Authors: Elizabeth Gilbert
Tags: #Non-fiction
“It was an exciting time,” Valarie remembers now, “those first two years up at Turtle Island. Eustace lived with me in my nice suburban house in Georgia for a while, getting his speaking arrangements together and trying to pay his father back. I acted as his agent, getting him booked all over the state. And eventually I quit my good job and sold my good house and moved up to Turtle Island. I was following my bliss. That’s where I wanted to be. We worked hard to get the place going. I helped him with the first building up there, a toolshed, because the most important thing for Eustace was a place where he could gather the tools he’d need to create the rest of his vision. We lived in a teepee, and I cooked our meals on an old woodstove every day, but I was happy to be living this way because I wanted to learn those skills. I believed in what we were doing. I believed in what we were teaching. I was on a spiritual mission of my own, and mine paralleled his.”
The way they lived was a nightmare and a comedy. Eustace was on the road so much of the time, he’d have to carry every piece of paper, every check, calendar, and pile of mail in an old leather satchel. They kept files of school addresses and fliers in boxes in the teepee, which would get soaked in the rain and then eaten by mice, mold, and grubs. They had no phone. One time, Eustace walked down the holler to ask one of his neighbors, old Lonnie Carlton, if he could borrow his phone to make some long-distance business calls and pay him back later. For an old Appalachian farmer like Lonnie, a long-distance phone call was maybe a once-a-year event, probably having to do with a death in the family and certainly never lasting more than two minutes. Well, Eustace got on that phone and talked to school principals and Boy Scout leaders and newspaper reporters all over the South for six straight hours. Old Lonnie just sat there watching him the entire time, slack-jawed.
When it became obvious that he’d need a phone of his own, Eustace ran a phone line from a neighbor’s house up into a nearby cave, which became his office. He would hike down the mountain and climb into that cave at night during the winter and do what he remembers as “some pretty slick little business deals,” networking and taking notes and lighting his work all the while with a crackling fire. Later, he got permission to run a phone line into a pole barn that belonged to his neighbor Will Hicks. Valarie put the phone in a Styrofoam cooler so that it wouldn’t rust out from moisture. She remembers making business calls and negotiating hard-line fees for speaking engagements up there in the hayloft while the cows were mooing below her.
“Guys on the other end would ask, ‘What’s that noise I keep hearing?’ and I’d say, ‘Oh, it’s just the television going in the other room.’ I’m telling you, it was a real ‘Green Acres’ arrangement we had going there. Then the phone got wet and ruined. I tried to dry it out by putting it in the warm woodstove. Of course, it melted all over the place, like some kind of Salvador Dali deal. That’s the way we lived.”
Something was going to have to change. One night Eustace took Valarie out for a nice dinner down in Boone at the Red Onion Café, to treat her for all the work she’d been doing. And over dinner he sketched out designs on napkins for the office building he had decided they needed. Recognizing that he had a forty-day break—a rare repose— from speaking engagements, he figured over dinner that he’d build the office during that little window of time. Otherwise, it would never happen. So the next morning, before daylight, Eustace started working on it.
The building would be passive solar, twenty square feet, and made of cinderblock, glass, and rough-hewn lumber. Eustace didn’t know exactly how to erect a solar building and had never built anything more sophisticated than a toolshed, but he was damn sure he could do this. He selected a good sunny spot close to the entrance of Turtle Island so that the office could serve as a welcome station and be far away from the more primitive center of camp, which was to be deeper into the woods. He dug three sides of the building down into the earth, to help contain the heat, and Valarie helped him lay a brick floor to absorb energy from the sun. The entrance was a set of handsome French doors Eustace had picked up at a flea market for five dollars. The door handles, he rebuilt from deer antlers. He placed large windows in the front of the office and set skylights, all salvaged from junkyards, into the roof for light and heat.
The front of the roof, which people can see, is covered in hand-split shingles, for aesthetic value. But the back of the roof is practical and tin. The interior walls are paneled with two-foot-wide planks of weathered white pine, which Eustace rescued from an abandoned old barn, and which give the room warmth and depth. He built two large desks from the rest of the barn planks and also built sturdy bookshelves that function as a wall, dividing the office into two separate and sunny workspaces. On the floor is an antique rug he found at a Navajo auction. High shelves along the tops of the walls hold rare baskets and pottery, including one ancient pueblo pot Eustace had noticed on the porch of an old house in Raleigh one afternoon. Immediately recognizing its worth, he offered the owner of the home twenty dollars for the piece. “Sure,” the lady of the house said. “Take it. I get tired of sweeping around that old thing.” Later, Eustace sent a photograph of the pot to an expert at Sotheby’s, who estimated its value at several thousand dollars.
It’s a lovely building, the Turtle Island office. Beautiful art and books are everywhere inside, and all around the outside grow Eustace’s wildflowers—iris, Indian paintbrush, and ladyslipper. It’s a warm, organic, welcoming, fully efficient passive solar structure, with its own telephone and answering machine. And Eustace designed, built, decorated, and landscaped the entire thing in forty days.
By now, Eustace was getting a reputation across the mountain range for being quite a little busybody. For instance, he bought his lumber from an old Appalachian mountain man named Taft Broyhill, who owned a sawmill. Eustace would work all day on the building and then work into the night, too, by the headlights of his truck. When he needed more lumber, he’d drive over to the next mountain and visit Taft Broyhill’s mill around midnight, wake the old farmer up, and deal with him right there in the wee hours, so as not to waste perfectly good daylight time conducting commerce. Then he’d head back to Turtle Island, sleep for three or four hours, and start working on the building again long before dawn.
One night when he drove over to Taft Broyhill’s place around midnight, he was accompanied by a friend who had come to help Eustace out for a few days. While the old man was piling up the lumber, Eustace noticed in a heap of scrap wood a gorgeous hickory log, far too nice a piece of wood to saw into lumber. He asked if he could buy that hunk of hickory, and would Mr. Broyhill mind sawing it down to some manageable lengths for him.
“Well, what do you want it for?” the old man asked.
“Why, sir,” Eustace explained, “I was just thinking to myself how nice it would be to use that solid hickory for carving tool handles and such.”
The old man obligingly started up his chain saw and, in the headlights of Eustace’s truck at midnight in the falling snow, began cutting up the hickory log. Suddenly he stopped, turned off his chain saw, and stood up. He stared for a while at Eustace and his friend. Eustace, wondering what was wrong, waited for Taft Broyhill to speak.
“You know,” the old man finally drawled, “I was just wonderin’— what do you boys do in your
spare
time?”
Eustace was killing himself with work. The minute the office was finished he was back on the road, making money by preaching about the bliss of primitive living and the wisdom of the Native Americans and the comforts of “the simple life.” He was bolting in a frenzy from state to state, trying to convince people to give up the rat race and bask in warm communion with nature. It was a brutal existence. One friend even bought him a radar detector so that he’d stop getting speeding tickets on his endless driving sprints to shows. And by February of 1988, Eustace seemed to be looking over the precipice into a chasm of madness when he wrote:
“Long run, the big trip, this endeavor to accomplish what I am doing now, a poor boy paying for a large tract of land. So much goes into it, every day I work, trying so hard, and even today—a day without a class or lecture—I spent 12 hours doing paperwork, responding and soliciting and getting more work, more more more MORE piled on. I can take it, like an enthusiastic weightlifter in hot adrenaline—I am working even in my sleep—work-sleep, I call it—giving up time for love with Valarie, giving up time to pick the flowers . . . Atlanta, then Augusta, working in Toccoa and then Clarksville—prostitution of my time to hundreds of people—day after day pounding on stage, on stage, on stage YEELLLLING!
“I live on stage power and energy flowing, pulling it together . . . sleep 7 minutes, then get up—drive—be great. You are the best! They are on your strings like a puppet to be worked, controlled, listened to, and told—back and forth . . . ah, but the lack of understanding! Don’t you know I need rest? Don’t you know I need air? I need to breathe, damn it! Leave me alone, you stupid bastards! Can’t you see? You stupid people, can’t you understand?
That is the best program I have ever seen,
you really did good!
I have heard it so many times, it’s like subsisting on cardboard. What the hell. I get my land. I have a quiet nature preserve to sleep in someday at the end of a long tunnel—what a dichotomy . . . How much will I let others in? Oh, my good people of the world, I LOVE YOU—give me strength, Lord, to do my trek. Someday I will find the soft ferns and sunshine to lie down in and rest. Peace.”
And at the end of a similar rant in his journal a few weeks later, Eustace added, “Not to mention trying to figure out if I want Valarie to be my mate for life.”
In the summer of 1989, Eustace had his first campers at Turtle Island.
Turtle Island was no longer an idea—it was an institution. Eustace had got himself brochures, business cards, insurance plans, first-aid kits, not-for-profit status. It was real. And the kids loved it, every year. Instead of having parents drive the campers up the mountain to the makeshift parking lot, Eustace had his staff meet the families down on the road and then hike in to Turtle Island. If the parents couldn’t make the hike? Well, too bad.
Say your goodbyes down here, folks
. This way, the kids would come into the fertile valley of Turtle Island through the woods, on foot, entering the kingdom as though through a sacred and secret door. The woods would finally open into the sunny meadows of the camp, and there would be this marvelous new-old world, different from anything these kids had ever known. No electricity, no running water, no traffic, no
commerce
.
And when they arrived, Eustace Conway was there to meet them, wearing his buckskin and his calmest smile. Over the course of the summer, he taught the children to eat foods they had never known, to sharpen and use knives, to carve their own spoons, to make knots and play Indian games and—every time they cut a branch off a living tree— to cut away a small lock of their own hair, to leave as an offering of thanks. He taught them to be respectful of one another and of nature. He worked to heal what he considered the spiritual damage inflicted on them by modern American culture. He’d be walking in the woods with a group of kids, for instance, and come on a patch of sweet briar. He’d no sooner tell the children how delicious the leaves tasted than they’d swarm on the plant like locusts, ripping off handfuls of branches.
“No,” Eustace would say.“Don’t destroy the entire plant! Be considerate of limited resources. Take one leaf, nibble a little bit of it, pass it around. Remember that the whole world isn’t here for you to consume and destroy. Remember that you aren’t the last person who will walk through these woods. Or the last person who will live on this planet. You’ve got to leave something behind.”
He even taught them how to pray. After the campers woke at dawn, Eustace would lead them up to the very same hill where he had prayed with his pipe the first winter he’d slept at Turtle Island. They called the place “sunrise hill,” and they would sit in silence, watching the sun come up, all of them meditating on the day. He took them on hikes to waterfalls and to ponds, and he bought an old horse for them to ride around. He taught them how to catch and eat crawdads from the stream and how to set traps for small game.
If a child said, “I don’t want to kill a defenseless animal,” Eustace would smile and explain, “I’ll tell you a little secret, my friend. You’ll never find in all of nature such a thing as a ‘defenseless’ animal. Except maybe some human beings I’ve known.”
He finally had his place, a place where he could teach in an interactive and twenty-four-hour environment, with no distractions and no limits on his time or resources. Everything he wanted to show his students was right on hand. It was as if they were living inside an encyclopedia.
On a nature walk he might say, “That mushroom right there is lacteria. You have to be very careful with this species, though, because there are four mushrooms in the world that look just like that. Two of them are poisonous and two of them aren’t. So don’t make any hasty decisions about which ones to eat! The only way you can tell the difference is to break the mushroom open and put your tongue to the milky substance right here inside. See that? If it tastes bitter, it’s poison, so stay away from it.”
Or he might tell them how primitive people took care of their health with witch hazel. “It’s growing right there, and it’s good for all kinds of wounds.”
Or he’d say, “That’s black birch. Why don’t you chew on that? It tastes good, right? The inner bark is the most valuable part. It’s what the old-time Appalachian people used to make birch beer out of. Maybe we should do that later.”
He was in bliss over the success of what he had created. There seemed no limit to what he could teach up here. The campers would return home to their suburban lives, and their parents would write letters to Eustace: “What did you do to my son, that he’s so much more mature now? What did you teach him that has made him so interested in his world?”