The Complete Elizabeth Gilbert: Eat, Pray, Love; Committed; The Last American Man; Stern Men & Pilgrims (84 page)

“My fire has been fed well tonight,” Eustace Conway, college student, wrote in his journal on a frigid day in December, “and I am reaping a beautiful harvest of HEAT. Love it. I am living in a way that would be hard for many modern people to handle. For example, yesterday evening as darkness was falling I kindled a fire and proceeded to heat my water and cook my dinner. When the water was warm, I took off my upper body wear (in the freezing temperatures) and washed my hair and body. It would be too much for my fellow classmates to handle!”

This was probably true. Although, to be fair, there were some young modern people who could have related to the scene, no problem. Donna Henry, for one. Although her name doesn’t appear often in the journals, Donna was there beside Eustace a lot of the time, right there in the teepee next to him, stripping off her upper body wear, too, and washing her hair in the same frigid temperatures.

Donna stuck around with Eustace after they had conquered the Appalachian Trail together. The following summer, the two of them had hiked the national parks of the West together, again at breakneck speed (he leading; she scrambling to follow), and she discovered, after all their time in the wilderness, that she desperately wanted to marry this guy. She was frank with him about it. She told him straight out that “we have a connection, we’re soulmates, we’re partners. This is a once-in-a-lifetime relationship.” But Eustace felt he was far too immature to consider marriage. Second only perhaps to the possibility of moving back home with Dad, marriage was the last thing on Eustace’s mind when he was twenty years old. This whole journey of schooling and traveling and living in the teepee was about the opposite of marriage for Eustace; it was about reaching perfect liberty.

Still, he loved Donna and appreciated her company, so he let her stick around. She moved into his teepee with him for some time while he attended college and she embraced his interests as her own. She learned to sew buckskin, took up the study of Native American culture, and started going to powwows with him, meeting his friends and playing teepee hostess.

Donna Henry was turning into Donna Reed. And she was lonely and confused about this. The fact is, she didn’t get to see Eustace very much. He was powering up on a double major in anthropology and English, and when he wasn’t in class, he was busy becoming the activist and teacher he increasingly felt ordained to be. Eustace Conway, in his early twenties, was a Man of Destiny in Training, and that didn’t leave much time for a girlfriend. He’d begun to travel all over the South, teaching in the public schools, developing what he would later call his “dog and pony show”—a hands-on, interactive program of nature education and awareness. He was brilliant at this. He could move a conference of the most jaded businessmen to standing ovations. And kids? Kids loved Eustace as if he were a kind of woodsy Santa: “Mr. Conway you are a very nice man . . . Thank you for attending Heritage Day . . . I enjoyed learning about Indians. I especially enjoyed hearing about how they lived and what they ate . . . It was very interesting to see that you can sew your clothing together . . . When I grow up I might try to be like you . . . I think you taught me more in one day than I’ve learned in the eight years I’ve been going to school.”

Eustace was also consumed by the effort of pulling together the details of his personal philosophy. He knew he was destined to be a teacher, but what was it precisely that he needed to teach the world? He wanted to alert people to the woeful beating that the modern consumer-driven life delivers to the earth. Teach people how to achieve freedom from what his grandfather had called the “softening and vision-curbing influence of the city.” Train them to pay attention to their choices. (“Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle are good ideas,” he would lecture, “but those three concepts should only be the last resort. What you really need to focus on are two other words that also begin with R—Reconsider and Refuse. Before you even acquire the disposable good, ask yourself why you need this consumer product. And then turn it down. Refuse it. You
can
.”) What it came down to was the idea that people had to change. They had to get back to living eye-to-eye with nature, or else the world was finished. Eustace Conway believed he could show them how.

So he also spent his college years working away on the manuscript for a book—a how-to book, for lack of a better description—called
Walk in Beauty: Living Outside
. It was a detailed policy plan for Americans to make the transition from insipid modern culture to a richer natural life, where they and their children could prosper far away from “smog, plastic, and a never-ending babble of nonsense enough to scramble brains, raise blood pressure, create ulcers, and sponsor heart disease.” He understood that an abrupt move to the wilderness would be terrifying for most Americans, but he felt certain that if he could write a clear phase-by-phase guide, he could help even the most pampered families move back into the woods comfortably and safely.
Walk
in Beauty
has a marvelous tone of you-can-do-it optimism. Every word shows how confident Eustace was, at the age of twenty-one, not only that he had the answers, but that he would be carefully listened to.

The book is organized into tidy topics, like Heating, Lighting, Wellness, Bedding (“Understanding the principles of insulation is a good starting point”), Cleanliness, Clothing, Tools, Cooking, Children, Water, Animals, Community, Fire, Solitude, Foraging, Spiritual and World View. His prose is clean and authoritative. His constant message is that the more educated one becomes in the wilderness, the less one is “roughing it” and therefore the more comfortable one’s life can be. There is no reason, he assures the reader, to suffer in the woods once you know what you’re doing.

“It can’t be fun being miserable in the wilderness! To walk in beauty means to harmoniously fit yourself into the natural scene, producing happy, content, memorable times. Not memorable because you burned up your shoes by the fire and got dysentery from drinking bad water! But memorable in a sense of smoothing the wilderness over and making it nice, good, peaceful, beneficial, and snug—the way a home ought to be.”

Go easy, Eustace reassures us. Take it step by step. “Use your backyard as a place to develop basic skills.” When learning how to make warm bedding from natural materials, “try sleeping out on a cold night on your back porch at first, where you can retreat back to the bedroom and figure out what went wrong if you have to.” Ready to start foraging for food and cooking on an open fire? Try it in a local park before you move to the Australian outback. “You can always order pizza if you burn your dinner. Or you can start over and do it right the second time, or the third time, getting better each time.” Above all, no matter how small the detail may seem, “
Pay Attention!
It took me 3½ years in the woods before I realized the great difference a truly clean globe on an oil light can make. It wasn’t that I didn’t clean the globe before—I just didn’t do a good enough job. But now that I keep it spotless, I can see a lot better at night.”

All it takes, Eustace promises, is practice, common sense, and some basic American willingness to try something new. Stick to it, believe in yourself, and in no time at all you and your family can be living in a “hidden home in the forest [as] wonderfully peaceful” as Eustace Conway’s home.

The tricky part was that his schooling and his activities and his writing all combined to keep this most natural of woodsmen out of the woods a lot of the time. There’s only so much advocacy you can do from within a teepee. If you’re hellbent on changing the world, then you’ve got to put yourself out there in the world. You must let no campaign opportunity slip by. Eustace saw everywhere opportunities to campaign, almost to the point of distraction. He wrote a blissful observation in his journal one January day: “I was glad to see the morning star through the smoke flaps this morning.” But he was quick to add, “I am beginning to try and write a story about teepee life for a magazine.”

He was collecting so many obligations and appointments that he was often away from his hidden home in the forest for days at a time. This meant leaving his girlfriend and old hiking partner Donna Henry in the teepee all by herself most of the day, day after day. She was the one sitting there observing nature while her man was busy teaching or studying or dancing at some powwow or being surrounded by admirers, and she was feeling less and less wonderfully peaceful about the whole deal. Donna (who today concedes that she has only herself to blame for not building an independent life from the man she worshipped) had little to do with her time but try to please Eustace and tend to the teepee in his absence.

And sometimes when Eustace did see Donna, he could be hard on her. His perfectionism didn’t stop with himself. He might be irritated that she hadn’t completed all her chores or didn’t know how to make pancakes correctly over the fire or hadn’t kept the globe of the oil lamp clean enough. And he was far too busy with his obligations to constantly show her how to do things right. She should be learning all this on her own. She should be taking the initiative!

As the months went by, Donna felt more and more that she was always screwing something up and that her best efforts would never be enough to please this man. She was nervous every day about what he was going to come down on her for. And then, one cold January afternoon, she finally broke. Eustace came into the teepee with some dead squirrels he’d found on the side of the road. He tossed them on the ground, and said, “Make soup out of these for dinner tonight.” And he left, already late for his next appointment.

“Now, remember,” says Donna today, thinking back on it. “This life was his dream, and I was following him and living in the teepee because I loved him. But I didn’t know how to make squirrel soup. I mean, I’m from Pittsburgh, right? All he told me was to leave the heads on so that no meat would be wasted. So I tried to cut the meat off the bones, not knowing it would be better to boil the whole animal so that the meat would fall off the bone. Of course, hardly any meat came off with my knife. But I did the best I could, left the heads in the soup, and then buried the bones in the woods behind the teepee. When Eustace came home and looked at the soup with the heads floating around, he asked, ‘Where’s all the meat? And where are the rest of the bones?’ I told him what I had done, and he was furious at me. So furious that he made me go out there, in the middle of January, in the middle of the night, and dig up those goddamn squirrel bones and show them to him, to prove how much meat I’d wasted. Then he made me wash the carcasses off and cook them up. Four days later, I left him.”

It was six full years before Donna and Eustace spoke again. Donna buried herself in the study of Native American culture. She moved to an Indian reservation and married a Lakota Sioux, mostly because she thought he would be a substitute for Eustace. But the marriage was unhappy. For the sake of her son, named Tony, she pulled herself together and set out on her own. Eventually she married again—a good man, this time—started a successful publishing company, and had another child.

Yet twenty years later, Donna still loves Eustace. She thinks there’s a level at which they were made for each other, and that he was a fool not to have married her. Despite the “significant emotional relationship” she shares with her decent second husband (who has gracefully accepted his wife’s lasting feelings for this old lover as part of the Donna Henry package) and despite her fears that Eustace “doesn’t know how to love, only how to command,” she believes that she was put on this earth to be Eustace Conway’s “most excellent partner.” And that maybe their story isn’t over. Someday, she thinks, she may live on that mountain with him again. In the meantime, she sends her son to Eustace’s summer camp at Turtle Island every year to learn how to be a man.

“Eustace Conway is my son’s hero,” she says. “I don’t know if Eustace will ever have any children of his own, but if he has any children in his heart, my Tony is one of them.”

As for Eustace, he has the fondest memories of Donna, who was “the most extraordinary natural athlete I’ve ever met—such a strong and willing partner.” She was great, he says, and probably would have made a terrific wife, but he was too young for marriage. When I asked if he remembered the famous squirrel-bone incident (my exact question was, “Please tell me you didn’t really do that, Eustace!”), he sighed and supposed that it was not only a true story, but exactly the kind of story that repeats itself in his life “time and again, with many different people.” He sounded thoroughly remorseful about it, about the heightened expectations he has of everyone and the way his uncompromising personality sometimes fails to make good people feel good about themselves. Then we changed the subject and finished our conversation.

But when I returned home that evening, I found a message from Eustace on my answering machine. He’d been contemplating the squirrel-bone incident and “hated to think” I didn’t understand the situation. He remembered it now. And he remembered that the reason he’d made Donna dig up the squirrel bones in the middle of the night was the excellent opportunity it gave him to educate her further on the proper way to handle a squirrel carcass.

“And why waste perfectly good meat?” he went on. “And the fact that it was January was really to our advantage, because the temperature was so low. This meant the meat would have been preserved nicely in the cold ground. Whereas, if it had been the middle of summer, I might have just let it go, because the meat might have been spoiling in the sun and been covered with maggots and insects. I must have taken all this into consideration and realized that the meat was still good and that it was a good teaching opportunity and then I must have decided that it would’ve been a waste to just throw it out, see? So when I asked her to bring the bones back, I was only being logical.”

Concluding with the hope that this all made more sense to me now, Eustace wished me a pleasant evening and hung up.

“What is this modern-day Mountain Man trying to prove?” asked one of the many newspapermen who visited Eustace Conway in his teepee during those college years. Then he quoted Eustace’s reply: “Nothing. Most people like to live in houses and watch television and go to movies. I like to live in my teepee and watch the rain or snow falling and listen to the language of nature. If they feel that money and materialism are the major virtues of life, how can I sit in judgment of them? All I ask in return is the same consideration for my life.”