“She’d been making biscuit dough,” he remembers, “and her hands were covered with flour, but her face was as white as the flour on her hands, and she was shaking with fear at the sight of me. When she finally spoke, her voice was so faint and breathless, I was afraid she might pass out. It was like talking to somebody who’s sick in the hospital but who’s still trying to speak. You want to say, ‘Save your strength! Don’t try to talk!’ That’s how shy she was.”
The woman at the door was Susie Barlow, a member of the interconnected network of Appalachian families who were soon to become Eustace’s neighbors. The Barlow clan, Carlton clan, and the (quite literally named) Hicks clan had all lived in this craggy mountain holler for as long as remembered history. They were kind, reclusive people, who still yanked their teeth out with homemade iron pliers when the need arose. They raised hogs and made the most magnificent fifty-pound salt-cured hams. They bred hound dogs for hunting and for sale. They kept their dog litters in their living rooms, the pups staggering about blindly in a big wooden crate, peeing all over a faded handmade patchwork quilt, which could have surely fetched several hundred dollars at auction in New York City. The Carltons and Hickses and Barlows were poor but deeply religious people who honored the Sabbath with reverence and handled the Bible with humility.
“I’ll tell you this much,” Eustace says. “You know that I have issues with Christianity, right? But when I go visit my Appalachian neighbors and they say, ‘Will you pray with us, brother Eustace?’ I hit that floor and I pray. I get down there on my knees in their kitchens, down on that worn linoleum, and I take their hard-working hands, and I pray my heart out, because these are the truest believers I have ever known.”
They were perfect neighbors. It was a perfect piece of land. Eustace was ready to begin his utopian journey. But he didn’t want to do it alone.
For all that he was the American romantic archetype of the solo man in the wilderness, Eustace still desperately craved a female partner to share his dream. Just as he was imagining his ideal utopian home, he was also designing (in equally precise and fantastic detail) his ideal utopian bride. He knew exactly who she would be, how she would look, what she would bring to his life.
She would be beautiful, brilliant, strong, loving, capable, and his faithful partner, the gentle touch that would humanize his brilliantly executed life plan and support his vision. She showed up in his dreams often as a young Native American beauty, quiet and loving and peaceful. She was the Eve who would help Eustace build his Eden. She was the same dream girl, by the way, that Henry David Thoreau used to fantasize about back when he was holed up alone at Walden Pond—a faultless child of nature, a paragon modeled after the mythical Greek demigoddess “Hebe, cup-bearer to Jupiter, who was the daughter of Juno and wild lettuce, and who had the power of restoring gods and men to the vigor of their youth . . . probably the only thoroughly sound-conditioned, healthy and robust young lady that ever walked the globe, and wherever she came it was spring.”
This was the woman of Eustace’s dreams, the very picture of lushness and fertility and grace. But he wasn’t having an easy time finding her. Not that he had trouble meeting women. He met loads of women; it was just hard to find the right one.
His relationship with a woman named Belinda, for instance, typified his experience with the opposite sex. Belinda, who lived in Arizona, had seen Eustace Conway talking about his life in the woods on a national television program called “PM Magazine.” She immediately fell in love with him, transported by the romantic notion of this wild and articulate mountain man, and she tracked him down through the mail. They wrote passionate letters to each other, and Eustace went to stay with her briefly out West, but it never turned into something real. Belinda had a child already, which was only one of the reasons they ultimately split. Eustace was never entirely sure whether Belinda loved him as a person or as a notion.
Then there was Frances “the strong girl from England,” and Eustace fell in love with her, too.
“She seems to have the wisdom, strength, and tenacity that would make a good partner,” Eustace wrote of Frances in his journal. “I need the love and companionship that I have gotten so little of. I know I’m a romantic. Sometimes I think and feel that I am so logical and in ways cool-hearted and methodical, yet I can also be so young, naïve, and unrealistic.”
But Frances was soon gone, and then came Bitsy, with whom Eustace fell overpoweringly in love. Bitsy was a beautiful and mysterious Apache doctor. Not just any Apache, but a descendant of Geromino’s band, and she had everything Eustace always fell for: the wide smile, the long hair, the dark skin, the athletic body, the “eyes that would melt you,” the confidence, the grace. But things didn’t work out with Bitsy, either.
“I desire you still,” she wrote, in a letter finally severing the relationship. “Yet I have been unable to come to you. You are a charmer. But I feel you want me for your needs. I do not desire to be saved or taught or led in any direction but my own at this time. You are a giver, a teacher. This is good, for some. But I feel you want me as a glorification for you. Forgive me if this seems harsh. I do not mean it in that way. Your needs shadow mine.”
He didn’t take the breakup well.
“OH! GOD DAMN! BITSY!” he exploded in his journal in February of 1986. “I am crying, hitting the floor, shouting out in pain. Oh, damn, there is no release. I am not getting over it! You! I need to see you. You are the only key . . . my heart is bleeding for you. I love you like life itself, the whole universe! I am dreadful sick in love with you! What can I do? Nothing I can do. Nothing nothing nothing NOTHING NOTHING. Oh, how can I bear to lose you? I want you for a wife, a partner, to share the adventures of life. I will never find another like you . . . what does fate, God, the flowing energy of the universe have to say about this?”
Then, from Eustace Conway’s journal, February 1987: “Valarie Spratlin. Love. New Love. Where did you come from? Did God send you? Are you real? Are you really mine? Do I love you as much as I think I do, or do I just love the love you give me? I would love to think you are the answer to prayers I have been sending. Are you the next step in my moving, educating, predestined life? Is fate that strong a ruler and are we planned for soul mates?”
Valarie Spratlin, an attractive and energetic woman ten years Eustace’s senior, was working in 1987 with the Department of Natural Resources in Georgia. She was in charge of one-fifth of the state’s parks. She had heard about Eustace Conway and his “dog and pony show” from a friend in North Carolina, so she invited him to Georgia to conduct some workshops in her park system. They fell in love fast. She was intrigued by his life, by his magnetism, and by his bold plans for rescuing the world. She wrote him letters addressed to “My Primitive Savage Pagan.” She was into the whole iconographic picture of him—the buckskin, the teepee, the works. Her previous boyfriend had been a musician with the Allman Brothers, and she’d spent the last ten years of her life traveling around the country with the band, so she had already established herself as someone who was up for adventure.
“I know we just met a mere two weeks ago,”Valarie wrote Eustace in a spontaneous little poem, “but my feelings for you continue to grow.”
Soon after they met, Eustace asked Valarie to join him on a three-week tour of the Southwest, down to Mesa Verde and all the old Indian sites. “Heck, yeah,” she said, and they packed up her little Toyota and headed out. She remembers that he never once let them buy any food; they had to scrounge for meals or else dine three times a day on oatmeal and raisins. “Damn,” she recalls, “but he was the penny-pinchingest man I ever saw.” He took her hiking down in the Grand Canyon—“not for a nice little stroll, but for the entire day, with nothing to eat again but freakin’ oatmeal and raisins”—and the next day headed into Bryce Canyon for three more days of nonstop hiking. These were Eustace-style hikes: twenty-five miles at a stretch and no breaks.
“Eustace Conway,” she finally said, when he insisted one evening that they climb y
et another ridge to see yet another sunset, “you are pushing me too hard.”
He looked at her, incredulous. “But, Valarie, you may never be here again. I can’t believe you’d give up the chance to see such a beautiful view.”
“I’ll make you a deal,” she told him. “I’ll climb that last goddamn mountain with you if you promise me that when we get out of here, you’ll take me to a real restaurant and buy me a hamburger and french fries and a Coke immediately.”
He laughed and agreed, and she made the climb. She was romantic and smitten, but she was no pushover. She was cool and spunky. She knew how to draw a line with Eustace where others found it impossible to stand up to him. And she was crazy about him. She was an environmentalist by disposition and an educator by training, and here was this guy who took every belief she had about the world and multiplied it by fifty. She was behind him on all his plans, and there soon came about a subtle pronoun shift in discussions of the future. Eustace no longer talked of “my need to find good land,” but “our need to find good land.” This woman seemed in every way to be what he had always hoped to find: a true partner. Together, Eustace and Valarie looked all over the South for a spot that would work for his—for their—utopia.
And so it came to pass that, in the late winter of 1986, Eustace Conway drove Valarie Spratlin up into the mountains behind Boone to show her the place he was interested in buying. It was nighttime. It was freezing rain. They drove in a dilapidated old van Eustace had recently purchased, with holes in the floorboards where exhaust kept pouring in. The road up the mountain was more like a dry creek bed of boulders and ditches than anything designed for a car’s passage. They finally stepped out of the van, and Eustace, delighted, shouted to Valarie, “We’re here! This is it!”
It was freezing. It was dark. The wind was howling. Valarie could see nothing. She ducked under a big hemlock to get out of the weather, but some wild chickens roosting in the tree started squawking around, and their movements dumped more icy water down her back.
“I don’t like it here, Eustace,” she said.
“You’ll like it in the morning,” he promised.
There wasn’t a single structure on the land. They slept under a tarp that night, and it started to snow. Around midnight, Eustace climbed alone to the highest point of the property and smoked a pipe in a prayer of thanksgiving for having found his destiny. Valarie, shivering under the tarp, was thinking, “It’s snowing and I don’t know where the hell I am and I’m freezing to death and that goddamn man just left me to go smoke a pipe?”
In the morning, though, when Eustace took her for a walk around the whole property, she began to see what he loved about the place. It was nothing but dense forest, yet Eustace was already mapping out the 107 acres of his personal world—bridges to go here; a teepee camp to fit there; this would make wonderful pasture; here’s where the barn could go; here’s where we can build cabins for guests; someday I’ll buy the land on the other side of the ridge, and we’ll plant buckwheat over here . . .
He could see it all. And the way he explained it so clearly? Why, she could see it, too.
The land was going to cost him nearly $80,000.
Eustace had saved some money, but not that kind of money. And there was no banker in the world who’d give a second glance to a kid in buckskin who lived in a teepee. So where can a modern mountain man get $80,000 when he needs it fast? The only person Eustace Conway knew for sure had that kind of money was his father.
Eustace didn’t feel remotely comfortable hitting the old man up for money. He didn’t feel comfortable around the old man at all. His father had still never said a kind word to him. Had never acknowledged that his “idiot” son had graduated with honors from college. Had never gone to hear Eustace speak before auditoriums full of captivated audiences; listened to a single story or looked at a single photograph from any of Eustace’s adventures; read any of the newspaper and magazine articles written about his son. (Mrs. Conway would cut them out and leave them on the coffee table for her husband to see, but he wouldn’t touch them; he’d just set his Wall Street Journal or his glass of water down on them, as if they were invisible.) In every way, Big Eustace was more detached from his children now that they were out of his house.
“I wish Dad would write to you,” Eustace’s mother wrote to her son when he was away in college, “but he seems to have a lot of hang-ups. Martha received her first letter ever from him on her birthday, and it was so shocking that she said she bawled while reading it.”
Eustace was amazed to realize that even now, when he was in his early twenties, he was still haunted by the pain of his childhood. He had thought this would all go away once he got older, once his physical body had left the environment of home. Why was it that his father could still make him cry? Why was he still having dreams that woke him at four o’clock in the morning, “rooting up old memories of grief and pain”? Eustace was shocked to discover, during one Christmas visit to Gastonia, that his dad remained “the rudest man I have ever met, the most judgmental man I have ever met, the most critical man I have ever met.”
It’s not that Eustace hadn’t tried to reconcile with the old man. As far back as his adolescence, he’d tried. His mother was always encouraging Little Eustace to “bend over backward” to improve his relationship with Big Eustace.
“I hope and pray so much that everything will go better for you and all of us at home next year,” she had written to Eustace before his senior year of high school. “Just as you so greatly want Dad’s love and respect, so does he want your love, respect and obedience. Which a child owes his parents. I feel sure one of the big reasons why Dad has always been hard for you to get along with is because he has always been ‘second fiddle’ all through your life, since you gave me most of your attention, time and dependence for all the things you need, and for affection. It started from way back when you were a little boy and, due to the fact that I gave you too much time and attention, it snowballed into a very unhappy relationship. At this point, there is still a possibility for a new happy relationship to develop between you and your Dad, but it is up to you to bring it about. In youth you are more able to be flexible in changing your behavior patterns and attitudes. Swallow all your pride to humble yourself before Dad and admit that you have done and said things in the past which have displeased him, but that you are willing now to try to please him to the best of your ability.”
So Eustace, from the time he was twelve, wrote letters to his father. He knew that his father thought himself a gifted communicator, and he hoped that he could improve their relationship if he expressed himself properly. He would work on those letters for weeks, trying to find the most mature and respectful way to approach Big Eustace. He would write that he believed they had a difficult relationship and would like to work on healing it. He would suggest that perhaps someone could help them talk to each other. He would tell his father he was sorry to have disappointed him, and maybe if they discussed their problems without anybody yelling, he could change his behavior to make his father happier.
His father never responded to any of the letters, although occasionally he read one aloud in a mocking fashion, to entertain Eustace’s siblings. There was so much to make fun of: Eustace’s spelling, grammar, his audacity in speaking as an equal—that kind of thing. Big Eustace was particularly entertained by a letter Little Eustace wrote back in high school, in which he suggested that his brother Walton, who had a brilliant mind and a sensitive nature, might thrive at a private school, where he would not be bullied by the redneck kids of Gastonia High. What a laugh! Big Eustace read that one over and over to the other kids, and everyone, even Walton, was encouraged to mock Little Eustace for presuming to tell his father what might be best for the family.
Yet, when he reached adulthood, Eustace often found himself trying again.
“I do not write to bring you pain or discouragement,” he wrote once, man to man. “On the contrary. I apologize for bringing pain or anything but goodn
ess into your life. I always have wanted to be good. Good for you, good for Mom, good for everyone. I have an overwhelming need to be accepted by you, to be appreciated, acknowledged, recognized for something better than trash (stupid, ignorant, wrong, worthless). I have a great void where I look for love. All I have ever wanted is your love. I feel like a moth near a candle. Perhaps I should accept defeat and stay away from you. But denial and distance do not satisfy the need for your acceptance.”
Again, no response.
So, no, the relationship was hardly prospering, but Eustace needed to borrow a lot of money, and his father, frugal and shrewd, had it. Eustace had never asked his father for a dime; it had been a point of pride. When Mr. Conway once told young Eustace they should discuss the terms of an allowance, Eustace said, “I don’t think I deserve an allowance,” and that was the end of that. Eustace never asked his father for help with college tuition, although Mr. Conway happily paid the college fees for his younger children. How, then, was Eustace Conway to come to his dad in 1987 as an adult and ask for a loan? A pretty big loan.
The conversation, as we can imagine, was not genteel. Eustace got an earful from the old man: he was destined to fail in this venture; he should expect no mercy from his father when the sheriff came calling with bankruptcy papers; and who did he think he was, anyhow, to believe he could handle the responsibilities of caring for 107 acres and running a business?
“You’re wrong to think you can succeed at this,” his father said, over and over again.
Eustace sat like a rock in a stream, letting the cold deluge rush right by him, keeping his mouth shut and his face blank, repeating to himself the comforting chant I know I’m right, I know I’m right, I know I’m right . . . And, in the end, his father lent him the money.