The Complete Elizabeth Gilbert: Eat, Pray, Love; Committed; The Last American Man; Stern Men & Pilgrims (99 page)

Until August 29, 1911, that is. On that day, right in the middle of an age of railroads and telephones, Ishi, a healthy native in his fifties, wandered down to a ranch valley in Oroville, California. He was naked, and his hair was burned off, to symbolize mourning. He had been hiding in the canyons since childhood with a sister and a grandmother, and now that they had both passed away, he, overcome with grief and loneliness, had taken a long journey on foot, ready to travel “into the next world.” Which is where he ended up. He was a Stone Age man who had walked right into modern industrial America. It took researchers and ethnographers weeks to figure out who Ishi was and to piece together a language by which to communicate with him. They found him, of course, to be a priceless vault of anthropological information. He taught them language, myths, and hunting techniques (including a form of archery that had previously been observed only in Mongolia). The anthropologists who studied Ishi ended up bringing him to their museum, where he worked as a janitor.

“This man,” Eustace said in disbelief, “with his unbelievably articulate ability to live in the wilderness, was pushing a broom all day.”

Ishi also made arrowheads for visitors, who would come to see him on display at the museum once a week. He learned to speak some English, took to wearing trousers, saw vaudeville acts, rode trains, and died of tuberculosis within the decade.

“I swear to God I feel like Ishi sometimes,” Eustace said. “Completely different from everyone else in this world, the last of my kind, stranded. Just trying to communicate. Trying to teach people something. But constantly misunderstood.”

Eustace had run into this understanding-deficit throughout his horse journeys. He met young people who were vegetarian environmentalists and were upset to see him dressed in animal skins or to learn that he hunted for food. He reached the point where he no longer had the energy to explain how much more destructive to the environment their synthetic-fleece clothing was, seeing that it was made of nonret newable material produced in polluting and resource-gobbling factories. Or that they didn’t know where their food came from, or how the earth suffered from its manufacture and packaging. And then there were the animal rights people, who objected to the cruelty they perceived in watching Eustace push his horses so hard.

“There were people out there who owned fat horses, horses that were nothing but pasture potatoes,” Eustace observed, “and they had never seen a horse that was truly in shape before they saw mine. My horses are lean, long-muscled, skinny, capable animals that have worked and traveled their whole lives. These are athletes built for the long haul. That’s what horses were made to be. Nobody takes better care of animals than I do. But I heard people say, ‘You aren’t feeding those ponies enough!’ and it made me angry. I wanted to say, ‘Listen, people. I’m feeding my horses so goddamn much food it would flat-out
kill
your lazy old horse stuck in your stupid little pasture.’ But my horses were lean because they were burning it off.”

The most upsetting incident occurred in Gillette, Wyoming. Eustace and Patience and their horses had just finished a 51-mile day. They hitched the buggy to the rail of a dusty saloon that looked like a movie set and went inside for a burger. On their way out of town, an old cowboy swung by and took a look at Eustace’s best horse, Hasty, his trusted Morgan, who, fed and watered, was resting with his head down. The cowboy said, “That horse ain’t got no heart. I’ve been around horses my whole life, and I can tell you that animal has one foot in the grave. You better pull him out and give him up.”

Eustace didn’t say a word. He didn’t tell the cowboy that Hasty had traveled thousands of miles in his life. He didn’t say that Hasty had once kept a 45-beat-per-minute heart rate after trotting fourteen miles—lower than the pulse rate of most horses at rest. Wasn’t even breathing hard. He didn’t mention that Hasty would cover nearly 450 miles in the next eight days. Or that Eustace Conway wouldn’t trade that horse for a million dollars.

“Hasty was just a bay,” Eustace told me. “Brown horse with a black mane and tail. He was the most common-looking horse you ever saw, but he was a hero. People had no idea what I was sitting on with that horse. That cowboy said Hasty didn’t have any heart; I’m telling you this horse was nothing
but
heart. Hasty was my champion, and he loved to go. We experienced adventures together that this cowboy couldn’t even have imagined, and we understood each other. We pushed each other to go as far and as fast as we could, and Hasty loved it. I’m telling you, that horse hasn’t even found his limits yet. And I never met anyone who understands what that means.”

There’s a guy down in Kentucky who is (because somebody has to be) the world’s foremost authority on the history of long-distance equestrian travel. His name is CuChullaine O’Reilly, and he owns the world’s largest collection of books on equestrian adventure. He himself has ridden horses on five epic journeys across Central Asia, including one trip to the Himalayan Mountains, where one of his horses died and was eaten by the locals.

“You gotta put Eustace Conway in context,” says CuChullaine O’Reilly, who actually can. “I know my stuff, and let me tell you that this guy is the real deal. Because how many people in this country keep horses? Hundreds of thousands, right? And how many of them have ridden their horses more than fifty miles away from a barn? Nobody. Because it’s terrifying to put yourself and your animal out there in the world with no security. I know all about this.

“Look, the distances Eustace has traveled aren’t in themselves remarkable. I know a couple who’ve gone over eighteen thousand miles on horseback. I know a guy from Maine who went for a fourteen-thousand-mile ride a few years ago. So crossing the country is not in itself a big deal. What’s extraordinary is that Eustace did it in 103 days. Unbelievable. That’s the fastest anyone has traveled long distance on horseback in at least twenty-five years, probably longer. The fact that Eustace did it without having been a real horseman before is astonishing. He used his wilderness skills and audacity and intelligence, and he made this journey virtually free of mistakes. And the buggy journey? To turn around and master buggies so fast? It’s mind-boggling. There are only a few people who are Eustace’s peers in horsemanship, and they are all lifelong horsemen who do nothing else. They do their research for two years before a long journey, and then they get sponsors and bring along private veterinarians and lots and lots of money. And they make lots of mistakes he didn’t make.”

There are three factors, according to CuChullaine O’Reilly, that a man needs in order to be a brilliant endurance rider: courage, resolve, and romance. Eustace has all these, in spades. And something else, too. He has a kind of preternatural gift. To CuChullaine O’Reilly, Eustace Conway’s crossing the country in 103 days was an accomplishment as exciting as an untrained Iowa farm boy stepping up to a footrace and casually breaking a four-minute mile. You can’t just
do
that. But Eustace did.

In this regard, and in terms of pure and authentic character value, CuChullaine O’Reilly finds Eustace comparable only to one other person, the Alaskan wildman Eugene Glasscock. Eugene Glasscock is a bearded and hard-boiled recluse (“Mr. Mountain,” he’s called at home) who got a wild hair one day back in the 1980s and decided to ride his horse from the Arctic Circle down to the Equator. Wearing, of course, handmade buckskins. The crazy freak. He barely made it alive through the Yukon and Rockies, and he was attacked by machete-wielding bandits in Mexico, and he had to swim beside his horse across some raging rivers down in Guatemala. He liked the jungle, though. That’s why Mr. Mountain still lives down there in Central America, someplace totally off the map. Too bad he’s difficult to get in touch with, says CuChullaine O’Reilly, because it’d sure be fun to get Eugene Glasscock and Eustace Conway together for a weekend “so that they could go off and tell stories and get drunk and eat some possums.”

“Nobody can understand Eustace,” he says. “Because what you get when a modern-day American encounters Eustace Conway and his horse is the twenty-first century running head-on into a six-thousand-year-old nomadic tradition that regular people cannot understand. They are so removed from that episode of their humanity that it is foreign to them. They have no idea what trans-species communication is. They don’t understand that Eustace uses his horsemanship not as a prestige gimmick or as a means of winning blue ribbons or collecting rodeo belt buckles, but as a way to become bonded to another animal so that together they pass through curtain after curtain of incomprehensible and invisible experience until they reach the indescribable other side.”

But there’s one other thing that the world’s foremost expert on equestrian endurance travel believes about Eustace Conway. He says there’s still more to come from Eustace. He thinks Eustace hasn’t even begun to show us what he can do. He thinks Eustace has the capacity for “some real Jason and the Argonauts type of superhuman adventure. Maybe.”

Why only
maybe
?

“Because,” he explains, “I think he’s reached a plateau in his life. He’s pushed himself as far as he can go using his charisma and courage, and now he needs to go on a spiritual journey. He needs to do something that is private. He’s postured himself in public for so many years that he doesn’t know himself. There are parts of his soul he can’t begin to understand, and until he learns these things about himself, he’ll never be the nomad he’s meant to be. He’s a brave man, but he’s not a spiritual pilgrim yet. Until he goes out in the world, all alone, and cuts away the ropes and publicity and ego and bullshit and does something truly heroic, he’s just blowing smoke up his own ass. And I’ll tell you another thing. He’s no goddamn farmer, and he should quit trying to be one. That’s not his nature. He needs to get away from all that. He should stop trying to save the world. Because until he stops living in his grandfather’s shadow and pretending that he likes digging holes in the ground and planting vegetables on that goddamn farm, he will never be Jason of the Argonauts.”

Adds CuChullaine O’Reilly, “But that’s just my opinion.”

CHAPTER EIGHT

I alone comprehend the true plan and the means of fulfilling it.

—Charles Fourier, Utopian

E
ustace Conway’s grandfather founded Camp Sequoyah in 1924 and ran his domain with an exacting command until the moment of his death, by heart attack, when he was eighty. He died in the harness, as they say, never slowing his stride. And he hadn’t named a successor to his legacy. After his funeral, it was revealed that there was no plan for the camp to continue without him. While Chief always had a large staff working for him, he didn’t trust anyone enough to turn over the management of the operation, never having found anyone he believed capable of running his beloved Sequoyah—his “Camp With a Purpose” where “the Weak Become Strong and the Strong Become Great”—up to his rigorous standards.

When campers and staff arrived at Camp Sequoyah for the summer, Chief took over every aspect of their lives. He dictated how they would dress, when they’d exercise, when they would pray, and what they would eat. One counselor remembers the day Chief Johnson took him into his office and spent a full hour delivering a lecture on how best to sweep a room. Another counselor once got a lecture on how best to use a paperclip. (“The big loop goes to the back of the document; the small loop to the front.”) Naturally, Chief prohibited tobacco, cursing, and alcohol from his property. But he also strictly forbade Coca-Cola, vinegar, pepper, and denim. There was a rumor that Chief even put saltpeter in the applesauce to “curb desire” and keep his boys away from the temptations of self-abuse. (“We
did
eat an awful lot of applesauce,” said one old Sequoyan when I brought it up.) Hair was not to touch ears. Campers were to wear pressed white shirts on Sundays. Camp nurses, the only females on the workforce, were to be matronly and plain so as not to cause sexual disturbance by their presence. Staff members were to be graded throughout the summer on their physical and social progress, with extra credit given for such traits as Loyalty, Readiness to Shoulder Responsibility, and Personal Magnetism.

He was uncompromising. He did not hand out praise. Nobody was ever good enough for Chief. Nobody worked harder or more efficiently than Chief. He carved that camp from virgin wilderness, creating it with his own strength and genius. He had suffered through the first winters up at Sequoyah in a log cabin, had defined every philosophical notion that made the camp unique, had built its every structure, and had kept the operation alive (and thriving) throughout the hard times of the Great Depression and World War II. So who was going to tell Chief Johnson how anything was done? Nobody. As his grandson Eustace would complain fifty years later in his journal about the lackluster employees of his own empire, Turtle Island, “I have worked hard to make this place what it is. What have
they
done? How can
they
respect it? What investment have
they
made in anything that is a serious challenge? How can I put up with them?”

Well, you can put up with them by assuming absolute power over them, body and soul. That’s what Chief did. Chief had a series of “talks” he delivered to the campers at different points of their stay, based on their ages. Included were discussions of God and Nature and Honesty and Courage and How to Become a Man of Destiny, and also warnings about Masturbation and Dating. He spoke to the boys about “The Effect of a Rational Sex Life Upon Marriage and Offspring” (Talk #5) and about “Venereal Disease” (Talk #6). When his boys left Camp Sequoyah, Chief stayed in touch with them—with the many thousands of them—sending them motivational messages every Christmas, as well as sending out his own earnest pamphlets, which he mailed off at key moments of their lives:

A Letter to Boys About to Leave Home for Preparatory School

A Letter to Young Men About to Enter College

A Letter to Young Men on the Occasion of Their Twenty-first Birthday

A Letter to Young Men About to Get Married

A Letter to Young Men Who Have Just Become Fathers

Every boy was Chief’s son. And his boys went on to become doctors, judges, teachers, soldiers—the stalwart backbone of the American South for decades. Every one of their achievements was his achievement. One woman wrote Chief a letter back in the 1950s assuring him that her son, a former Sequoyan, had passed through two years of the Navy without appearing to have acquired any “of the bad habits for which sailors are sometimes known. I feel that the vision he caught at Sequoyah has been and will continue to be a shining guiding light along his way.”

Every boy was Chief’s son, yes. But he also had two flesh-and-blood sons of his own, Harold and Bill Johnson, the brothers of Eustace Conway’s mother, Karen.

“The youth of each generation should be aware of the role some of them will be privileged to play in the progress of man toward a Higher Destiny,” Chief wrote, and no youths had this responsibility thrust upon them harder than Chief’s sons. And yet Harold and Bill, perhaps we should not be surprised to learn, both went completely ballistic on their dad. They were smoking and drinking by the age of fifteen. Alternatively sullen and willful. Shooting off guns and racing cars. Disobedient and indignant.

“They were just the opposite,” recalled one old Sequoyan, “of what Chief desperately wanted in a son. He had always envisioned them to be the ideal boys.”

Chief could make no sense of why his sons had gone wrong. Maybe it was the mother’s fault. Mrs. Chief, as she was forever known, was always confounding her husband by not being as rigorous a disciplinarian as he would have liked. But what could you expect? Mrs. Chief was not her husband’s doctrinarian equal. She was a gifted pianist and a college graduate and a frustrated urban sophisticate who was emotional and unpredictable and often resentful about spending her life in the woods with thousands of boys. She had, it was always said with great delicacy, “an artistic temperament.” Unlike her husband, who kept a logical hold on the more animalistic aspects of human nature, Mrs. Chief was known to sometimes scream her head off in fits of frustration and anger. She was also known to sneak away sometimes to play sexy and rollicking ragtime tunes on the piano when her husband was out of earshot. She probably liked pepper, too.

So maybe what happened to the sons was Mrs. Chief’s fault. That’s what Chief probably figured. Both boys busted out of that house the first chance they got. It was Harold, Chief’s firstborn, who caused his father the most trouble.
Canst thou not beg?
No, Harold Johnson could not beg and could not submit to his father, not from day one. And he couldn’t stand it at home. As Harold’s nephew Eustace wrote in his adolescent diary decades later: “While it would be a dumb thing to run away, I think I would be happier anywhere in the woods if I could only get away. If I do leave, I will try my best not to come back, even if I am starving. Anything is better than this.”

Harold ran away to Alaska when he was seventeen. Like generations of American boys before him, he headed to the frontier to get out from under the authority of the old man. He could not be in the same house with his father. They had no means of dialogue. His father would never praise Harold, never let up on him, never give him an inch of space within which to move or grow. But Harold wanted to be a big man, and it came to pass that there was not room in this town for the two of them. Harold had to go.

He’d read some Jack London and got an itch. By the time he made it to Seward, he had only fifty cents in his pocket. He was hungry, scared, and alone, but he damn sure wasn’t going back to Camp Sequoyah. He found work on a road crew. Then he got himself a motorcycle and went to school to learn how to repair engines. And then, on the brink of World War II, he enlisted in the Marines (much to the horror of his father, who had been a committed pacifist ever since witnessing the carnage in the trenches in France). Harold was stationed in Hawaii, where he taught jungle survival to Air Force pilots. After the war, he refused to move back South and founded one business after another up in Alaska—an ice cream shop, a boat dealership, a mail-order color slide developing operation. Then he built and sold generator sets, a lucrative scheme in a state that still had no power grid. Then he set up a diesel engine business and became a millionaire. He was six feet five, strong, and dashing. And was always known as a charming, magnetic, big, controlling, and powerful man who worked endless hours, had a genius for self-promotion, and did not easily give praise or welcome the opinions of others.

When Chief Johnson died at the age of eighty, there was nobody to take over Camp Sequoyah. Neither of Chief’s sons wanted to run the camp. Harold hated the South and had his own empire to manage up in Alaska. Bill, the younger and more troubled child, had become a real estate developer, of all heretical things. It was his wish to sell off some of the beautiful forested dynasty of Camp Sequoyah, which his father had preserved over so many decades, for housing and lumber.

Something crucial must be noted here about the Johnson family. What seems never to have been discussed was the possibility that Chief’s daughter might take over the camp. Despite Karen’s deep commitment to her father’s vision and her competence in the wilderness, she was never considered a candidate for leadership. Not seen as strong enough, perhaps. But Karen’s husband very much wanted to run that camp, was dying for the chance. And we know, of course, that her husband was Eustace Robinson Conway III.

That was Big Eustace, who had come to Camp Sequoyah after MIT to work with children and to live in nature. One of Chief’s star counselors, brilliant, energetic, dedicated, and physically adept, Big Eustace loved the wilderness, held the camp’s endurance hiking record, and was a gifted teacher and a patient leader of boys. He was adored at Camp Sequoyah. (I went to a Camp Sequoyah reunion once and met there a number of grown men who said, when I mentioned Eustace Conway, “Is he here? My God, I would give anything to see him again! He was the best nature educator I ever had! I worshipped him!” It took me some time to do the math and estimate the ages and realize that these old guys were talking about my Eustace’s
father
.) With his calculating intellect and passion for nature, Big Eustace believed he had the brains and the spirit to take over Sequoyah one day. And, as he freely admitted to me, he married Karen Johnson “halfway because of the person that she was and halfway to get my hands on that camp of her father’s.”

The fact is, he would have been great at running the place. As one old Sequoyan remembered, Big Eustace was “as straight-laced, as dedicated, and as competent as Chief himself. We all assumed he’d take over the camp one day. He was the closest thing we ever saw to someone with the capacity to keep it running up to Chief’s standards.” But when Chief died, he left no such word in his will. And Harold and Bill declared that they would fight to the death to keep the camp out of their brother-in-law’s control. They hated their sister’s husband. They hated him for his intellectual arrogance and his dismissiveness of them. They thought him an opportunist and wouldn’t let him near the place.

So the camp floundered through years of substandard management, run by lesser men from outside the family. As for Big Eustace, he gave up his dreams of becoming a nature educator and worked as an engineer at a chemical plant. Living in a box, working in a box, driving from box to box in a box with wheels. He never again set foot near Sequoyah. And when Little Eustace turned out to be a willful and wild boy who preferred the woods to school, Big Eustace would regularly attack him with the accusation that he was “irregular, abnormal, stubborn, and impossible, just like your Johnson uncles.”

The camp finally withered to nothingness. The solid handmade log cabins lay empty. When the camp was finally abandoned in the 1970s, Little Eustace Conway was a teenager. He was already a skilled woodsman and a fierce leader, the one who had every kid in his neighborhood working on regulated shifts around the clock to tend to his extensive personal turtle collection.

“I want Camp Sequoyah,” Little Eustace said. “Give it to me! Let me run it! I know I could do it!”

Of course nobody listened to him. He was just a kid.

Summer, 1999.

When Eustace Conway returned to his thousand acres of Turtle Island after his adventures crossing America on horseback and in buggies, he found his paradise to be, well, a mess.

There was a lot more to Turtle Island after years of Eustace’s improvements and developments; the place was no longer a rugged nature preserve but a highly organized and highly functional primitive farm. It was dotted with buildings, all of which Eustace had built in various traditional styles. There was his private passive solar office, yes. But he’d also built several public structures, including a comfortable bunkhouse for visitors called “Everybody’s,” the design of which he borrowed from a neighbor’s traditional barn.

He’d built a handsome toolshed, crafted perfectly in line with the buildings of Daniel Boone’s era, what with its hand-split oak door and handmade hinges and chinks filled with manure and clay. He based this design on buildings he’d seen at historic sites. And a hog pen of half-dovetailed logs, notched in the traditional Appalachian style. And a chicken house with a foundation of stone sunk nine inches into the ground to keep predators from digging in and stealing eggs. And a corn crib with nice pungeon floors and, although “a hundred years from now, someone might wish I hadn’t used pine, so be it. I needed to get the job done.” He’d built a blacksmith shop of locust and oak, right on the site of a blacksmith shop that stood there two hundred years ago, when what is now Turtle Island was the only thoroughfare for this whole section of the Appalachian Mountains. He used the stones of the original building to make forges, where he now does all his own smithing. He’d created an outdoor kitchen. And, over the course of a summer, with a team of dozens of young people who’d never worked construction before, he’d crafted a forty-foot-tall locust and pine and poplar barn, put together without a single sawn board, containing sixty-foot-long beams and boasting a cantilevered roof, six horse stalls, and thousands of hand-split shingles.