The Complete Elizabeth Gilbert: Eat, Pray, Love; Committed; The Last American Man; Stern Men & Pilgrims (91 page)

In fact, these famous backwoods American guys all got to be famous backwoods American guys through their intelligence and ambition and carefully styled self-representations. Daniel Boone, the very model of a free-living frontiersman, was a real estate speculator (indeed, a developer) of the highest order. He founded the Kentucky town of Boonesborough and subsequently filed over twenty-nine legal claims to land, eventually owning thousands of acres. He embroiled himself in litigation over border disputes, including one nasty case that he fought through the colonial court system for more than twenty-three years. (Even in the eighteenth century, even for Daniel Boone, the process of landownership was more bureaucratically complicated than the statement “This is mine!” Boone knew how the world worked. As he wrote to one fellow settler, “No Dout you are Desireous your Land Bisness Should be Dunn, but that is a thing impossible without money.”)

There happen to be a lot of heroic moments in American history that would have been impossible without money. The reason Daniel Boone became famous was that he entered into a business deal with a schoolteacher from Pennsylvania named John Filson, whose family also owned a lot of land in Kentucky and who was looking for a way to publicize the state and thus increase the value of his property. Filson ended up writing a thrilling book,
The Adventures of Colonel Daniel Boone
, which became a best seller and, as intended, a lure for settlers to come down to Kentucky and buy up all that good Boone-and Filson-owned land. It was a vastly profitable and clever venture on Boone’s part, and it also made him an icon in his own lifetime.

Both Boone and Crockett were much sharper businessmen than you might have guessed by watching their TV shows in the 1950s. (
“The rippin’est, roarin’est, fightin’est man the frontier ever knew!”
) And they weren’t the only clever ones. Kit Carson had dozens of adventure novels written about him and published in New York City while he was still alive (
Kit Carson: Knight of the Plains; Kit Carson: The Prince of
the Goldhunters
, among others). And Carson’s old boss, the explorer John Frémont, was smart enough to add a little romantic dash to his congressionally commissioned exploration reports to make them national best-sellers. Even Lewis and Clark knew how to sell it. When they were returning from their famous expedition, they outfitted themselves all rugged and cool when they sailed up the river into St. Louis to be welcomed by a thousand cheering residents and no small number of newspaper reporters, one of whom wrote, with admiration, “They really did have the appearance of Robinson Crusoes—dressed entirely in buckskin.”

So when Eustace Conway hustles himself “a slick little business deal” or when he trades land for land or when he writes in his journal, “I just put together a big packet of news articles for publicity; there are probably 35 major news articles done on me over the years—this will be an impressive packet for selling myself,” or when he exploits his mountain man persona to get himself an audience, he is not betraying his frontier American forefathers in any way; he’s
honoring
them. They would recognize immediately what he’s up to, and they would admire it, because running that kind of savvy operation is what success has always been about on this continent.

“Working seven days a week, all hours of the day for a year now,” Eustace wrote in his journal after Turtle Island had been open a few years. “I guess I am a good example of striving for a high goal, dependent not on immediate returns but on the vision of the future, totally a part of my social and philosophical upbringing. My grand-dad set an example in many ways with Sequoyah. Even now, a horned owl calls, reminding me of him as the warmth of the fire lives with me.”

He didn’t owe his father money anymore (“and it is truly a happy day to be releasing this burden”), but there was no end of other chalt lenges facing him. It was an effort of organization to get Boys’ Camp and Girls’ Camp running at Turtle Island every summer. And there were the realities of dealing with the kids themselves. Someone would cut his hand on sharp obsidian and need stitches; someone would get poison ivy; someone would get caught smoking pot and have to be sent home because of Eustace’s lifelong straight-edge intolerance for drugs.

Not to mention the issues of staffing. His personal standards of excellence being what they were, Eustace soon realized it was going to be one difficult task to find solid workers whom he could trust. For a while, his brothers, Judson and Walton, worked for Eustace as counselors. They were great, but they had their own lives going and couldn’t be relied on to teach at Turtle Island forever. Walton had finished college and was heading to Europe, where he would live for several years. Judson was already yearning to spend his summers in the West and would soon take off on his own adventures, riding boxcars and hitchhiking. (“I was recently backpacking in the Wind River Range of Wyoming,” Judson wrote to Eustace in a typically exuberant postcard. “I fought an early blizzard for 15 miles above the timberline—12,000 feet. It came close to taking my life. It was great fun. I hope camp is going good. Oh, by the way, I’m a cowboy now.”)

Aside from his brothers, it was extremely tough for Eustace to find people who would work as hard (or nearly as hard) as he did and still give him the respect he felt he deserved. For a man who often said that he found the idea of a mere eight-hour workday “disgusting,” Eustace was rarely satisfied with his employees’ efforts. They would come to Turtle Island “awed, amazed, and in love with this place” (as one ex-employee wrote) and then seem shocked that they had to work so hard. Again and again, he lost his team, either by their deserting or by his firing them.

He wished he could magically have the staunch staff his grandfather had worked with at Camp Sequoyah back in the 1930s, instead of these petulant modern kids with all their
feelings
and
needs
. His grandfather had demanded purity and perfection, and, by and large, he got it. If Chief so much as heard a rumor that a counselor had been seen smoking a cigarette in town on his day off, that counselor would come back to camp and find his bags packed for him. Chief never concerned himself with trampling on people’s feelings or being labeled as “unfair.” He had ultimate authority, which was all Eustace was asking for. That, and a commitment from people to try to work as hard as he did. Which was a tall order.

I’ve worked with Eustace Conway. Nobody gets to visit Turtle Island without working. I spent a week up there one autumn helping Eustace build a cabin. There were three of us on the job—Eustace, myself, and a quiet and steadfast young apprentice named Christian Kaltrider. We worked twelve hours each day, and I don’t recall lunch breaks. Silent, steady work. The way Eustace works, it’s like a march—numbing and constant. You get the feeling you’re in a platoon. You stop thinking and just give in to the pace. Eustace is the only one who speaks at all when it’s work time, and that’s to issue commands, which he does with unassailable authority, although every command is polite. There was only one moment in the process where he stopped working. Eustace asked me to please go to his pile of tools and fetch him an adz.

“I’m sorry,” I said, “I don’t know what that is.”

He described the adz for me—a tool that resembles an ax, but with a curved blade set at a right angle to the handle, used for dressing wood. I found the tool and was walking back toward the cabin to return it, when Eustace suddenly put down his hammer, stood up, wiped his forehead, and said, “I’m pretty sure I’ve seen the word ‘adz’ used in literature. Wasn’t it Hemingway who wrote about the sound of the adz coming from a front yard where someone was building a coffin?”

I slapped a horsefly on my neck and offered, “Are you possibly thinking of Faulkner? I think there’s a scene in
As I Lay Dying
where Faulkner describes the sound of someone building a coffin in a front yard.”

“Yes, of course,” Eustace said. “Faulkner.”

And he returned to work. Left me standing there with an adz in my hand, staring at him.
Yes, of course. Faulkner
. Now, back to work everybody.

Eustace wanted to finish the floor of the cabin by sundown that day, so we were working fast. He was so eager to get the job done that he used a chain saw to cut up the bigger logs. Eustace was sawing through a log when the chain saw hit a knot, kicked back, and jumped up toward his face. He deflected it with his left hand, sawing into two of his fingers.

He made one quick sound like “Rah!” and pulled back his hand. The blood started pumping out. Christian and I froze, silent. Eustace shook his hand once, sending out a shower of blood, and then recommenced sawing. We waited for him to say something or try to stop the bleeding, which was fairly prolific, but he didn’t. So we both kept at our work. He continued bleeding and sawing and hammering and bleeding and sawing more. By the end of the day, Eustace’s entire arm, the logs, the tools, both of my hands, and both of Christian’s hands were covered with blood.

And I thought,
Ah, so this is what’s expected of us
.

We worked until dusk and headed back to base camp. I walked next to Eustace, and his arm hung down, dripping. We passed a flowering bush and, always the teacher, he said, “Now, that’s an interesting sight. You don’t usually see jewelweed with both orange and yellow blossoms on one plant. You can make an ointment out of the stem, you know, to relieve the itching of poison ivy.”

“Very interesting,” I said.

Only after dinner did Eustace bandage his savaged hand. He mentioned the incident just once, saying, “I’m lucky I didn’t saw my fingers off.”

Later that night I asked Eustace what his most serious injury had been, and he said he’d never been seriously injured. One time he did slice open his thumb in a careless moment while dressing a deer carcass. It was a deep, long cut “with the meat hanging out and everything,” and it clearly needed stitches. So Eustace stitched it, using a needle and thread and the stitch he knows well from sewing buckskin. Healed just fine.

“I don’t think I could sew up my own skin,” I said.

“You can do anything you believe you can do.”

“I don’t believe I could sew up my own skin.”

Eustace laughed and conceded, “Then you probably couldn’t.”

“People have such a hard time getting things done out here,” Eustace complained in his journal in 1992. “The environment is so new. It really isn’t a problem for them. It is
my
stress over their slow, ignorant pace that bothers me.
They’re
blissfully enjoying every minute.”

Challenges were coming at Eustace from every direction. A friend pointed out that it was a mistake for Eustace not to carry personal health insurance. “But I’m healthy!” he protested. So his friend explained that if Eustace were to be seriously injured in an accident and needed intensive care, the hospital could raid all his assets, including the value of his land, to cover the expense. Jesus Christ! Eustace had never thought of such a thing before. Plus he had no end of taxes to manage and surveying to pay for. Plus he had to deal with poachers on his land. He ran down on foot some dumb young kid who dropped a buck out of season with an illegal gun just a few hundred feet from Eustace’s kitchen. Even more horrifying, he himself had been accused of poaching.

He was teaching a class of eighty young students one afternoon when four government cars and eight lawmen pulled up and arrested him for poaching deer. Tipped off by a resentful neighbor, the game warden went straight to Eustace’s cache of dozens of deerskins and accused Eustace of having killed the animals without a permit. In fact, the skins had been given to Eustace by people who wanted them tanned. It was a terrifying moment.

Eustace had to spend the next month collecting letters of evidence from every person who had given him a deerskin, as well as documents from environmentalists and politicians across the South swearing that Eustace Conway was a committed naturalist who would never hunt more than was legally allowed. On the day of his trial, though, he had the balls to wear his deerskin pants to the courtroom. Why not? It’s what he always wore. He strode into his trial looking like Jeremiah goddamn Johnson. Ma-Maw, the elderly Appalachian neighbor who lived down the holler and who hated the Law as much as the next hillbilly, came with Eustace to give him moral support. (“I’m afraid the judge might take these buckskin pants right off me and throw me in jail,” Eustace joked to Ma-Maw, who said sternly, “Don’t you worry. I have my bloomers on under this skirt. If they steal your pants, I’ll just take off my bloomers and give ’em to you. You can just wear my bloomers to jail, Houston!”) Ma-Maw loved all the Conway boys, but she never
could
get their names quite right . . .

When his time came to speak, Eustace gave the judge the most eloquent and impassioned earful about his life and dreams and visions of saving nature, until the judge—amazed and impressed—said, as he was signing the papers to dismiss the poaching charges, “Is there anything
I
can do to help you with Turtle Island, son?”