The Last American Man

I just finished reading this page-turner about Eustace Conway, a man who lives entirely off the land in the Appalachian Mountains of North Carolina. He takes the art of self-sustained living to the extreme, eating only food he has hunted or grown, wearing clothes that he has made out of animal skins and plant-fiber thread, and building houses from wood he has fallen on the 1,000 acres where he lives and operates his educational camp called Turtle Island.

I initially picked up the book because I fall into the following dreamy category that Gilbert dispels in the first chapter:

 “Eustace told me that people tended to romanticize his lifestyle. Because when people first ask him what he does for a living, he invariably replies, 'I live in the woods.' Then people get all dreamy and say, 'Ah! The woods! The woods! I love the woods!' as if Eustace spends his day sipping the dew off clover blossoms. But that’s not what living in the woods means to Eustace Conway.”

Gilbert then proceeds to tell the story of when Eustace “came upon a gorgeous eight-point buck grazing through the brush,” and shot it for food and clothing. Much to Eustace’s horror, the animal didn’t die right away, so Eustace yelled, “Get up brother! Get up and I’ll finish you off!” Preferring not to shoot the beautiful animal “at point blank range” he stabbed it in the jugular, at which time it reared up and a battle between the two animals, man and buck, ensued. “Eustace clung to the antlers,” the two went “thrashing through the brush” until finally Eustace “sliced his knife across the buck’s neck…but the buck kept fighting, until Eustace ground its face into the dirt, kneeling on its head and suffocating the dying creature. And then he plunged his hands into the animal’s neck and smeared the blood all over his face, weeping and laughing and offering up and ecstatic prayer of thanksgiving to the universe for the magnificent phenomenon of this creature who has so valiantly sacrificed its life to sustain his own. 

 

That’s what living in the woods means to Eustace Conway.”

Ok, most of the book is not like this, but it does drive home a good point to readers like me who think how fun it must be to live off the land! Well.

The book is affectionately written by Elizabeth Gilbert of Eat, Pray, Love fame, which might come as a bit of a surprise to some. I heard an interview with Elizabeth Gilbert once where she mentioned how strange it was to be suddenly identified as the ultimate Chick Lit writer, because until she wrote EPL, most of the subjects she wrote about were decidedly male. Like this one. This is a book about one intriguing man in particular, but the larger narrative is about American Men—the ideals that shape our national psyche, how outdated and unattainable those are, and how (interestingly, much like women nowadays, a theme that Gilbert explored in depth in EPL) that leaves a lot of guys scratching their heads about what is expected of them and how to proceed.

But it is also about the arduous journey of how to live sustainably with a capital S in modern American society. While few people will ever take sustainable living to the level that Eustace does, I think most people who try to incorporate these values in any amount will inevitably face the hard questions that Eustace bumps up against time and time again, like: How can a person have a foot in both worlds? How do you live true to your own values and honor nature without pissing off the other people around you who don’t? What does it mean to live fully, to be a full person? To be happy and to be human, period?  

At one poignant moment in the book, Eustace speaks to a room full of disrespectful teenagers about his experiences and lifestyle, and while Gilbert is cringing with fear for him on the sidelines, the room falls immediately silent, and the kids remain on the edge of their seats during the entire talk.

Afterwards, Gilbert asked Eustace, “Why do you think these particular teenagers were so hypnotized by you tonight?” His reply, which comes fast and assured: “Because they recognized right away that I was a real person. And they’ve probably never met one before.” 

 

Of all the ideas in the book, the following one will probably linger with me the most, and speaks to the value of putting oneself in nature’s direct path on a regular basis. Eustace told those same disrespectful teenagers:

“I live in nature, where everything is connected, circular. The seasons are circular. The planet is circular, and so is its passage around the sun. The course of water over the earth is circular, coming down from the sky and circulating throughout the world to spread life and then evaporating up again. I live in a circular tepee, and I build my fire in a circle, and when my loved ones come to visit, we sit in a circle and talk…I don’t live inside buildings, because buildings are dead places where nothing grows, where water doesn’t flow, and where life stops. I don’t want to live in a dead place. People say that I don’t live in the real world, but it’s modern Americans who live in a fake world, because they’ve stepped outside the natural circle of life.

 

Do people live in circles today? No, they live in boxes. They wake up every morning in the box of their bedroom because a box next to them started making beeping noises to tell them it was time to get up. They eat their breakfast out of a box, and they throw that box away into another box. Then they leave the box where they live and get into a box with wheels and drive to work, which is just another big box broken up into lots of little cubicle boxes where a bunch of people spend their days sitting and staring at the computer boxed in front of them….People get their music from a box, their food from a box, they get they keep their clothing in a box, they lives their lives in a box!”

The man has a point.

Clearly, Eustace is a fascinating person and an inspiration to anyone trying to carve out a life that reflects, without compromise, the values that a person holds most dear. One outside of the box.

If you don’t have time to read the book, but are intrigued by Eustace, you can learn more about him here.