Authors: Elizabeth Gilbert
Tags: #Non-fiction
“I told him I wanted to go home. I was probably crying. I’m sure I was homesick, because I was just a kid. Eustace was calm and thoughtful. We sat in his truck and he talked about life and about what it takes to become a man. He imparted wisdom and kindness to me, taking me seriously at an age when nobody ever took me seriously. He told me that one of the reasons people are so unhappy is they don’t talk to themselves. He said you have to keep a conversation going with yourself throughout your life to see how you’re doing, to keep your focus, to remain your own friend. He told me that he talked to himself all the time, and that it helped him to grow stronger and better every day. He suggested some books I should read. Then he hugged me.”
Fifteen years later, Dave Reckford still couldn’t tell this part of the story without tears brimming up.
“Listen,” he said, “it was a real hug, long and strong. It was a bear hug. It was the first time I had ever been hugged by a man, and it seemed to cure something inside me that was lonely and hurt. He told me I was free to go home and he wished me luck. But he also told me I was free to come back and stay with him on Turtle Island any time I wanted to, because I had done a good job and because I was a good person. And I did go home, but when I got there, I found that something had changed in me. And the rest of my life was changed.”
Every man in Dave Reckford’s family is a lawyer, a doctor, a businessman, or a diplomat. That’s what is expected, the way of the family. It’s not Dave’s way, as it turns out. Dave is thirty years old now and has been roaming around, looking for his place. He’s studied history and music. He’s tried his hand at writing. He’s traveled to Cuba and Europe and across America and even joined the army, trying to find where he should place himself for his short time on earth.
Recently, he finally landed. He solved it. He asked the woman who tends to his parents’ gardens to take him on as her apprentice. She agreed. So now Dave Reckford has become what he believes he was intended to be: a gardener. He takes care of plants. He spends his days thinking about soil and light and growth. It’s a simple relationship, but he is rewarded by it. He tries to understand what plants need and how to help them. He tries to make his every movement careful and precise, to honor his work. He talks to himself all the time, keeping in contact with his personal essence. And every single day of his life he thinks about perfection of focus and about the singular grace of human labor.
Which means that, every single day of his life, he thinks about Eustace Conway.
You can’t fix it. You can’t make it go away.
I don’t know what you’re going to do about it,
but I know what I’m going to do about it. I’m just
going to walk away from it. Maybe
a small part of it will die if I’m not around
feeding it anymore.
—Lew Welch
T
he history of Eustace Conway is the history of man’s progress on the North American continent.
First, he slept on the ground and wore furs. He made fire with sticks and ate what he could hunt and gather. When he was hungry, he threw stones at birds and blew darts at rabbits and dug up roots from the ground, and so he survived. He wove baskets from the trees in his domain. He was a nomad; he moved on foot. Then he moved into a teepee and became a more sophisticated trapper of animals. He made fire with flint and steel. When he mastered that, he used matches. He began to wear wool. He moved out of the teepee and into a simple wooden structure. He became a farmer, clearing the land and cultivating a garden. He acquired livestock. He cut paths into the woods, which became trails and then roads. He improved the roads with bridges. He wore denim.
He was first an Indian, then an explorer, then a pioneer. He built himself a cabin and became a true settler. As a man of utopian vision, he now sustains himself with the hope that like-minded people will buy property around Turtle Island and raise their families as he will someday raise his. The neighbors will till their land with animal-drawn machinery and come to each other’s aid in the time of harvest and join each other for bursts of recreational dancing, and they will ride to each other’s homes on horseback and trade goods.
When all that happens, Eustace will have become a villager. That’s what he wants—to create a town. And when that is all firmly in place, he will build his dream home. He’ll move out of the cabin and into a large and expensive show house full of walk-in closets and appliances and family and
stuff
. And he will have finally caught up with his time. At that point, Eustace Conway will be the paradigm of a modern American man.
He evolves before our eyes. He improves and expands and improves and expands because he is so clever and so resourceful that he cannot help himself. He is not compelled to rest in the enjoyment of what he already knows how to do; he must keep moving on. He is unstoppable. And we are also unstoppable. We on this continent have always been unstoppable. We all progress, as de Tocqueville observed, “like a deluge of men, rising unabatedly, and driven daily onward by the hand of God.” We exhaust ourselves and everyone else. And we exhaust our resources— both natural and interior—and Eustace is only the clearest representation of our urgency.
I remember driving back to Turtle Island early one evening with him, after a visit to his grandfather’s old empire of Camp Sequoyah. We were almost home, passing through Boone, and stopped at an intersection. Eustace suddenly spun his head and asked, “Was that building there two days ago when we left for Asheville?”
He pointed at the skeleton of a small new office building. No, I hadn’t noticed it there two days earlier. But it looked almost finished. Only the windows needed to be popped in. A battalion of construction workers were leaving the site for the day.
“Couldn’t be,” Eustace said. “Can they really put up a building that fast?”
“I don’t know,” I said, thinking that, of all people, he ought to know. “I guess they can.”
He sighed. “This country . . .” he said.
But Eustace Conway
is
this country. And, that being the case, what remains? What remains after all this activity? That’s the question Walt Whitman once asked. He looked around at the galloping pace of American life and at the growth of industry and at the jaw-clenching rush of his countrymen’s ambitions and wondered, “After you have exhausted what there is in business, politics, conviviality, and so on—have found that none of these finally satisfy, or permanently wear—what remains?”
And, as ever, dear old Walt gave us the answer: “Nature remains.”
That’s what Eustace is left with, too. Although, like the rest of us (and this is his biggest irony), Eustace doesn’t have as much time as he wishes to celebrate the natural world.
As he told me one winter evening over the phone, “We had a snowstorm up at Turtle Island this week. A friend of mine came to visit and said, ‘Hey, Eustace, you’ve been working too hard. You should take a break and build a snowman. Ever think of that?’Well, hell, of course I’d already thought of that. All I had to do was take one step outside my door that morning to see that it was perfect snow for a snowman. I’d already visualized the snowman I would build, if I were to build one. I quickly analyzed the consistency of the snow and decided exactly where to put the snowman for best presentation, exactly how big it would be, and where in my blacksmith shop I could find charcoal for the eyes. I pictured every detail of the snowman right down to the carrot nose, which I had to think about for an instant:
Do we have
enough carrots to spare that I could use one for this snowman? And after
the snowman is over, could I get the carrot back and put it in a stew so
that it wouldn’t be wasted? Or would an animal get at the carrot first?
I ran through all this in about five seconds, estimated how much time it would take out of my busy day to build the snowman, I weighed that against how much pleasure building a snowman would bring me—and decided against it.”
More’s the pity, because he does enjoy being outside and he might have gotten more pleasure from the snowman than he was able to logically calculate. Because he does love nature, for all his commitments and obligations. He loves it all—the cosmic scope of the woods; the stipple of sunlight slanting down through a verdant natural awning; the loveliness of the words
locust, birch
, and
tulip poplar
. . . More than loving it, he needs it. As Eustace’s grandfather wrote, “When the mind is tired, or the soul is disquieted, let us go to the woods and fill our lungs with the rain-washed and the sun-cleansed air, and our hearts with the beauty of tree, flower, crystal, and gem.”
The best man that Eustace can be is the man he becomes when he is alone in the woods. That’s why I drag him out of his office whenever I come to Turtle Island and make him lead me on a walk. Even though he generally doesn’t have time for it, I make him do it, because we don’t get ten steps into the forest before he says, “That’s bee balm. You can make a straw out of its hollow stem and suck moisture up from pebbles in streams where it might be too shallow to drink.”
Or, “That’s Turk’s Cap, a flower that looks a lot like a tiger lily, only more exotic. It’s extremely rare. I doubt there are five of these plants on all thousand acres of Turtle Island.”
Or, when I complain about my poison ivy, he takes me down to the river and says, “Come join me in my pharmacy.” He pulls up some jewelweed, and opens it to the ointment inside, spreads it on my bumpy wrist, and suddenly everything feels better.
I love Eustace in the woods because he loves himself in the woods. It’s that easy. Which is why, one day when we were walking, I said to him out of the blue,“Permission to introduce a revolutionary new concept, sir?”
Eustace laughed. “Permission granted.”
“Have you ever wondered,” I asked, “if you might benefit the world more by actually living the life you always talk about? I mean, isn’t that what we’re all here for? Aren’t we each supposed to try to live the most enlightened and honest life we can? And when our actions contradict our values, don’t we just fuck everything up even more?”
I paused here and waited to get punched. But Eustace said nothing, so I continued.
“You’re always telling us how happy we could be if we lived in the woods. But when people come up here to live with you, what they end up seeing is your stress and frustration at having so many people around and being overwhelmed with responsibilities. So of course they don’t absorb the lesson, Eustace. They hear your message but they can’t
feel
your message, and that’s why it doesn’t work. Do you ever wonder about that?”
“I wonder about it constantly!” Eustace exploded. “I’m totally fucking aware of that! Whenever I go into schools to teach, I tell people, ‘Look, I am not the only person left in this country who tries to live a natural life in the woods, but you’re never going to meet all those other guys because they aren’t
available
.’Well, I am available. That’s the difference with me. I’ve always made myself available, even when it compromises the way I want to live. When I go out in public, I deliberately try to present myself as this wild guy who just came down off the mountain, and I’m aware that it’s largely an act. I know I’m a showman. I know I present people with an image of how I
wish
I were living. But what else can I do? I have to put on that act for the benefit of the people.”
“I’m not so sure it’s benefiting us, Eustace.”
“But if I lived the quiet and simple life I want, then who would witness it? Who would be inspired to change? Only my neighbors would see me. I’d influence about forty people, when I want to influence about four hundred thousand people. You see the dilemma? You see my struggle? What am I supposed to do?”
“How about trying to live in peace for once?”
“But what does that
mean
?” Eustace was roaring now, laughing and totally losing it. “What does that fucking
mean
?”
Of course, that’s not my question to answer. All I can tell with any certainty is when the man
appears
to be most at peace. And that usually isn’t when he’s firing apprentices or spending six straight hours on the telephone haggling with tax lawyers, school boards, newspaper reporters, and insurance companies. When he appears to be most at peace is when he is experiencing the closest and most personal liaison with the wilderness. When he is right inside nature’s stupefying theater, he is closest to happy. When he is—as much as is humanly achievable in our modern age—living in communion with whatever is left of our frontier, he gets there.
Sometimes I’m lucky enough to have a glimpse into that best part of Eustace Conway in the most unlikely instances. Sometimes the moment just finds him. There was this one evening when we were driving back from Asheville, trucking along in silence. Eustace was in a quiet mood, and we were listening to old-time Appalachian music, taking in the sad twang of hard men who had lost their farms and hard women whose husbands had gone down into the coal mines and never returned. It was drizzling rain, and as we moved from superhighway to freeway to two-lane macadam to the dirt road of his mountain, the rain lightened up, even as the sun was going down. We bounced and trundled up toward Turtle Island under the gloom of steep, overgrown hollers.
Quite suddenly, a family of deer leaped out of the woods and onto the road before us. Eustace hit the brakes. The doe and her fawns skitted sideways into the darkness, but the buck stayed, staring into our headlights. Eustace honked. The buck stood. Eustace jumped out of the truck and let out a loud whoop into the damp night, to chase the buck back into the woods, but the buck stood where it was.
“You’re beautiful, brother!” Eustace shouted at the deer.
The buck regarded him. Eustace laughed. He made fists and shook them wildly in the air. He whooped and howled like an animal. Again, Eustace shouted to the buck, “You’re beautiful! You rule!
You da bomb!”
Eustace laughed. Still the buck held his ground, unmoving.
And then Eustace, too, stopped moving—enchanted into a temporary paralysis. For a long while he stood as stock still and silent as I’d ever seen him, barely illuminated by the spilled bath of his shadowy headlights, staring at that buck. Nobody budged or breathed. In the end, it was Eustace who broke first, throwing his fists up into the air again and shouting out into the night with all the voice he could summon:
“I love you! You’re beautiful! I love you! I love you! I love you!”