That was his plan, anyway.
Audacious? Sure. Still, there is something about the guy . . .
Eustace is not easily dismissed. As his brother Judson would attest in awe, and as I later came to witness in person, Eustace’s skills in the wilderness are truly legion. He is wildly competent. He is physically and intellectually predestined to acquire proficiency. He has perfect eyesight, perfect hearing, perfect balance, perfect reflexes, and perfect focus. He has long muscles on a light but strongly constructed frame, like a natural middle-distance runner. His body can do anything he asks of it. His mind, too. He has to be exposed to an idea or shown a process only once to get it right, to lock it in, and immediately begin improving on its principles. He pays closer attention to his surroundings than anyone I’ve ever seen. His mind operates, as Henry Adams wrote of the minds of the earliest American settlers, like “a mere cutting instrument, practical, economical, sharp, and direct.”
And that kind of mind makes for a hard honesty. So that when I once asked him, “Is there anything you can’t do?” Eustace replied, “Well, I’ve never found anything to be particularly difficult.” In other words, he’s got the self-assurance to back up his conviction that he can change the world. That, in addition to the unshakable will and airtight world view of a natural-born reformer. And he’s got charisma, too, which he unleashes brazenly in every interaction he has with anyone.
I first visited Eustace at Turtle Island back in 1995. Midway through my stay, Eustace had to leave the mountain, and I went with him. He had to leave the woods, as he often does, to teach about the woods, to make some money and spread the gospel. So we drove across North Carolina to a small summer camp that specialized in environmental education. A group of teenagers skulked into the camp’s dining room for the evening’s event, and to me they all looked like jerks—loud, disrespectful, shoving, shrieking, laughing. Eustace was supposed to get these kids excited about nature.
I thought, This is not gonna end well.
Eustace, wearing jeans and a plaid shirt, not buckskin, walked across the stage toward the microphone. Around his neck hung two large coyote teeth. On his belt, the knife.
The shoving and shrieking and laughing continued.
Eustace, thin and serious, stood at the microphone with his hands in his pockets. After a long moment, he said, “I am a quiet-spoken man, so I am going to have to speak quietly tonight.”
The shoving and shrieking and laughing stopped. The jerky teenagers stared at Eustace Conway, riveted. Just like that—dead silence. I swear it. It was like goddamn To Sir with Love.
“I moved into the woods when I was seventeen years old,” Eustace began.“Not much older than you are today . . .”And he talked about his life. Those kids were so transfixed, you could have operated on them and they wouldn’t have noticed. Eustace told them about wilderness survival and his adventures, but he also gave his speech about the difference between the world of boxes and the world of circles.
“I live,” Eustace said, “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 through the world to spread life and then evaporating up again. I live in a circular teepee and I build my fire in a circle, and when my loved ones visit me, we sit in a circle and talk. The life cycles of plants and animals are circular. I live outside where I can see this. The ancient people understood that our world is a circle, but we modern people have lost sight of that. 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.
“I saw the circle of life most clearly when I was riding my horse across America and I came across the body of a coyote that had recently died. The animal was mummified from the desert heat, but all around it, in a lush circle, was a small band of fresh green grass. The earth was borrowing the nutrients from the animal and regenerating itself. This wasn’t about death, I realized; this was about eternal life. I took the teeth from that coyote and made myself this necklace right here, which always circles my neck, so I’d never forget that lesson.
“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 then 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 boxes in front of them. When the day is over, everyone gets into the box with wheels again and goes home to their house boxes and spends the evening staring at the television boxes for entertainment. They get their music from a box, they get their food from a box, they keep their clothing in a box, they live their lives in a box! Does that sound like anybody you know?”
By now the kids were laughing and applauding.
“Break out of the box!” Eustace said. “You don’t have to live like this because people tell you it’s the only way. You’re not handcuffed to your culture! This is not the way humanity lived for thousands and thousands of years, and it is not the only way you can live today!”
Another hour of this, then uncontained applause, like at a revival meeting. After the talk, Eustace sat on the edge of the stage, drinking from the glass jug filled with fresh Turtle Island spring water that he carries with him everywhere. The teenagers approached reverently, awed, as the camp director gave Eustace an enthusiastic handshake and a discreetly enveloped generous check. The teenagers gathered around more closely. The toughest, baddest-ass gangsta boy of them all came to stand right beside Eustace. He put his fist on his heart and announced, with real solemnity, “You rule, man. You da bomb.” Eustace threw back his head and laughed. The other campers lined up to shake his hand and then detonated with questions.
“Could you make fire right now if you had to?”
“Yes.”
“If someone dropped you naked into the middle of Alaska, could you survive?”
“I suppose so. But it’d be a lot easier if I had a knife.”
“Were you scared when you first moved into the woods?”
“No. The civilized world is much scarier than the woods.”
“Were your parents mad at you when you moved into the woods?”
“My father didn’t know why I’d want to leave a comfortable modern house, but my mother understood.”
“Do you ever get sick?”
“Rarely.”
“Do you ever go to the doctor?”
“Never.”
“Do you know how to drive a car?”
“How do you think I got here tonight?”
“Do you use any modern tools?”
“I use chain saws all the time to take care of my land. I use telephones. And plastic buckets. My God, but plastic buckets are great! I’ve made plenty of my own baskets and containers out of tree bark and grasses—I mean, I know how to do it and I’ve used those primitive means of hauling water around lots of time—but I tell you, there’s nothing like a plastic bucket to get the job done faster. Wow! Plastic buckets! Glorious! I love ’em!”
“Do you have a toothbrush?”
“Not at the moment.”
“Do you have a hairbrush?”
“I used to have a porcupine hairbrush. I don’t have it anymore, though.”
“What’s a porcupine hairbrush?”
“A hairbrush made out of porcupine bristles.”
“Where’d you get that?”
“A porcupine saved my life once when I was hiking on the Appalachian Trail, so I made the hairbrush out of
its bristles, to honor it.”
“How could a porcupine save your life?”
“By giving me something to eat when I was starving to death.”
Here, there was an extended silence, as the kids tried to figure that one out. Then they all kind of said, “Ohhh . . .” at the same time, and the questioning continued.
“Why were you starving to death?”
“Because there wasn’t any food.”
“Why wasn’t there any food?”
“Because it was winter.”
“What’s the longest you’ve ever gone without eating?”
“Probably the two weeks before I killed that porcupine.”
“Can you show us your porcupine hairbrush?”
“I don’t have it anymore. I brought it to a demonstration like this one, to show it to some kids your age, and somebody stole it. Can you imagine how sad that made me feel?”
“Do you have a gun?”
“I have several guns.”
“Have you ever killed a person?”
“No.”
“Are you married?”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“I guess I haven’t found the right woman yet.”
“Do you wish you were married?”
“More than anything in the world.”
“Do you ever get lonely out there in the woods?”
Eustace hesitated, smiled wistfully. “Only in the evenings.”
Later that night, when we were alone, Eustace told me how heartbroken he gets whenever he spends time around modern American teenagers. Yes, he can communicate with them, but people never understand that it rips him up inside to see how ignorant the kids are, how undisciplined in their personal interactions and how disrespectful of their elders, how consumed they are by material desire and how helplessly incompetent in a way that you would never see with, say, Amish children.
But I wasn’t listening carefully to Eustace’s lament, because I had another question on my mind. “Hey, about what happened there tonight. Do you get that kind of response everywhere you speak?”
“Yes.”
“From all age groups; from all backgrounds?”
“Yes.”
I thought this over. “So tell me specifically. Why do you think these particular teenagers were so hypnotized by you tonight?”
Eustace’s reply was so immediate, so uncompromising, and so coldly delivered that it sent a quick little chill right through me.
“Because,” he said, “they recognized right away that I was a real person. And they’ve probably never met one before.”
CHAPTER TWO
My son,my executioner,
I take you in my arms,
Quiet and small and just astir,
And whom my body warms.
—“My Son,My Executioner,” Donald Hall
In the winter of 1975, when Eustace Conway was fourteen, he began a new diary and wrote this statement, by means of an introduction:
“I, Eustace Conway, live in a fairly large house in Gastonia, North Carolina. I have a mother and a father living at this time, and I also have two brothers (Walton and Judson) and one sister (Martha). I have a very strong hobby of Indian crafts and lore. I have organized an Indian dance team of four people, including myself. The people are: me, my brother Walton, who is the older of my two brothers, Tommy Morris, who is a close friend living about two blocks away, and also Pete Morris, who is his brother. Their father killed himself about two years ago but their mother is going to remarry soon. I go to the Scheile Museum of Natural History every chance I get because I love it there and I love the people there. I have nearly become a member of the staff . . . My bedroom is itself a museum. I have covered it with Indian paintings and pictures, bear skins from my uncle in Alaska, and many Indian crafts I have made. There is no room in my room for anything else and it is really stuffed and I have many more things that I can’t put in.”
He was an unusual kid. He was busy all the time. He went to school every day, of course, but only because they made him go. After school, he would ride his bicycle over to the Scheile Museum, a small natural history museum filled with dusty World War I–era dioramas of North Carolina flora and fauna. And that was where the day’s real schooling started for Eustace; Mr. Alan Stout, the museum’s director, had taken a liking to him and always welcomed him into the marvelous inner asylum of the Scheile.
Eustace was hard to resist. The kid had a wonderful big smile, on the occasions when he’d actually crack one. Such an uncommonly focused child! So highly motivated and interested in geology, anthropology, history, biology—anything you could offer him. Mr. Stout used to let Eustace hang around in the back rooms of the museum for hours every day, to the boy’s supreme bliss. (“Mr. Stout knows more about Indians than anyone I know,” Eustace raved in his diary. “And he is a very good watercolor painter, and paints scenes of Tennessee, where he was born and raised.”) Eustace was like no child Mr. Stout had ever met; indeed, like no child he would ever meet again. If you gave him a book to look at, he’d study it, ask a dozen questions, and then request another book the next afternoon. If Mr. Warren Kimsey, the museum’s resident taxidermist, showed Eustace how to skin and flesh a rabbit, he’d do it with a fanatical perfection and ask for another rabbit so that he could try to improve on the skill.
“Warren is new,” Eustace confided to his diary, “but he has swiftly become closest to me. In fact, I like him more than any other person in this world.”
And he was a terrific helper. A regular eager beaver. Always happy to sweep out the storage rooms or take over any chore nobody else would do. Mr. Stout even let Eustace use the museum as a practice space for his Indian dance troupe. Eustace was the president of the troupe, but Mr. Stout coached the dancers, drove them to competitions, helped show the boys how to sew and bead the intricate, traditional Indian dance costumes. As Eustace got older, Mr. Stout took him on canoe trips on the Catawba South Fork River, to collect water samples for government environmental studies. He took Eustace on camping trips all alone sometimes, and watched in wordless admiration as the teenager caught, killed, skinned, cooked, and ate rattlesnakes.
Mr. Stout more than liked Eustace; he respected him. He thought he was brilliant. He carefully observed the development of Eustace Conway much as Thomas Jefferson had carefully observed the development of a young neighbor named Meriwether Lewis (a child whom the president would always recall as having been “remarkable, even in infancy, for enterprise, boldness and discretion”). And, anyway, Mr. Stout had a sense that Eustace had a desperate need for someplace to go in the afternoons, someplace other than home. He didn’t know the details of the family situation, but he had met the father, and it didn’t take any genius to recognize that life was not easy in that fairly large house on Deerwood Drive.
So Eustace would spend his afternoons at the museum and then take off and hit the little forest behind his house. Check his traps, hunt for turtles, create trails. He made notes of what he saw during those forays into the woods. He’d been keeping a diary for years, but it wasn’t so much a means of personal expression as a compulsive chronicle of everything he had accomplished that day (whether related to wildlife or to the more mundane) and a long list of what he intended to accomplish the next day.
“Today I fed worms to my baby snapping turtle. I watched a movie about a boy and a homing pigeon, practiced on the hoop dance, and started working on the feathers for my coup stick. Then I was developing my skills in table tennis. I have become quite good. I am going to read my Bible every night until I finish it. I may make a feather crest out of real turkey tail feathers.”
“Today I found a cougar track that was 3 days old. I caught a corn snake that was 51.2 feet. I also set a snare for a coon where I saw 3-day old coon tracks. I hope to catch it for the skin.”
“I began reading a book, Fighting Indians of the West. After a while of that, I mounted two deer feet . . . Martha told me that a squirrel had been hit on Gardn
er Park Drive. I skinned it, but froze it to flesh later.”
A whole page in one of his childhood diaries was headlined frogs, full of information and observation on the same. (“Today I caught 3 tree frogs and put them in my 10-gallon terrarium. The next day I found some bunches of eggs in the water bowl. I also caught a salamander and put him in there with the frogs. One of the frogs is thought to be dead, for I have not seen three of them together at the same time for a while . . .”)
It was as though Eustace were some kind of baby Thoreau. Or maybe not. Although he was attentive to his environment, Eustace didn’t have then, and never would develop, Thoreau’s languid communion with nature. (For instance: “Sometimes, in a summer morning, having taken my accustomed bath,” Thoreau mused, “I sat in my sunny doorway from sunrise till noon, rapt in reverie, amidst the pines and hickories and sumacs, in undisturbed solitude and stillness.”) No way would Eustace Conway endure that kind of decadent repose. Even as a child, he was far too compulsive to sit for weeks on end to watch the light change. Instead, Eustace was driven to engage. It’s more to the point to say that he was like the young Teddy Roosevelt, another energetic and determined child, who also studied under a master taxidermist, who also zealously created a natural history museum in his bedroom, and who also wrote conscientious, academic observations in preadolescent diaries. Like Teddy Roosevelt, the young Eustace Conway could be described as having been “pure act.”
Eustace didn’t have a lot of friends. He wasn’t much like anybody else, and he already knew this, even at the age of ten. When he looked at other boys his age, he saw kids who spent hours watching television, talking about what they saw on television, and imitating characters from television. None of their references made any sense to him.
The other boys also had strange hobbies. In the cafeterias, they’d play this elaborate pencil-breaking game, trying to steal each other’s pencils and snap them in half, keeping score of how many pencils each boy broke. This was both puzzling and upsetting to Eustace. How could anyone have such disrespect for property? Pencils were made out of trees, after all, and were worth something. He also watched boys in his classroom fritter away whole semesters by drawing picture after picture of race cars in their school notebooks—and using only one side of the paper, too! Eustace, even back then, would think, What a waste of time . . . and what a waste of paper. These boys just seemed so damn bored. All they could think of doing was to fight and wreck stuff. But Eustace could always think of something useful; there weren’t enough hours in the day for all he wanted to do and learn.