The Complete Elizabeth Gilbert: Eat, Pray, Love; Committed; The Last American Man; Stern Men & Pilgrims (110 page)

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank the extraordinary Conway family for their openness and hospitality during this project, and particularly Eustace Conway for his courage in letting me proceed with this work unfettered.

It has been an honor to know you all, and I have tried to honor you here.

There have been many people in Eustace’s life—past and present—who gave generously of their time to help me formulate the ideas behind this book. For their tolerance in being incessantly interviewed, I thank Donna Henry, Christian Kaltrider, Shannon Nunn, Valarie Spratlin, CuChullaine O’Reilly, Lorraine Johnson, Randy Cable, Steve French, Carolyn Hauck, Carla Gover, Barbara Locklear, Hoy Moretz, Nathan and Holly Roarke, the Hicks family, Jack Bibbo, Don Bruton, Matt Niemas, Siegal Kiewe, Warren Kimsey, Alan Stout, Ed Bumann, Pop Hollingsworth, Patience Harrison, Dave Reckford, Scott Taylor, Ashley Clutter, and Candice Covington. And a special note of thanks to Kathleen and Preston Roberts, who are not only lovely and gracious people, but who let Eustace and me sit on their porch and drink beer and shoot off guns all night long. (“I never fired a gun when I was drunk before,” Eustace said, and Preston shouted, “And you call yourself
Southern
?”)

I am grateful to the authors of the many books and histories that have guided this endeavor. Among others, I found inspiration in John Mack Faragher’s biography of Daniel Boone, David Roberts’s biography of Kit Carson, James Atkins Shatford’s biography of Davy Crockett, David McCullough’s biography of the young Teddy Roosevelt, Rod Phillips’s analysis of forest Beatniks, and Stephen Ambrose’s compelling account of Lewis and Clark’s journey to the Pacific.

Anybody interested in reading more about American utopias should get Timothy Miller’s encyclopedic
The 60’s Communes: Hippies and Beyond
, and anybody interested in a surprisingly funny book that happens to be about American utopias should hunt down a copy of Mark Halloway’s brilliant
Heavens on Earth: Utopian Communities in America,
1680–1880
. The statistics quoted in Chapter Seven on the decline of males come from
The Decline of Males
, by Lionel Tiger. I also owe thanks to R. W. B. Lewis for his wise study
The American Adam
, and to Richard Slotkin for his equally wise
The Fatal Environment
. And my bottomless thanks (and eternal admiration) go to the living library that is Doug Brinkley, for telling me to read all these books.

Thanks also go to Powell’s Bookstore of Portland, Oregon, for having—when I was seeking books about the impressions of nineteenth-century European visitors to America—an entire shelf labeled “Impressions of 19th Century European Visitors to America.” There is no better bookstore in America, and this proves it.

I am fortunate to have great friends who are also great readers and editors. For their help and valuable assistance in editing various versions of this book, I thank David Cashion, Reggie Ollen, Andrew Corsello, John Morse, John Gilbert, Susan Bowen (the speed-reading Georgia Peach), and John Hodgman (who invented just for me the essential new editing abbreviation CWRBS, meaning “Cut the Will Rogers Bullshit”). I thank John Platter, who found the strength to read an early draft of this book in his final days of life, and whom I miss terribly every time I walk to my mailbox and remember that I will never receive another letter from him.

I thank Kassie Evashevski, Sarah Chalfant, Paul Slovak, and the hugely incredible Frances Apt for their sure-footed guidance. I thank Art Cooper at
GQ
for believing me four years ago when I said, “Trust me— you just gotta let me write a profile about this guy.” I thank Michael Cooper for saying long ago, when I was in doubt about writing the book, “Wouldn’t you rather make a mistake by
doing
something than make a mistake by
not
doing something?” Again, I thank my big sister Catherine for her preternatural genius about American history and for her steadfast support. Again, I thank my dear friend Deborah for being open twenty-four hours a day to dispense her wisdom on the human psyche. This book would be virtually barren of ideas without the inspiration of these two amazing women.

There are not enough thanks in the world to offer the Ucross Foundation for giving me 22,000 acres of privacy in the middle of Wyoming during what I will probably always remember as the most important thirty days of my life.

And lastly, there are not enough ways in the world for me to say this:

Big Love

‘A howlingly funny first novel’

‘Gilbert’s tangy language has as much music as muscle; the novel is Emersonian in its clarity and Austenian in its sly social observation’

‘While Elizabeth Gilbert is not the first writer to suggest that smart women have much to teach stern men, she puts the idea forward with rugged power’

‘A wonderful novel that will have you laughing out loud, Stern Men is an admirable debut from a writer obviously destined for literary longevity. Like Tyler and Irving (and Joseph Heller, Stanley Elkin, and Alice Hoffman), Gilbert has a gift for comic fiction that conveys serious issues (in this case, the environment, caste systems, etc.). And like those writers, Gilbert will most certainly be around for a long time to come’

‘Wise, funny, and wonderful’

‘In this breezily appealing first novel, Gilbert presents us with a heroine as smart, sly, plucky and altogether winning as her own prose; it’s difficult, in fact, not to develop a knee-weakening crush on both’

‘Gilbert’s storytelling brio and keen intelligence prove irresistible’

‘This funny, clever, and wise novel, filled with well-developed characters who are more than eccentric stereotypes, moves [Gilbert] squarely to the forefront of writers to watch’

‘Sophisticated yet ribald, comic yet serious: an exceptional debut from a writer to watch’

For everything.

In their specific geography, Fort Niles Island and Courne Haven Island are so astonishingly similar that their creator must have been either a great simpleton or a great comic. They are almost exact duplicates. The islands—the last peaks of the same ancient, sunken mountain chain—are made from the same belt of quality black granite, obscured by the same cape of lush spruce. Each island is approximately four miles long and two miles wide. Each has a handful of small coves, a number of freshwater ponds, a scattering of rocky beaches, a single sandy beach, a single great hill, and a single deep harbor, held possessively behind its back, like a hidden sack of cash.

On each island, there is a church and a schoolhouse. Down by the harbor is a main street (called, on each island, Main Street), with a tiny cluster of public buildings—post office, grocer, tavern. There are no paved roads to be found on either island. The houses on the islands are much alike, and the boats in the harbors are identical. The islands share the same pocket of interesting weather, significantly warmer in the winter and cooler in the summer than any coastal town, and they often find themselves trapped within the same spooky bank of fog. The same species of fern, orchid, mushroom, and wild rose can be found on both islands. And, finally, these islands are populated by the same breeds of birds, frogs, deer, rats, foxes, snakes, and men.

The Penobscot Indians left the first human records on Fort Niles and Courne Haven. They found the islands an excellent source of sea fowl eggs, and the ancient stone weapons of these early visitors still show up in certain coves. The Penobscot didn’t long remain so far out in the middle of the sea, but they did use the islands as temporary fishing stations, a practice picked up handily in the early seventeenth century by the French.

The first permanent settlers of Fort Niles and Courne Haven were two Dutch brothers, Andreas and Walter Van Heuvel, who, after taking their wives and children and livestock out to the islands in June of 1702, laid claim to one island for each family. They called their settlements Bethel and Canaan. The foundation of Walter Van Heuvel’s home remains, a moss-covered pile of rock in a meadow on what he called Canaan Island—the exact site, in fact, of Walter’s murder at the hands of his brother just one year into their stay. Andreas also killed Walter’s children on that day and took his brother’s wife over to Bethel Island to live with his family. Andreas was frustrated, it is said, that his own wife was not bearing him children fast enough. Eager for more heirs, he’d set out to claim the only other woman around. Andreas Van Heuvel broke his leg some months later, while building a barn, and he died from an ensuing infection. The women and children were soon rescued by a passing English patrol ship and taken to the stockade at Fort Pemaquid. Both women were pregnant at the time. One delivered a healthy son, whom she named Niles. The other woman’s child died in delivery, but the mother’s life was saved by Thaddeus Courne, an English doctor. Somehow this event gave rise to the names of the two islands: Fort Niles and Courne Haven—two very pretty places that would not be settled again for another fifty years.

The Scots-Irish came next, and they stayed. One Archibald Boyd, along with his wife, his sisters, and their husbands, took over Courne Haven in 1758. They were joined during the next decade by the Cobbs, Pommeroys, and Strachans. Duncan Wishnell and his family started a sheep farm on Fort Niles in 1761, and Wishnell soon found himself surrounded by neighbors called Dalgleish, Thomas, Addams, Lyford, Cardoway, and O’Donnell, as well as some Cobbs who’d moved over from Fort Niles. The young ladies of one island married the young men of the other, and the family names began floating back and forth between the two places like loose buoys. By the mid-1800s, new names appeared, from new arrivals: Friend, Cashion, Yale, and Cordin.

These people shared much the same ancestral background. And because there were not many of them out there, it’s not surprising that, in time, the inhabitants came to resemble one another more and more. Rampant intermarriage was the culprit. Fort Niles and Courne Haven somehow managed to avoid the fate of Malaga Island, whose population became so inbred that the state had to finally step in and evacuate everyone, but the blood lines were still extremely thin. In time, there developed a distinctive form (short, tightly muscled, sturdy) and face (pale skin, dark brows, small chin), which came to be associated with both Courne Haven and Fort Niles. After several generations, it could be fairly said that every man looked like his neighbor and every woman would have been recognized by her ancestors on sight.

They were all farmers and fishermen. They were all Presbyterians and Congregationalists. They were all political conservatives. During the Revolutionary War, they were colonial patriots; during the Civil War, they sent young men in blue wool jackets to fight for the Union in distant Virginia. They did not like to be governed. They did not like to pay taxes. They did not trust experts, and they were not interested in the opinions or the appearance of strangers. Over the years, the islands were, on different occasions and for various reasons, incorporated into several inland counties, one after another. These political mergers never ended well. Each arrangement ultimately became unsatisfactory to the islanders, and by 1900 Courne Haven and Fort Niles were left to form an independent township. Together, they created the tiny domain of Skillet County. But that, too, was a temporary arrangement. In the end, the islands themselves split; the men on each island, it seemed, felt best and safest and most autonomous when left completely alone.

The population of the islands continued to grow. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, there came a muscular expansion, with the advent of the granite trade. A young New Hampshire industrialist named Dr. Jules Ellis brought his Ellis Granite Company to both islands, where he soon made a fortune by excavating and selling the glossy black rock.

Courne Haven, in 1889, hit its peak, achieving a record population of 618. This number included Swedish immigrants, who had been hired by the Ellis Granite Company as raw-muscled quarry labor. (Some of the granite on Courne Haven was so rifted and coarse that it was good only for making cobblestones, easy work for unskilled laborers like the Swedes.) That same year, Fort Niles boasted a society of 627 souls, including Italian immigrants, who’d been hired as skilled carvers. (Fort Niles had some fine, mausoleum-grade granite— beautiful granite to which only Italian craftsmen could do justice.) There was never much work for the native islanders in the granite quarries. The Ellis Granite Company much preferred hiring immigrants, who were less expensive and easier to control. And there was little interaction between the immigrant workers and the locals. On Courne Haven, some local fishermen married Swedish women, and there appeared a streak of blonds in that island’s population. On Fort Niles, however, the pale, darkhaired Scottish look remained unsullied. Nobody on Fort Niles married the Italians. It would have been unacceptable.

The years passed. Trends in fishing changed, from lines to nets and from cod to hake. The boats evolved. The farms grew obsolete. A town hall was built on Courne Haven. A bridge was built over Murder Creek on Fort Niles. Telephone service arrived in 1895, through a cable run under the sea, and by 1918 several homes had electricity. The granite industry dwindled and was finally driven into extinction by the advent of concrete. The population shrank, almost as quickly as it had ballooned. Young men moved off the islands to find work in big factories and big cities. Old names started vanishing from the rolls, slowly leaking away. The last of the Boyds died on Courne Haven in 1904. There were no O’Donnells to be found on Fort Niles after 1910, and—with each decade of the twentieth century—the number of families on Fort Niles and Courne Haven diminished further. Once sparsely inhabited, the islands became sparse once again.

What the two islands needed—what they always needed—was good blood between them. So far away from the rest of the nation, so similar in temperament, lineage, and history, the residents of Courne Haven and Fort Niles should have been good neighbors. They needed one another. They should have tried to serve each other well. They should have shared resources and burdens and benefited from all manner of cooperation. And perhaps they could have been good neighbors.

Perhaps their destiny did not have to be one of conflict. Certainly there was peace between the two islands for the first two centuries or so of settlement. Perhaps if the men of Fort Niles and Courne Haven had remained simple farmers or deep-sea fishermen, they would have been excellent neighbors. We have no way of knowing what might have been, though, because they ultimately became lobstermen. And that was the end of good neighbors.

Lobsters do not recognize boundaries, and neither, therefore, can lobstermen. Lobstermen seek lobsters wherever those creatures may roam, and this means lobstermen chase their prey all over the shallow sea and the cold-water coastline. This means lobstermen are constantly competing with one another for good fishing territory. They get in each other’s way, tangle each other’s trap lines, spy on each other’s boats, and steal each other’s information. Lobstermen fight over every cubic yard of the sea. Every lobster one man catches is a lobster another man has lost. It is a mean business, and it makes for mean men. As humans, after all, we become that which we seek. Dairy farming makes men steady and reliable and temperate; deer hunting makes men quiet and fast and sensitive; lobster fishing makes men suspicious and wily and ruthless.

The first lobster war between Fort Niles Island and Courne Haven Island began in 1902. Other islands in other bays of Maine have had their lobster wars, but none was waged so early as this one. There was scarcely even a lobster industry in 1902; the lobster had not yet become a rare delicacy. In 1902, lobsters were common, worthless, even an annoyance. After bad storms, hundreds and thousands of the creatures washed up on the shores and had to be cleared away with pitchforks and wheelbarrows. Laws were passed forbidding affluent households from feeding their servants lobster more than three days a week. At that moment in history, lobstering was merely something island men did to supplement their income from farming or vessel fishing. Men had been lobstering on Fort Niles and Courne Haven for only thirty years or so, and they still fished in coats and ties. It was a new industry. So it is remarkable that anyone could have felt sufficiently invested in the lobster industry to start a war over it. But that is exactly what happened in 1902.

The first Fort Niles–Courne Haven lobster war began with a famous and reckless letter written by Mr. Valentine Addams. By 1902, Addamses were to be found on both islands; Valentine Addams was a Fort Niles Addams. He was known to be intelligent enough, but famously high-strung and maybe the slightest bit mad. It was in the spring of 1902 that Valentine Addams wrote his letter. It was addressed to the Presiding Chairman of the Second International Fisheries Conference in Boston, a prestigious event to which Addams had not been invited. He sent neatly written copies of his letter to several of the Eastern Seaboard’s major fishing newspapers. And he sent a copy to Courne Haven Island on the mail boat.

Valentine wrote:

In the spring of 1903, Valentine Addams wrote a letter to the Third International Fisheries Conference, again held in Boston. This conference, even larger than that of the year before, included dignitaries from the Canadian Provinces and from Scotland, Norway, and Wales. Addams again had not been invited. And why should he have been? What business would a common fisherman like him have at such a gathering? This was a meeting of experts and legislators, not an occasion for the airing of local grievances. Why should he have been invited, with all the Welsh and Canadian dignitaries, and all the successful Massachusetts wholesalers, and all the renowned game wardens? But what of that? He wrote, in any case: