The Complete Elizabeth Gilbert: Eat, Pray, Love; Committed; The Last American Man; Stern Men & Pilgrims (106 page)

“But that’s the pattern of the world,” he went on. “First come the roads and then come the farms and then the farmers sell out to developers who chop it up and rape it and put in more roads until it’s all chewed to pieces. I can’t save every acre in North Carolina. I don’t have the power for that.”

“But what would you do with Hoy’s property if you could get it?” I asked, thinking he might use it for hayfields or as a place to graze his ever-increasing kingdom of horses.

“I’d save it and then give it to one of my sons when he was grown so that he could make it a traditional heritage farm,” Eustace said.

That sentence hung awkwardly in the air for a long moment. There were several assumptions at play here: that Eustace will someday have a bunch of children; that there will be boys among them; that any one of these boys will grow up to give a shit about heritage farming; that Eustace will not find
his
sons to be as mammoth a disappointment (“the antithesis of what I had expected!”) as his grandfather and his father found their sons to be; that any of his land will still be around in twenty-five years. Even Eustace seemed to hear these doubts.

“My
sons
,” he said finally, in self-disgust. “Listen to me talk. Where am I going to get sons?”

Where, indeed? And with whom as a mother? This is the trillion-dollar question in Eustace’s life, the question that haunts not only him but everyone who knows him, to the point that it’s like a national pastime for people to sit around speculating about who (or if) Eustace Conway would someday marry. Every member of the Conway family has taken me aside at some point in the last few years to utter his or her secret desire that Eustace will never marry and certainly never have children, because he would be, as Martha fears, “way too scary as a father.”

But Eustace has other friends who are constantly trying to set him up with one mountain-climbing, peace-loving, dark-skinned, modern nature girl after another. Some friends think he should go back to Guatemala and marry the prettiest and quietest fourteen-year-old Mayan girl he can find. Others think he needs the world’s toughest and most modern ballbuster to come in and kick his ass around Turtle Island for a while. And he has one friend, a blunt woman artist, who never stops challenging him with this accusation: “Hey, Eustace. Why don’t you just admit that you don’t really like children? You can’t get away from them fast enough when they’re in the room with you.”

Like everyone else, I have my own opinions about Eustace’s romantic life. It seems to me that what he really needs is a woman who is both strong and submissive. This may sound like a contradiction, but it wasn’t always the case. Strength combined with submission in women was the norm for centuries, especially on the American frontier. Take a look again at Davy Crockett’s wife, whose thorough competence in the wilderness was matched only by her subservience to her husband. That’s what Eustace needs. But that was 1780. Times, as we’ve all surely noticed, have changed. And so it is my personal opinion that Eustace Conway is not going to have much luck finding himself a wife (or, as he sometimes puts it, “a mate”). As an urban friend of his bemoaned once, in a fake folksy drawl, “A century of goddamn feminism done spoilt all the brides!”

Like many impressive Men of Destiny before him, it is only in this one most delicate operation of intimate partnership where Eustace doesn’t succeed. All his energies and all his talents become useless in the face of it. As the unhappy Meriwether Lewis wrote to his dear friend William Clark, a few years after they’d crossed and mapped the continent, “I am now a perfect widower with respect to love . . . I feel all that restlessness, that inquietude, that certain indescribable something common to old bachelors, which I cannot avoid thinking my dear fellow proceeds from
that void in our hearts
which might, or ought to be better filled. Whence it comes I know not, but certain it is, that I never felt less like a hero than at the present moment. What may be my next adventure God knows, but on this I am determined,
to get a wife
.”

It’s not as though Eustace doesn’t have plenty of options. The man has a powerful effect on women and has access to loads of them, isolated though his world may seem. There is no end of beautiful and starry-eyed female dreamers who dance through Turtle Island every year as campers, apprentices, and day-trippers, many of whom would be more than happy to have a thrilling roll in the duff with a real mountain man, given the invitation. If all Eustace was after in life was hot sexual gratification, he could easily pick himself an endless supply of lovers, as if picking berries off a bush. He must be given credit, though, for never having used Turtle Island as a personal Free Love Utopia. He has never exploited that crop of lovelies for short-term sexual pleasure. On the contrary, he consciously detaches himself from the many young girls who idolize him for his rugged image, because he doesn’t think it’s appropriate to take advantage of their adoration. Instead, what he endlessly searches for is a robust and sacrosanct monogamous union of Olympian dimensions between two heroic figures. It’s a search informed and inspired by a conception of romantic love that remains doggedly—indeed, heartbreakingly and unbelievably and almost belligerently—naïve.

“It was so intriguing to meet you and have a chance to share with you,” he wrote in an early letter to one woman who never hung around long enough to even be legitimately listed as one of Eustace Conway’s girlfriends. “I don’t know exactly what you must think about me, but I hope we will have a chance to get to know each other. I am looking for a mate—an energetic, intelligent, adventuresome person like yourself is really attractive to me. I would like to live out my fantasies of a sacred relationship that was filled with a lifetime of love and compassionate care and understanding. I want that ‘perfect’ love-filled American dream ‘fantasy’ relationship, if you will. I am holding out for nothing less than that . . . I have been interested in marriage for 10 years. I have been looking but haven’t found the ‘right one’ yet . . . If you have the vision to see and the care to investigate, you will find me a deep and caring person who is capable and willing to offer you more than you have ever dreamed about in the way of meaningful partnership through this journey of life, ‘the human experiment.’ I offer you that. Please take me seriously on this and not let another protective mechanism keep you from finding in me what your heart truly desires. Insofar as I can offer you my love, truest sentiments, Eustace.”

But this “stand-in-the-wind-tunnel-of-my-love” approach hasn’t worked, there, either. And it baffles Eustace, this absence, this loss, this failure to create an ideal family to erase his brutal childhood. He’s all too aware that he’s running out of time. Just recently, he got involved with Ashley, a twenty-four-year-old beautiful hippie he’s known for years. She is as warm and loving as any human being I’ve met. Eustace first ran into her six years before, at a party, and stared at her all night, watching her talk to others, thinking that “she was so alive, so full of love, like a waterfall spilling all over the room with the mist boiling up around her, so captivating. I took one look at her and thought,
This is
the one. I need to marry that girl
.”

But Ashley, all of eighteen at the time, already had a lover. She was on her way out of town, about to step into the world for some wild traveling and adventures, and was in no way ready to be Eustace Conway’s woman. But she has since returned to Boone and she’s single now. Eustace has fallen in love with her once again, and she with him.

Eustace thinks Ashley is an angel, and it’s not hard to see why. She emanates kindness and humanity. Ashley was driving me through Boone one afternoon when a homeless man approached her car at a red light and asked for money. Ashley, who has been barely surviving for years on food stamps and hope, dug around in the car for spare change, but could find only a few dimes.

“I can’t give you much money,” she apologized to the homeless man, “but I promise I will give you all my prayers.”

“Thank you,” he said, smiling as if he’d been handed a hundred-dollar bill. “I believe you.”

Ashley has a heart big enough to absorb all the love and need and hunger that Eustace thrusts at her without even flinching. But there’s a glitch with Ashley. Somewhere along her journeys she managed to acquire three young children—a five-year-old son and toddler twin daughters.

When I heard about them, I said, “Eustace, I always thought you wanted thirteen kids. Looks to me as if you’ve got a good start here, buddy. Three down, ten to go.”

Eustace laughed. “Sure, but the
concept
of thirteen kids is a lot different from the
reality
of three.”

Ashley is calm, affectionate, funny, attentive, and steady. She brings a much-needed sense of peace and hospitality to Turtle Island. And she can gracefully handle that way of life. She spent several years living on a scrappy Rainbow Gathering commune that made Turtle Island look like a Hilton Resort. This is a woman who went through two pregnancies without seeing a doctor. (“You know when you’re healthy,” she explains, “and I didn’t need anyone to tell me I was doing fine.”) This is a woman who delivered her twins outside in the middle of the night on the cold Colorado ground, barely sheltered under a tarp. This is a woman who could definitely manage a life of hog-butchering and Dumpster Diving.

Eustace swears he would marry Ashley in a minute if she didn’t already have a family. He has strong reservations about bringing up another man’s freewheeling children, particularly when that other man is a hippie who still has a considerable presence in his kids’ lives. Eustace doesn’t want an undisciplined influence like that anywhere near children he himself might someday be raising. Although he is not as frightened, it should be said, by Ashley’s twin daughters as he is by her energetic and willful young son.

“How could I adopt that boy when he’s already begun to be formed? He’s already seen too many corrupting things that I can’t control or erase. I had the worst relationship with my father, and if I’m going to have a son, I have to be sure that the relationship is perfect right from the beginning. I don’t want there to be a moment of anger or trouble between us. For all I know, I could spend ten years showing Ashley’s boy the proper path, and then he could turn on me when he’s fourteen and say, ‘Fuck that, Dad. I’m gonna go get high.’”

“Eustace,” I said, “nobody can promise you that your own biological children wouldn’t say the same thing someday. In fact, I can almost promise you that they will. You do know that, right?”

“But the odds would be better with my own children, because I’d be there from the beginning to teach them what’s acceptable and unacceptable behavior. The odds just don’t look good with Ashley’s kids. They’re already undisciplined. Ashley’s a great mother but her children manipulate her and cause all kinds of havoc and destruction. It’s really hard to have her kids around all the time, because they’re not trained. They’re always getting into everything and demanding her attention. She brings them up here and I do things with them, like take them horseback riding, but it’s no fun. It’s fun for
them
but not for me.”

Eustace can’t quite let go of Ashley, because she’s beautiful and kind and gives him the deliciously unconditional love he’s been starving for. But he can’t keep her around, either, because she brings too many terrifying variables into his exacting and well-ordered cosmos. He’s been trying to help her bring more order and discipline to her family; he’s lent her books from his library written by the Amish about how to properly “train up” a child, very much as one would train up a horse. Ashley, who is indeed run ragged by her children, studied the books carefully and gratefully, and has taken much of the advice to heart. She’s even passed these old-fashioned lessons about childrearing along to her hippie friends who are mothers, to help them create some stability within their own disorganized families. And it’s been a largely successful education. Using the strict old Amish system, Ashley has gotten her children on a more solid schedule, and there are fewer tantrums and meltdowns. But the children are still a handful, of course. Because there are three of them and because they are children.

So Eustace doesn’t know what to do about Ashley. In the end, his decision will almost certainly be a showdown between the two things he craves most: absolute love and absolute control. It’s a tough call. Historically, love has always been a pretty fierce contender, but some people in this world need more than love. Eustace has lived without love before; that’s a familiar sensation for him. Whereas he has never lived a moment of his adult life without control.

So he remains alone and single. And full of questions about what kind of woman he should seek. After all these years, he’s come to think that he should be more careful about whom he selects to love. Maybe he’s been too random in his choices; maybe that’s why it never works out. Taking on the challenge as he would take on any organizational task, Eustace recently sat down and efficiently listed the requirements for his perfect woman. If he could evaluate prospective candidates in each category, he should be able to choose wisely, and surely he would never be hurt or lonely again.

Very healthy,
his list (set forth in no particular order) begins. Then:

Capacity for intimacy.

Beautiful.

Confidence with and passion for sexuality.

Spiritual belief/direction.

Excited and motivated to live each day completely and with sacred
appreciation for it.

Nurturing, giving, caretaking, traditional woman sides to personality.

Leans toward nonmaterialistic lifestyle, values.

Emotional, confident, centered, energy, positive support, and social
skills.

Independently able self, with capacity to bond deeply in sacred
marriage union.

Multilingual.

Involved with or appreciation for arts—dance, theater, literature,
visual, etc.