no idea whether she’s a woman now or not?

Jason didn’t know. All he knew was that he ached for some sort of confirmation of his adulthood, and college life wasn’t giving it to him. He had no idea where to find what he sought, but he was compelled by the idea that Eustace might help. Jason did have a beautiful girlfriend, and he maintained the romantic idea that the two of them would homestead in Alaska together someday, but she apparently had her own ideas. She was young, affluent, a brilliant student, as reflexively feminist as most of her generation, and she had an itch to see the world. She had limitless possibilities before her. Jason hoped she would “settle down” eventually with him, but that struck me as doubtful, and, indeed, after the next few months she left him. And that hardly made Jason feel better about himself as a man in the making.