The Complete Elizabeth Gilbert: Eat, Pray, Love; Committed; The Last American Man; Stern Men & Pilgrims (86 page)

It was not easy going, keeping these utopias running. The kids who founded them were just that—kids. White, middle-class, college-educated kids, most of whom had no practical farm skills. Their communes folded left and right, assaulted from the inside by drug abuse, disorganization, apathy, resentment, and bankruptcy, and attacked from the outside by mainstream America’s values and laws. Morning Star Ranch in California, for example, had no end of trouble from the local sheriff, who, in 1967, arrested the commune’s leader, Lou Gottlieb, for the crime of “running an organized camp in violation of state sanitary regulations.” Gottlieb—who was a fantastic wiseass, in addition to being a utopian idealist—quipped at the time of his arrest, “If they can find any evidence of organization here, I wish they would show it to me.”

Yes, officer, it would have been difficult to find any evidence of organization in most of these 1960s utopias. It’s all too easy now to look back at them as nothing more than a spastic side effect of a feral youth movement that was really only seeking new and creative ways to avoid adult responsibility. Although, on closer examination, it must be said that not every American commune of the 1960s was a madcap carnival. Some communes were founded on serious religious principles; some had intense political agendas; some were blessed with members who soberly and conscientiously tried to lead the good and simple life. And a few hippie communes did hammer out enough management skills to ensure their long-term survival.

The simply named Farm has been communally productive in Tennessee since 1971, after some major adjustments in its original policy of total anarchy. Over the years more traditional rules and restrictions have been introduced, and more realistic ideas about maintaining the rights of the individual within the larger framework of utopian communal living have kept its members sane and relatively free of bitterness and resentment. As with any communal experiment that lasts more than a year, the Farm had to trade in much of its early romanticism for a more pragmatic organizational principle. Still, the Farm’s long-running and successful social projects (several environmental teaching programs; a public advocacy law firm) reflect the original founders’ idealistic dreams.

Indeed, that sense of thriving idealism seems to be as critical a factor in keeping a commune alive over the years as good bookkeeping practices and strict visitors’ policies—just as, in a good marriage, a couple will more easily endure the hardships of decades if an original spark of their youthful romance can survive. As one long-term member of the Farm explained, “We’ve been through some pretty hard times together. There’s a certain amount of sentimentality toward seeing it succeed.”

On such lines, consider the famous Hog Farm of California. Hog Farm is still thriving some twenty-five years after its founding, an endurance largely credited to the charismatic guidance of its great hippie visionary leader, Hugh Romney, AKA Wavy Gravy (proudly the only American utopian ever to have had a Ben and Jerry’s ice cream flavor named in his honor). Wavy Gravy has stubbornly refused over the years to compromise his free-for-all, do-gooder 1960s values, and his dream utopia thrives as a monument to the power of pure idealism. Hog Farm’s summer camp (Camp Winnarainbow) is a flourishing California institution, as is the charitable-works arm of the commune, which has been successfully fighting blindness in Third World countries for years.

All those who live at Hog Farm today still follow both their charming leader and their serious political agenda steadfastly and with good humor. Their enduring success defies those who insist that conformity to society’s norms is the only way to survive in modern America. For all the concessions and disappointments they may have experienced over the decades, the Hog Farmers still fight the good fight together, insistently holding true to the original irreverent notion of themselves as “an extended family, a mobile hallucination, an army of clowns.”

Eustace Conway was born at the beginning of the 1960s. He passed his formative years right in the middle of this major counterculture revolution, but the freewheeling values of the time seem to have had little effect on his ideas. Modern-day hippie types respond to Eustace positively because they think he’s one of them. He does seem to be a hippie at first glance, what with his long hair and his thick beard and his back-to-nature ethic and the friendly bumper sticker on his truck that reads “Friends Come in All Colors.” That said, Eustace is actually quite conservative. He loathes drugs and drug-users, has no patience with sexual swingers, and has sometimes been accused of cherishing discipline over freedom. If you wanted to take his gun from him, for instance, you’d probably find yourself prying it out of his cold, dead fingers. So, no, our Eustace Conway is not exactly a mobile hallucination or a tripped-out foot soldier from some army of clowns.

But what Eustace does share with the hippie utopian dreamers of the 1960s (as well as with their romantic utopian ancestors of the 1860s) is this most American of ideals: that society is both capable of transforming and willing to transform. If you can get yourself a piece of land and some serious motivation, you can start a small project that will grow and inspire a massive change across an entire country. Eustace Conway, like any good utopian, was not afraid to try this. He was not afraid to claim that he had all the answers. He was not afraid to formulate an entirely new world view.

What he wanted Turtle Island to be was more than just a nature preserve. More than what his grandfather had made of Sequoyah. This land was not to be a summer camp where children could temporarily escape the evils of the city and grow into strong citizens. No, Eustace wanted Turtle Island to be the setting of a colossal utopian experiment in which he would try to do nothing less than change and save America. It was to be the very blueprint for the future. Time and again, he had heard that old touchy-feely adage, “If you touch only one life, then you’ve had an effect on the world.”

Well, frankly, Eustace Conway thought that was bullshit. No reason to think so small, people! Why be content to touch only one life? Why not save the whole planet? Certainly this must be his destiny.

“God only made one person in the world like you,” wrote Eustace’s mother, who was always right there on the scene to remind her son of his singular calling. “And He has a special job for you to do, to use the talents He gave you.”

Eustace couldn’t have agreed more, and by the time he was in his mid-twenties, he was on fire with the desire to found his own utopia. The will was there; all he needed was the land.

He never expected to find his beloved Turtle Island in North Carolina, where real estate was already getting expensive and overpopulation already a problem. But, as it turned out, hidden up in the mountains behind the college and resort town of Boone were all kinds of shady little hollers where life had not altered in decades. Property was cheap, and people were quiet up there in the hills, so Eustace asked around to see if anyone had a big tract of land for sale. When he heard “the old Alley Church place” was available, he took a ride up there with a former college professor of his who knew a lot about buying land and reading tax maps—two skills Eustace did not have at the time but would soon acquire.

What they found up at the end of that rugged dirt road was perfection. It was 107 acres of what Eustace describes now as “a classic Southern Appalachian reclaimed hardwood forest,” and it was mind-alteringly beautiful. It had everything Eustace was looking for—fresh spring water, good solar exposure, attractive ridge-to-ridge property lines, level ground for farming, plenty of timber for constructing buildings, and an excitingly diverse ecosystem. It was a mixed woodland landscape, dominated by locust, birch, and sourwood. The air was wet and heavy, and the understory was fern-laden and lush. It was a wonderful climate for poison ivy and also for copperheads, although there were mild species thriving here, too—trout, woodpecker, pink and yellow ladyslipper, ginseng, orchid, bloodroot, rhododendron. . . .

The soil below his feet was vigorous and black and damp. Like most woodland on the East Coast of America, this was not original-growth forest. It was a second-growth forest that was healing itself, forest that had taken over once again after having been cleared more than a century ago, farmed steadily, and then abandoned for decades (in this case, when the local hillbillies were lured down to the town below to work in factories). Wild animals had made a healthy comeback, as had the trees. There were plenty of squirrels and every sign of an increasing deer population. The density of the birds was extraordinary, and, in the damp air of early morning, it sounded to Eustace like a jungle-worthy outcry of life. He suspected that there were mountain lions nearby, too. And bears.

It was the winter of 1986 when Eustace inspected the land for the first time. The instant he pulled his truck off the main highway, he found himself in serious Appalachia, all of which became more apparent as he climbed higher and higher into the Blue Ridge Mountains. The few people who did live back here
were
first-growth. Authentic, old-timey, genuine hillbillies. Their homes were tin-roof shacks barely adhering to the walls of these steep mountain hollers. Their yards were full of fossilized appliances and prehistoric cars, and the people kept livestock like rabbits and chickens up on their roofs, up away from the foxes. The word “hardscrabble” doesn’t begin to describe how hard and how scrabbled these lives appeared.

The roads were winding and unmarked, and Eustace wasn’t sure whether he was in the right location, so he pulled his truck into the yard of one of these beat-down shacks and knocked on the door to ask where the old Alley Church place was. A pale, lightweight woman in a calico apron came to the door and stared at Eustace in pure terror from behind the screen. She had probably never seen a man at her door who wasn’t a family member.

“She’d been making biscuit dough,” he remembers, “and her hands were covered with flour, but her face was as white as the flour on her hands, and she was shaking with fear at the sight of me. When she finally spoke, her voice was so faint and breathless, I was afraid she might pass out. It was like talking to somebody who’s sick in the hospital but who’s still trying to speak. You want to say, ‘Save your strength! Don’t try to talk!’ That’s how shy she was.”

The woman at the door was Susie Barlow, a member of the interconnected network of Appalachian families who were soon to become Eustace’s neighbors. The Barlow clan, Carlton clan, and the (quite literally named) Hicks clan had all lived in this craggy mountain holler for as long as remembered history. They were kind, reclusive people, who still yanked their teeth out with homemade iron pliers when the need arose. They raised hogs and made the most magnificent fifty-pound salt-cured hams. They bred hound dogs for hunting and for sale. They kept their dog litters in their living rooms, the pups staggering about blindly in a big wooden crate, peeing all over a faded handmade patchwork quilt, which could have surely fetched several hundred dollars at auction in New York City. The Carltons and Hickses and Barlows were poor but deeply religious people who honored the Sabbath with reverence and handled the Bible with humility.

“I’ll tell you this much,” Eustace says. “You know that I have issues with Christianity, right? But when I go visit my Appalachian neighbors and they say, ‘Will you pray with us, brother Eustace?’ I hit that floor and I
pray
. I get down there on my knees in their kitchens, down on that worn linoleum, and I take their hard-working hands, and I pray my heart out, because these are the truest believers I have ever known.”

They were perfect neighbors. It was a perfect piece of land. Eustace was ready to begin his utopian journey. But he didn’t want to do it alone.

For all that he was the American romantic archetype of the solo man in the wilderness, Eustace still desperately craved a female partner to share his dream. Just as he was imagining his ideal utopian home, he was also designing (in equally precise and fantastic detail) his ideal utopian bride. He knew exactly who she would be, how she would look, what she would bring to his life.

She would be beautiful, brilliant, strong, loving, capable, and his faithful partner, the gentle touch that would humanize his brilliantly executed life plan and support his vision. She showed up in his dreams often as a young Native American beauty, quiet and loving and peaceful. She was the Eve who would help Eustace build his Eden. She was the same dream girl, by the way, that Henry David Thoreau used to fantasize about back when he was holed up alone at Walden Pond—a faultless child of nature, a paragon modeled after the mythical Greek demigoddess “Hebe, cup-bearer to Jupiter, who was the daughter of Juno and wild lettuce, and who had the power of restoring gods and men to the vigor of their youth . . . probably the only thoroughly sound-conditioned, healthy and robust young lady that ever walked the globe, and wherever she came it was spring.”

This was the woman of Eustace’s dreams, the very picture of lushness and fertility and grace. But he wasn’t having an easy time finding her. Not that he had trouble meeting women. He met loads of women; it was just hard to find the right one.

His relationship with a woman named Belinda, for instance, typified his experience with the opposite sex. Belinda, who lived in Arizona, had seen Eustace Conway talking about his life in the woods on a national television program called “PM Magazine.” She immediately fell in love with him, transported by the romantic notion of this wild and articulate mountain man, and she tracked him down through the mail. They wrote passionate letters to each other, and Eustace went to stay with her briefly out West, but it never turned into something real. Belinda had a child already, which was only one of the reasons they ultimately split. Eustace was never entirely sure whether Belinda loved him as a person or as a notion.

Then there was Frances “the strong girl from England,” and Eustace fell in love with her, too.

“She seems to have the wisdom, strength, and tenacity that would make a good partner,” Eustace wrote of Frances in his journal. “I need the love and companionship that I have gotten so little of. I know I’m a romantic. Sometimes I think and feel that I am so logical and in ways cool-hearted and methodical, yet I can also be so young, naïve, and unrealistic.”