The Complete Elizabeth Gilbert: Eat, Pray, Love; Committed; The Last American Man; Stern Men & Pilgrims (96 page)

“My
word
, honey,” replied Mrs. Pierson Gay in her most feathery antebellum Southern accent, “it looks like Peter Rabbit done went and got himself a
Hahvahd
education.”

It wasn’t a parade every day. They had great times on their journey, but they also rode for long and desolate episodes along desert highways where nobody drove by and the garbage blew like tumbleweeds. In rural Texas, they rode through a blinding sandstorm, surviving it only by pulling their bandanas up over their faces, a good system until a Texas state trooper stopped them and demanded that they remove their “masks” because “folks is getting nervous y’all are some kinda outlaws.” At other points in the journey, they hit assassin waves of heat so oppressive that Eustace feared the horses might die and that their own lungs would combust from the scorch. Sometimes they’d stop around lunchtime and try to duck the heat under a patch of shade.

Judson would say,“How long do we have for a break?”

“Ten minutes,” Eustace would answer, and Judson and Susan would lie down, cover their faces with their hats, and catch exactly ten minutes of sleep. But Eustace never slept. His energies were consumed by caring for the horses. In those ten minutes, he’d make the rounds, check the feet, test knots on the lead ropes, look into the animals’ eyes, feel for saddle sores. He wasn’t concerned about the heat or his own physical exhaustion; only worried about the horses.

The worst weather they hit was in Louisiana, where they rode into a crippling four-day ice storm. It came on them out of nowhere in the form of a fierce freezing rain, and soon the three riders looked as if they were encased in a quarter inch of glass. Everything was frozen—hats, stirrups, saddlebags, boots, beards. This was the only weather that ever stopped the Long Riders, and it was not because of personal discomfort; it was because Eustace refused to endanger the horses’ safety on those slick roads of solid ice. Trying to find a place to hole up for the storm, they ended up taking shelter beneath the awnings of a small old-time grocery store. Eustace released Judson onto the local citizenry, telling him to use his famous charm to secure some warm beds for the riders that night and a warm barn for the horses.

“Go work the situation, little brother,” said Eustace. “Do what you do best.”

Judson, who does work fast, dutifully struck up a friendship with some fellers who were chewing tobacco in the general store. And within minutes the Long Riders had been invited to wait out the ice storm at a nearby compound, run by an organization of white militia rednecks representing the Patriot Movement. These militiamen were, according to Eustace Conway’s description, “some people who think that the United States government has way too much control over our lives, which is basically not a bad idea and I agree with many of their points, although I wasn’t impressed with their level of disorganization, and they all drank so much alcohol that they couldn’t forward their message efficiently.”

“Yeah, we got a place you can stay,” one of the militiamen drawled. “Y’all got any guns? Well, you won’t need ’em at our place! We got loads of guns.”

For the next two days, the Long Riders were guests of the Patriot Movement. Trapped in the small Louisiana farmhouse by the weather, Susan and Judson spent two cozy days getting stone drunk with these staunch defenders of America’s sacred Second Amendment rights and shooting guns for kicks. Meanwhile, Eustace tried to remain sober and productive, spending those forty-eight hours calling everyone he had ever met across America, trying to see if anyone knew somebody who might want to join the Long Riders and drive the truck and trailer. Eustace was fed up with all the bullshit of driving ahead and hitchhiking back. Sure enough, after about a hundred phone calls, he found his driver, a nineteen-year-old boy nicknamed Swamper, who had nothing else to do with his life at the moment but hop on a Greyhound bus back in North Carolina and join the team in Louisiana.

When the ice storm ended, the Long Riders bade farewell to their militia friends and headed west again with their new partner, young Swamper, driving the support vehicle, pushing on toward Texas.

Texas was a highlight for Eustace, because that’s where he bought himself the greatest horse of his life—his beloved Hobo. Hobo was a made-for-travelin’ Registered Standard Breed. Hobo would become a legend, the fastest and smartest and most loyal horse Eustace ever met. Eustace bought Hobo on the road in the middle of Texas from a farmer named Mr. Garland, and what a find that was. The farmer was leaning on his fence when the Long Riders trotted by, and they all set to talking. As Mr. Garland described this horse he was thinking of selling (“he’s kind of thin and fast”) Eustace’s mouth almost started watering. From the brief conversation, he could fill out the whole story. This Texan had bought himself a beautiful and speedy horse because he loved the idea of it, but now he found the animal too fast to handle. Bring it on!

“You want to try him out?” the Texan asked.

Eustace got on Hobo for a test drive and said, “Come up, boy.” In one dizzying nanosecond that horse went from contentedly grazing in the field to a formidable G-force gallop. Eustace’s hat flew off, and he was barely hanging on by his heels.

“I don’t think your brother can manage that horse,” Mr. Garland said to Judson, who was watching from the fence, and Judson said, “Oh, he’ll manage.”

What a day! Eustace was afraid it would be rude and obscene to tell that Texan how good this horse felt between his legs on the test drive, how fine and thrilling it was when Hobo opened up and took off across the pastures “like a born challenger, like a rocket,” how he couldn’t help thinking that nothing in the world had felt so good between his legs except maybe Carla’s body . . .

He bought Hobo right then and there and rode off with him. Eustace and this spectacular horse had the most amazing interaction, right from day one. As Eustace would say, “All I’d have to do is think, and as fast as I could articulate the thought, Hobo would respond.” This was an animal that finally matched Eustace’s will—a true partner, an animal that wanted to
go
. Hobo was a brilliant addition. The Long Riders needed an eager pace horse like Hobo to keep up their momentum. It was hard sometimes to stay motivated. All of them—horses and horsemen— were suffering from injuries and strain and weariness. Judson always shot off his pistol in celebration as they crossed a state border, for instance, but there was a nasty accident one day when he did this on the Arizona–New Mexico border and Eustace’s horse took off in a panic and threw him. Eustace wasn’t riding Hobo or Hasty that day, but was trying out a horse they’d purchased recently—Blackie, a strong and skittish mustang blend, which apparently had no liking for guns. When Judson shot off his pistol, the horse went ballistic, and Eustace landed on the top of his head on a rock and split his scalp. He was so badly hurt, he could barely see straight, and every step gave him a spasm, but he let the blood clot as a bandage and kept riding, because “What was I gonna do?
Not
continue on?”

This was no joy ride. They were not sashaying across America. They were burning up the miles, which meant they were tired all the time. They were hungry and hurting. They argued with one another. Sadly, the very opposite of what Eustace had wanted from this trip was happening. He had hoped to strengthen his relationship with Judson, but, instead, Judson was slipping farther and farther away from his hero-worshipping attitude toward his older brother. Judson wanted to have fun on this trip, and resented Eustace’s unyielding fixation on speed, which never allowed them time to stop and take in the surroundings.

“What can I say about Eustace?” Judson asked later. “He’s gotta be goddamn Ernest Shackleton all the time, set every world record, be the fastest this and the best that. He could never relax and have a good time. That’s not why Susan and I took the trip.”

The cross-country journey was turning into a vast canvas on which the differences between the Conway brothers were boldly highlighted. There was Eustace on one side—driven by his ancient mythological themes of heroes and destinies. And there beside him was Judson— driven by his desire to have a good time and armed with a thoroughly modern sensibility about the roles that people play in this world. It was this super self-conscious sensibility of Judson Conway’s (a sensibility, by the way, that he shares with pretty much every modern American except his brother) that enabled him to joke, “Hey, I’m a real cowboy now!” as he fired off his six-shooter. Judson was riding his horse across America because he knew that people used to do that kind of thing and because it was cool and fun to masquerade as an icon. Eustace was riding his horse across America because he wanted the icon to
live
. For Judson it was a delicious game; for Eustace, it was an acutely serious endeavor.

“Susan and I would’ve been happy to go at half the pace and have more time to hang out and smell the flowers,” Judson said.

“Just because I’m traveling fifty miles a day,” Eustace countered, “doesn’t mean I can’t smell the flowers. I’m smelling the goddamn flowers as I’m speeding by! And I’m smelling fifty miles more of ’em than other people. First of all, we needed the speed on this trip because of scheduling—Judson and Susan had to get back to their jobs, so we didn’t have forever to get to California. Also, I wanted to learn how much we were capable of. Both the horses and the riders. I wanted to push, to scrutinize, to challenge, to bend the realm of the possible. I wanted to put our limitations under a microscope and stare at them, understand them, and reject them. Look, it wasn’t important to me to be comfortable on this trip or to even have fun. When I have a goal, when I’m in the middle of a challenge like this, I don’t need the things other people need. I don’t need to sleep or eat or be warm or dry. I can live on nothing when I stop eating and sleeping.”

“That’s called dying, Eustace,” I said.

“No.” He grinned. “That’s called living.”

It’s hard to see where this urgency fits into Eustace’s more Zen-like philosophies of living in perfect harmony with the gentle rhythms of nature, about “being like water.” This journey was definitely not about being like water; it was about being a cross-country, cross-cutting buzzsaw. And the effect was not calming. Eustace’s partners could hardly stand his unremitting determination. Judson took to drinking whiskey every night on the trip as a way to soften the impact of his brother’s intensity.

“I know Eustace hated seeing me getting drunk and oblivious,” he said, “but it kept me sane.”

Eustace was relentless and his leadership was often oppressive, but he stands by all his decisions, even to this day. “People don’t understand— Judson and Susan didn’t understand—that it was no accident we covered all that distance without getting ourselves or our animals killed or seriously hurt. I know other people who’ve tried to ride a horse across America and got all messed up—horses injured, equipment stolen, mugged, beaten up, hit by cars. That didn’t happen to us, because I was fucking vigilant. I made about a thousand private decisions every day, each one narrowing the odds of hitting trouble. If I decided to cross the road, it was for a reason. If I could shift my horse slightly so that he walked on grass instead of gravel for just four steps, I’d do that, saving his legs four steps of impact.

“At the end of every day, when we were looking for campsites, my computer brain would kick in and evaluate each possibility, taking in about three dozen contingencies nobody else would have considered.
What kind of neighborhood is this meadow near? Is there an exit route behind
the meadow in case we need to make a quick move? Are there loose
wires on the ground that the horses could get tangled up in? Is there fresh
grass across the road that’s going to lure the horses to head over the
highway in the middle of the night and get hit? Will people see us from the
road and stop to ask what we’re up to and waste our energy when we need
to be caring for the horses?
Judson and Susan never saw this process. They kept saying, ‘How about this spot, Eustace? This looks like a nice place to camp.’ And I’d say, ‘Nope, nope, nope’ and not bother to explain why.”

Judson and Susan, already chafing under Eustace’s command, mutinied in Arizona. They literally came to a fork in the road. Judson and Susan wanted to veer off the highway and take a wilder route for the day, heading down into a rugged canyon for a shortcut that promised some serious all-terrain adventure. Eustace balked. He wanted to stay on the highway, a duller and less scenic ride that would put more miles on the horses, but considerably less impact. The Long Riders held a group meeting.

“It’s not safe,” Eustace said. “You don’t know what you’ll encounter down there. You could run into a canyon wall or an impassable river and have to backtrack ten miles, lose the whole day. You could get killed. You don’t have a map or any reliable information. You’re going to encounter loose rockslides and poor trails and dangerous creeks that will beat the hell out of your horses. Your animals are already pushed to the edge; it’s cruel to make this demand on them. It’s too dangerous a risk.”

“We’re tired of riding on the highway,” Judson complained. “We came on this trip because we wanted to see the country, and this is our chance to get back down into nature. We want to be more spontaneous, live closer to the edge.”

They took a vote and, of course, Judson and Susan won. Eustace wouldn’t budge. “I’m dead against it,” he said. “You can take the canyon trail if you want to, but I’m not coming.”

It was a devastating moment for Judson. They’d made a pact before setting out on the journey that democratic action would rule the day; if there was ever a dispute over the next move, majority opinion would rule. They would never split up over a disagreement, and now they were doing exactly that. On this heroic twenty-five-hundred-mile journey, there was to be one sad thirty-mile gap in the middle of the country where the inseparable partners separated because they could not reach a consensus.

“I thought we were supposed to be a team,” Judson said to his brother.