The Complete Elizabeth Gilbert: Eat, Pray, Love; Committed; The Last American Man; Stern Men & Pilgrims (90 page)

David Kaplan agreed. The two men didn’t sign a single piece of paper; they shook hands on the deal. “If you screw me,” Eustace explained politely, “I’m finished.” And he walked away, knowing that his life was in the hands of his biggest rival. It was a trapeze act. It was Russian roulette. It was like betting the farm on a pair of deuces. But it was this risk or no chance. Anyhow, he secretly suspected that David Kaplan was a decent man. Not only decent, but surely smart enough to know better than to make a lifelong enemy of a guy like Eustace Conway.

In the end, the gamble worked. David made his offer to Cabell Gragg—the same offer Eustace had been making for years—and Cabell took the bait. David Kaplan bought that crucial piece of land and two days later turned around and sold it with complete honor to Eustace.

Whose empire was now safe.

Granted, Eustace Conway may not be very current. He may not read the newspapers or listen to the radio, and it is true that he did once reply, when asked by a schoolchild in 1995 whether he knew who Bill Clinton was, “I believe Bill Clinton is an American political figure, but I’m not certain.” So he’s not up to the minute on the latest information, but that doesn’t mean he’s not as adept a businessman as any guy in a suit with a subscription to the
Economist
. Eustace is a shrewd, keen, and potentially ruthless operator—in the best sense of that word.

Still, this business side is an aspect of Eustace that people generally do not see, not unless they happen to be the people who draw the tax maps down in the Town Hall of Boone, North Carolina. People don’t see that calculating side of Eustace Conway because he doesn’t talk about it as much as he talks about listening to the sound of the drizzling rain and how to start a fire without a match. Hey, that’s not what he’s getting paid to talk about. But that’s not the only reason people don’t see it. For the most part, people don’t see that hard business edge of Eustace because they don’t want to see it. Because they’re afraid that if they look too closely at that side of him, it might spoil the nice image of the buckskin, the teepee, the single shot with the antique musket, the hand-carved wooden bowl, and the wide-open and peaceful smile. That’s the image they need today, the image they’ve always needed.

“Chivalrous in the manners and free as the winds,” as the British travel writer Isabel Lucy Bird described the men of the nineteenth-century American West.

“My Primitive Pagan Savage,” as Valarie Spratlin said, back when she was first falling in love with Eustace.

It’s what we all think to ourselves, back when we’re first falling in love with Eustace. Those of us who do, anyway. And we are legion. I know the feeling. I too had that moment of thinking this was the first truly authentic man I’d ever met, the kind of person I’d traveled to Wyoming as a twenty-two-year-old to find (indeed, to
become
)—a genuine soul uncontaminated by modern rust. What makes Eustace seem, on first encounter, like the last of some noble species is that there is nothing “virtual” about his reality. This is a guy who lives, quite literally, the life that, for the rest of the country, has largely become a metaphor.

Think of the many articles one can find every year in the
Wall Street
Journal
describing some entrepreneur or businessman as being a “pioneer” or a “maverick” or a “cowboy.” Think of the many times these ambitious modern men are described as “staking their claim” or boldly pushing themselves “beyond the frontier” or even “riding into the sunset.” We still use this nineteenth-century lexicon to describe our boldest citizens, but it’s really a code now, because these guys aren’t actually pioneers; they are talented computer programmers, biogenetic researchers, politicians, or media moguls making a big splash in a fast modern economy.

But when Eustace Conway talks about staking a claim, the guy is literally staking a goddamn claim. Other frontier expressions that the rest of us use as metaphors, Eustace uses literally. He
does
sit tall in the saddle; he
does
keep his powder dry; he
is
carving out a homestead. When he talks about reining in horses or calling off the dogs or mending fences, you can be sure that there are real horses, real dogs, or real fences in the picture. And when Eustace goes in for the kill, he’s not talking about a hostile takeover of a rival company; he’s talking about really killing something.

I remember one time when I was at Turtle Island helping Eustace with some blacksmithing. Eustace’s little blacksmith shop is always in action. He’s a competent smith in the old-style farm manner, which is to say that he’s not crafting fine iron filigree; he’s repairing his farm equipment and fitting shoes to his horses. On this day, Eustace was heating iron rods to fix a broken piece on his antique mower. He had a number of irons cooking in his forge at the same time and, distracted by trying to teach me the basics of blacksmithing, he allowed several of them to get too hot, to the point of compromising the strength of the metal. When he saw this, he said, “Damn! I have too many irons in the fire.”

Which was the first time I had ever heard that expression used in its proper context. But such is the satisfaction of being around Eustace; everything suddenly seems to be in its proper context. He makes true a notion of frontier identity that has long since passed most men of his generation, most of whom are left with nothing but the vocabulary. And the frontier vocabulary has outlived our actual frontier, because we’ve based our American masculine identity on that brief age of exploration and romantic independence and westward settlement. We hold on to that identity, long after it has any actual relevance, because we like the idea so much. That’s why, I believe, so many men in this country carry a residual notion of themselves as pioneers.

I think particularly of my Uncle Terry, who was born on a farm in Minnesota and raised by the children of American pioneers. Terry, a sensitive and intelligent baby boomer, couldn’t get off that homestead fast enough. He came East, started his own business, and now spends his days working as a computer expert. Several years ago Terry got into the computer game called Oregon Trail. The idea of the game was that you, the player, are a nineteenth-century American pioneer, heading West on a wagon trail with your family. To win the game, you have to make it to the Pacific, surviving a large number of virtual hardships, including disease, unexpected snowstorms, attacks by Indians, and starvation across rugged mountain passes. The better prepared you are—in terms of having packed the correct supplies and having selected the safest route—the better your chance of survival.

Uncle Terry loved this game and spent hours at the computer struggling to virtually head westward, much as his grandparents had struggled to literally head in the same direction a century earlier. But there was one thing that frustrated Terry about the game: the computer program didn’t allow him to improvise in the face of disaster. He’d suddenly get a message on the screen telling him that the axle on his wagon had broken and that he was going to die because he couldn’t proceed. The computer had proclaimed this virtual pioneer a failure. Game over, Terry would stand up from his desk and head to the refrigerator, cursing in annoyance. He’d fetch himself another beer and disparage the game’s designers, comically offended.

“If I were really out there on the Oregon Trail, I know I could solve this!” he’d say. “I could figure out how to fix a damn axle. I’m not an idiot! I’d cut down a tree, rig something up!”

He probably could. Not only was Terry raised on a farm; he spent his idealistic youth tramping through the wilderness of America seeking his own kind of independence. Faced with the trials of the Oregon Trail, Terry probably would survive. But he’s not out there proving this all day long. On the other hand, Eustace Conway is. Eustace
does
take his animals across the continent,
does
endure all manner of hardship,
does
figure out how to rig something up when the axle snaps.

Where it gets tricky is our deciding what we want Eustace Conway to be, in order to fulfill our notions of him, and then ignoring what doesn’t fit into our first-impression romantic image. My initial reaction on witnessing Eustace Conway’s life was relief. When I first heard of his life and his adventures, all I could think was
Thank God
. Thank God somebody in America was still living this way. Thank God there was at least one genuine mountain man, frontiersman, pioneer, maverick out there. Thank God there was one truly resourceful and independent wild soul left in this country. Because, at some deep emotional level, Eustace’s existence signified to me that somehow it’s still true, that we Americans are, against all other available evidence, a nation where people grow free and wild and strong and brave and willful, instead of lazy and fat and boring and unmotivated.

Or that’s how I felt when I first met Eustace, and that’s how I’ve since witnessed dozens of other people react when they first meet him. The initial reaction of many Americans, particularly men, when they catch a glimpse of Eustace Conway’s life is: “I want to do what you’re doing.” In fact, on closer examination, they probably don’t. While they’re a little embarrassed by the ease and convenience of their modern lives, chances are they’re not that ready to walk away from it all.
Not
so fast, buddy
. . .

Most Americans probably don’t want to live off the land in any way that would involve real discomfort, but they still catch a thrill from Eustace’s continual assurance that “You can!” Because that’s what most of us want to hear. We don’t want to be out there in a snowstorm on the Oregon Trail, fixing the broken axle of a covered wagon; we want to feel as though we
could
do it if we had to. And Eustace lives as he does in order to provide us with that comforting proof.

“You can!” he keeps telling us.

And we keep believing him, because
he does!

He is our mythical inner self, made flesh, which is why it’s comforting to meet him. Like seeing a bald eagle. (As long as there’s one left, we think, maybe things aren’t so bad, after all.) Of course, embodying the mythical hopes of an entire society is a pretty big job for one man, but Eustace has always been up for it. And people also sense
that
in him; they sense his self-assurance of being large enough to serve as a living metaphor, of being strong enough to carry all our desires on his back. So it’s safe to idolize him, which is an exciting experience in this callow, disillusioned age when it’s not safe to idolize anybody. And people get a little dizzy with that excitement, a little irrational. I know, because I’ve been there.

One of my favorite pastimes is to go back and reread the entry in my own journal from about the time Eustace and Judson Conway came to visit me in New York City. I especially like the part where I first meet Eustace and describe him as “Judson’s charming and wild and completely guileless older brother.”

Charming?
No doubt.

Wild?
Absolutely.

Guileless?
Guess again, sister.

There is nothing remotely guileless about this guy, and nowhere is that more evident than in his land deals. People who go up the mountain to see Eustace Conway and his land seldom ask themselves where that land came from. Turtle Island matches Eustace so completely that people believe it grew out of him or he grew out of it. Like everything Eustace represents to the public, his land seems detached from the corruptive processes of our degraded modern society. Against all reason, people find Turtle Island to be a tiny last parcel of the American frontier. And Eustace certainly couldn’t have done anything as crass as buying the place; he must have just claimed it.

We can see Eustace through the eyes of Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, a nineteenth-century Argentine intellectual who once visited America long enough to see how “this independent farmer looks for fertile lands, a picturesque spot, something beside a navigable river; and when he has made up his mind, as in the most primitive times in the world’s history, he says, ‘This is mine!’ and without further ado takes possession of the land in the name of the Kings of the World: Work and Good Will.” We love this idea so much that thinking any differently about Eustace or about how he nailed his domain would ruin our marvelous and reassuring vision of him as the Last American Man. But the story of Eustace Conway
is
the story of American manhood. Shrewd, ambitious, energetic, aggressive, expansive—he stands at the end of a long and illustrious line of the same.

There’s nothing anachronistic about his savvy ways. We want Eustace to be Davy Fuckin’ Crockett? Well, fine. Who exactly do we think Davy Crockett was? He was a congressman, that’s who. He was from the backwoods, sure, and he was a gifted hunter who had killed a bear with a knife (although probably not when he was a toddler), but he was also slick as all hell and he knew how to exploit his backwoods charisma for political advantage. In a debate with an aristocratic political opponent, the Tennessee woodsman was asked whether he agreed that there should be a radical change “in the judiciary at the next session of legislature.” Crockett (dressed in rugged buckskin) won over the local crowd by drawling innocently that he had no idea there was such a thing as a creature called “a judiciary.” Which was charming and funny, sure, although probably not true, since Crockett had been working in and around the judiciary for years—as a justice of the peace, a court referee, a town commissioner, and now as a member of the state legislature.

Crockett was a brilliant self-promoter who could always be counted on to give a reporter a witty, hillbilly sound bite or a dramatic tall tale about an encounter with some wild and dangerous “varmut.” He was cunning enough to carefully time the release of his heroic memoirs,
The
Life and Adventures of Colonel David Crockett of West Tennessee,
to coincide with his 1833 congressional election campaign. “What a miserable place a city is,” moaned Crockett. And then went to live in Washington, D.C., anyhow, where he willingly got in bed with his Northeastern Whig rivals in order to see that, appropriately enough, his beloved land bill was passed.