The Complete Elizabeth Gilbert: Eat, Pray, Love; Committed; The Last American Man; Stern Men & Pilgrims (81 page)

Back when he was in grammar school, Eustace would bring about six such heroic biographies and action-adventure books into the classroom every day. He’d read a book until the teacher confiscated it, and then he’d start on another. When she snatched that one, he’d begin another and then another. When all the books were gone, he’d stare out the window and plan projects inspired by his readings. He was only in second grade, for instance, when he started building himself a five-story tree house (complete with a basement and walkways that extended into branches of the tree next door), modeled after the descriptions in
The
Swiss Family Robinson
.

Naturally, the schoolteachers had no idea of what to do with this odd boy who would not pay attention in class. When he was in fifth grade, his teacher had to call Mrs. Conway in for a conference.

She said, “I don’t think Eustace is capable of learning.”

But it was too late; he was already learned, certainly in the skills and morals his mother had taught him. And if her ideas about raising her son conflicted with her husband’s ideas, the trick was not to combine their philosophies into one childrearing doctrine, but to apply each individually— one loud and public, the other secretive and steadfast. The father’s strict humiliations were applied only in the evenings and over the weekends; the mother’s stirring challenges were reserved for the long and free days in the woods. The trait these parents shared was absolute emphasism. Both placed Eustace in the center of their attention, where he received either high praise or demeaning shame. Eustace’s mother told him that he was a Man of Destiny and there was no achievement on this planet too lofty for him; his father told him he was useless.

Literal-minded creature that he was, the poor kid believed them both. How his head didn’t explode from the contradictions, it’s hard to say. But it is little wonder that Eustace spent a significant number of his youthful hours pondering the possibility that he might be the subject of a vast and sadistic science experiment. Maybe his whole life was playing out in some grand laboratory, where he was being tested, his reactions studied closely by scientists he could neither see nor understand. What other explanation could make sense of this? That one afternoon Eustace got a letter from his mother on the sly telling him he was “a handsome, bold, fearless, interesting, loving son of whom to be proud and for whom to be grateful,” and yet, maybe later the same day, would report in his diary that his father had told him he was “no smarter ‘than a nigger in the slums.’ I felt like killing him. I wonder what is to happen to me.”

He slept only a few hours every night. After the rest of the family had gone to bed, Eustace would stay up until two or three or four in the morning. He would finish his schoolwork, which was always drudgery for him except the rare circumstances when he had the opportunity to write term papers on topics like “The Teepee Then and Now.” When his homework was done, he would write in his diary, cramming the pages with his deeds and observations.

“Today, I went to Robinwood Lake for the first time this year and I caught a big female painted turtle I had let go last winter for hibernating.”

“Today, I finally saw all three tree frogs in my terrarium at the same time.”

“Today, Randy Cable caught an albino salamander and I put it in alcohol.”

“The black rat snake is happy in his new cage.”

He would read over his journal, trying to record his progress in becoming a competent woodsman. Every day he set higher challenges for himself in the wilderness because, as he later said, “I grew up in a culture and a family that had no way of providing me with rites of passage into manhood, so I had to invent them for myself.”

After writing in his journal, Eustace would stay up long into the night, obsessively perfecting his skills at beadwork and weaving. He’d sometimes spend months working on a single pair of buckskin moccasins, distracting his mind by sitting in low light with an old book about Plains Indian artifacts lying open across his bed, replicating the complicated beaded patterns in the pictures of antique Indian clothing.

His unhappy world of extremes had fostered in Eustace a fierce perfectionism. It was important for him to live every moment of his life completely free of mistakes, both to minimize his father’s opportunities to ridicule him and to prove to his mother that her intense praise was earned. The bar he set for himself was incredibly high. (He would lament in his journals years later that he never felt the “timeless freedom of youth” but was instead haunted by the “overhanging threat of incompletion.”) Even in his private moments, even in the middle of the night, when he was working secretly on his beloved projects of Indian beadwork, his efforts had to be faultlessly executed, or the work would bring him no comfort. Tearing up his stitches when they were imperfect and trying again, Eustace refined each line of beads across his moccasins until the patterns exactly matched those of the ancient Cheyenne masters. He was making art back there in his bedroom on Deerwood Drive that a child had no business even attempting.

When he was finally exhausted, he would turn off his light and consider sleep. Sometimes he’d listen to his parents arguing as he lay in the dark. Often, he would cry. Just as often, he would hold a hunting knife pressed against his throat as he was falling asleep. It was strangely consoling to feel the blade across his neck. It was somehow comforting to know that he could kill himself at a moment’s notice if things got too bad. Having that option somehow always gave him the peace he needed to finally drift off.

CHAPTER THREE

Thus situated, many hundred miles from our families in the howling wilderness, I believe few would have equally enjoyed the happiness we experienced. I often observed to my brother, you see how little nature requires to be satisfied? Felicity, the companion of content, is rather found in our breasts than in the enjoyment of external things.

—Daniel Boone

D
avy Crockett ran away from home when he was thirteen years old, to escape an irate father. Daniel Boone’s father used to beat his sons until they begged for mercy, but Daniel would never break. (“Canst thou not beg?” his father would demand.) Instead, young Daniel spent whole days alone in the woods to get away from his father’s domain and, by the age of fifteen, had earned a reputation as one of the best hunters in the Pennsylvania wilderness. The explorer John Frémont was five when he lost his father. Kit Carson lost his father (who was killed by the falling limb of a burning tree and left his wife to raise eight children alone), and Kit ran away from home when he was sixteen. The mountain man Jim Bridger was on his own at fourteen.

None of this was unusual for the time. The wagon trails to the West were filled with young boys who had left home for any number of reasons—but no small number of them, we can be sure, hit the frontier because they believed that even the most dangerous unknowns in the world were more appealing than whatever business was going on back there in that small cabin in New England or Virginia or Tennessee. There is a lot of talk in our history books about what
drew
young men to the frontier, but I wouldn’t be at all surprised if bad relationships with tough fathers was one of the major factors that
pushed
them out there.

And so it is that every generation finds a new wave of boys busting out of their homes, just dying to go anywhere that takes them away from Dad. It sure is a good way to populate a country pretty fast, although perhaps not ideal for the emotional lives of our families. Eustace Conway was trying to do the same—trying to escape. His adolescent years were an endless trauma, and he dreamed constantly of running away.

“Right before I went to bed,” he wrote in his diary as a fourteen-year-old, “daddy came in and lectured me about how I should act toward people and about how I only care about myself. He said that nobody will like me and that I boss everybody and that I do not do anything for anybody else. Although it would be a dumb thing to run away, I think I would be happier anywhere in the woods. If I do leave, I will try my best not to come back, even if I am starving. Anything is better than this.”

But he didn’t bolt. He stuck it out for three more years. Only when he had dutifully finished high school did Eustace Conway split. He took the teepee he’d made by hand (an older Native American woman who knew Eustace at the time described it as “the prettiest thing I’ve ever seen”) and he took his knife and he took some books and he was gone.

“I hope that I am right,” he confided to his diary when he moved out of his parents’ home, “and that I am following a path that is indeed good for me.”

What followed were probably the happiest years of Eustace’s life. And the freest. He owned a teepee and he owned a motorcycle, and that was about it. He lived in and around the mountains near Gastonia. He rebuilt the motorcycle to learn about the workings of an engine. He sewed all his own clothes. He ate nettles and hunted small game with a Cherokee blowgun, using darts he made from sticks, thistledown, and strands of deer tendon. He carved his bowls and plates from wood polished with beaver fat. He made his water jugs out of the clay he dug from the basins of creeks, the same creeks where he bathed. He slept on the ground, on animal skins. He wove ropes out of bark and his own hair. He split white oak and wove it into baskets. He cooked and warmed himself over fire, and he did not touch a match for three years.

“My lodge looks in passable shape,” he wrote in his diary, once his new home was in order. “And I hope that I grow to know it and myself better through the lifestyle that I am taking up at the present.” His new life did take some getting used to (“In the middle of the night it began to rain and so I reluctantly got out of bed and closed the smoke flaps, which should have been taken care of earlier”), but Eustace Conway felt almost immediately that he was at last living on this earth as he had been meant to live. “I slept until seven in the morning,” he wrote after one of his first nights in the teepee, “when the sun beaming down on the smoky canvas called my attention to the world. I got up and washed my face in spring water. Oh, how my body loves me! Happy day to all!”

His teepee was wonderful—a fort and a temple, a home so satisfyingly light and transient that it had none of the psychological impact of a house’s overstability. He could put it together or break it down in a matter of minutes. He could pack it up, load it onto the top of a friend’s car, drive it to an elementary school, and throw it together again on the playground for the delight of some grammar school kids he’d been hired to teach about nature that day. He could haul his teepee off to a powwow in another state for a weekend of dancing and fellowship with the Native Americans he had befriended over the years. He could pack it in storage while he went hitchhiking across the country on a whim, or he could hang out in his teepee, hidden somewhere in the woods, completely jazzed by the knowledge that nobody could find him.

He took a job after high school, but only for a little while. He headed down to Tennessee to work as a nature educator for learning-disabled and troubled kids at a place called the Bodine School. He was brilliant with the students, even though he was not much older than they were. He had terrific rapport with them, but he didn’t hit it off so well with his bosses. Eustace Conway, it should be said, does not take much truck in working under the authority of other people. It rubs him wrong. He quickly got into a dispute with the principal, who had promised Eustace that he could live in his teepee on the grounds of the campus but had reneged on the promise. And Eustace Conway does not take much truck from people who renege on their promises.

So, restless and irritated, he took off to visit a woodsy young guy he knew named Frank, who was going to college in Alabama. They had a good weekend visit. Kicked around in the forest and shot at things with an old-fashioned black powder rifle and made jokes. But Eustace had a sense that his friend was bothered by something, and, indeed, it emerged in subsequent conversation that Frank had broken up with his girlfriend and was floundering wildly—had quit doing sports, quit going to school, then quit working at his job. He didn’t have the first idea of what to do with himself next. When he finished telling Eustace his sad story, Eustace said (“and the words just leaped out of my mouth like a frog leaping out of a hot frying pan”),
Let’s hike the Appalachian
Trail
.

He couldn’t even say where the idea had come from. But suddenly it was out there.

“Sure,” Frank said. “Let’s do it.”

So Eustace called the principal of the Bodine School and quit his teaching job (no big deal; the guy was a jerk who broke his word, and who needs a damn job, anyhow?), and four days later the two young men were standing in a bus station in Montgomery, Alabama, waiting for a Greyhound to take them up to Bangor, Maine. The suddenness and brashness of the decision surprised even Eustace’s mother, who could usually be counted on to encourage such adventures.

“Your phone call with news came as a big surprise,” she wrote to him in a quick note, trying to catch him before he was gone. “I have mixed feelings about your planned hiking trip. I can understand why you desire to make such a trip and agree with the good aspects of it, but on the other side of the seesaw, it shows irresponsibility at keeping your word and inability to put important things first.” What she then added was a little provocative (in addition to being obvious) but she probably threw it in there to punctuate her own concerns: “Your father feels that you are a playboy and will never settle down if you don’t start taking life seriously and think more about preparing for your future. He thinks you should be working more and being more dependable to keep your promises of commitment. He disapproves!”

Well, tough. That’s what people turn nineteen for.

Their adventure started right off with an adventure. Eustace and Frank bought their bus tickets but couldn’t get on the bus until one last problem was solved. They were waiting at the station for a girl, a friend of Frank’s, to show up with his sleeping bag, a vital piece of equipment. They waited and waited, but the girl never showed. They begged the Greyhound driver to stall, but he finally had to take off to keep to his schedule. Frank and Eustace were devastated. And then, only moments after the bus pulled away, the girl and sleeping bag arrived. Frank and Eustace jumped into the girl’s station wagon and took off down the interstate, chasing the bus. When they caught up with it, Eustace told the girl to pull up alongside. They honked and waved, but, though the other passengers were staring, riveted, the driver pretended that they didn’t exist. Eustace Conway wasn’t going to be ignored and he damn sure wasn’t going to miss this Greyhound to Maine. So he told the girl to pull her car—speeding away at seventy-five miles an hour—right up under the bus driver’s window. Eustace rolled down his passenger-side window, pulled himself out, and stood on top of the station wagon, gripping the roof rack with one hand and clutching his and Frank’s bus tickets with the other. He waved the tickets in front of the driver’s face and kept hollering into the wind, “
Let us on this bus!
”

“At that point,” Eustace remembers, “the driver decided maybe he’d better pull over and let us on. All the passengers were cheering, and as we walked down the aisle this one big fat lady shouted, ‘Lawd! Y’all coulda been in a movie!’”

They got to Maine and hitchhiked to Bangor and found that they had arrived too early in the year. The rangers warned them not to even
think
about going over the timberline while there was so much deep snow and heavy ice on the ground. Of course, they ignored the warning and headed up the mountain before dawn the next day, and on that afternoon they saw a bald eagle careening in the cold and thin air, and they were on their way, a month ahead of other climbers.

Here’s what they hadn’t figured on: they never had enough to eat on that trail. Never, never, never. They were ravenous. They were hiking twenty-five and thirty miles a day on barely any food. They had some oatmeal with them, and that was about it. Each would have a cup of oatmeal every morning. Frank would gulp down his puny meal and then stare mournfully at Eustace while Eustace savored every flake as if it were a precious square of chocolate. On the first leg of the trip they found virtually no game on the trail to hunt; it was too early in the year for the animals to come up this high above the timberline, and, moreover, the ground was solid ice, with no edible plants in sight.

When they got to New Hampshire, half mad with hunger, Eustace spotted some partridges in the underbrush. He whipped out a length of string he’d been keeping in his pocket, fashioned a noose about eight inches in diameter, wrapped the string around a long stick, and sneaked up on the next partridge he spotted. He dropped that noose over the bird, tightened the string, made a grab, and ripped off its head. Frank was screaming and dancing and shouting and hugging and kissing Eustace while the still-flapping bird sprayed blood over the packed, white snow. “My God,” Eustace recalls, “but we ate the hell out of that bird.”

They ate its meat; they ate its brains; they ate its feet; and, still famished, they ate every last one of its bones. They were so driven by hunger that they became great hunters. Eustace taught Frank how to catch a bird with a noose (thank goodness for this skill, an old game he’d played with Randy Cable), and together they scrounged the trail as they headed south. They also took to eating crawfish and trout and berries, nettles, anything. They killed rattlesnakes and opened them up to see if there were baby rabbits or something else yummy inside the bellies; they’d eat the snake and whatever the snake had just eaten. Eustace even killed a spruce partridge one day with a rock. He saw the bird, thought to himself,
I need to eat that,
grabbed the nearest rock, chucked it, nailed the bird dead, and then ate every part of that blessed creature except the feathers.

They were determined to be hunters and gatherers. It was hard going and a weird place to try this out; the heavily traveled corridor of the Appalachian Trail was already so stripped by human beings that food was harder to find than in normal forests. And Eustace well knew it wouldn’t make any environmental sense if every hiker on the A.T. further stripped the land by doing what he was doing. Conscious of all that and maybe feeling a little guilty about overtaxing some already overtaxed land, he continued the experiment. He knew that primitive people had traveled huge distances on foot in millennia past, eating only what they could find along the journey, and he was sure that he and Frank could endure it, too. But that didn’t change the fact that they were starving to death.

They ate whatever they could hunt, pick, scavenge, or sometimes steal. When they hit Bear Mountain Park in New York State, they happened to swing through on the Fourth of July, when hundreds of Puerto Rican and Dominican families were picnicking and celebrating. It was a food bonanza for Eustace and Frank. They were dizzy with the discovery that every garbage can in the park was spilling over with beautiful tins of rice and beans and half-eaten chicken and popcorn and cake. The two of them were like Templeton the rat in that state fair scene from
Charlotte’s Web
—a couple of omnivores in paradise, shouting at each other from distant garbage cans over the din of salsa music, “I found an entire ham! Oh, my God! Sweet potatoes!”

But they’d had their most desperate food experience back in Maine, when they climbed off the trail for a few days and stayed in a small town with a family who kept the community hog in the backyard. The way the community hog system worked was that everyone in the town fed the hog their table scraps and then, come butchering time, split the meat for the winter. Frank and Eustace learned of this interesting custom the day the lady of the house baked some apple pies and gave the boys a bucket of apple peelings to take out back for the hog to eat. Outside, Frank and Eustace looked at each other, looked at the apple peelings, and said, “Fuck that.” They hid behind the barn and scarfed down the peelings. After that, they graciously offered to take over the feeding of the hog. To this day, all they will report about this experience is that the kind people of that small Maine town sure did throw away a lot of perfectly good food, and that the handsome community hog sure didn’t gain any weight while Eustace Conway and Frank Chambless were around.