There was no later. Not really. They limped along in their relationship for a year after the buggy journey, but Patience ended up taking a job down in Boone, coaching field hockey, and slowly peeled herself away from Eustace and from Turtle Island. And no number of his passionate fifteen-page letters (“I am sorry if I have not been able to articulate my self, feelings, perspective, in a way that you could understand . . . I pray someday when you are strong enough or ready you can experience this profound love I am feeling”) could win her back.
Patience had run out of it.
What killed Eustace about Patience was that she didn’t understand him. She didn’t understand how much he loved her. She didn’t understand his emotional limitations and scars. His goals. How much love he needed from her. How much love he was willing to give her. And how much he wanted to see that she trusted him. She didn’t understand anything about him.
And it is exactly this perceived lack of appreciation, lack of understanding, lack of faith, that burned Eustace to an emotional crisp. After suffering under a father who told him he was crazy and worthless and a total failure, how could he now be subjected to a person (especially someone who was supposedly in love with him) who didn’t trust him or believe in his expertise? Well, that was altogether too familiar. And if the woman he loved couldn’t understand him, how could he expect to gain understanding from anyone else? Where could he find recognition and sympathy? In whose arms? In whose eyes? Eustace Conway was becoming more certain that nobody would ever really know him, that this intense isolation would be a permanent condition. That he was a refugee in this world by birth and by destiny.
“I feel like Ishi,” he said.
The story of Ishi was one that had haunted Eustace from childhood. Ishi was an Indian of the California people, a primitive, Stone Age culture that lived for centuries in the canyons outside Los Angeles. In the late nineteenth century, Ishi’s people were killed in genocidal at- tacks as the white man pushed farther up into the canyons looking for gold and ranch land. By the turn of the century, the understanding among anthropologists was that the California Indians were extinct.
Until August 29, 1911, that is. On that day, right in the middle of an age of railroads and telephones, Ishi, a healthy native in his fifties, wandered down to a ranch valley in Oroville, California. He was naked, and his hair was burned off, to symbolize mourning. He had been hiding in the canyons since childhood with a sister and a grandmother, and now that they had both passed away, he, overcome with grief and loneliness, had taken a long journey on foot, ready to travel “into the next world.” Which is where he ended up. He was a Stone Age man who had walked right into modern industrial America. It took researchers and ethnographers weeks to figure out who Ishi was and to piece together a language by which to communicate with him. They found him, of course, to be a priceless vault of anthropological information. He taught them language, myths, and hunting techniques (including a form of archery that had previously been observed only in Mongolia). The anthropologists who studied Ishi ended up bringing him to their museum, where he worked as a janitor.
“This man,” Eustace said in disbelief, “with his unbelievably articulate ability to live in the wilderness, was pushing a broom all day.”
Ishi also made arrowheads for visitors, who would come to see him on display at the museum once a week. He learned to speak some English, took to wearing trousers, saw vaudeville acts, rode trains, and died of tuberculosis within the decade.
“I swear to God I feel like Ishi sometimes,” Eustace said. “Completely different from everyone else in this world, the last of my kind, stranded. Just trying to communicate. Trying to teach people something. But constantly misunderstood.”
Eustace had run into this understanding-deficit throughout his horse journeys. He met young people who were vegetarian environmentalists and were upset to see him dressed in animal skins or to learn that he hunted for food. He reached the point where he no longer had the energy to explain how much more destructive to the environment their synthetic-fleece clothing was, seeing that it was made of nonret newable material produced in polluting and resource-gobbling factories. Or that they didn’t know where their food came from, or how the earth suffered from its manufacture and packaging. And then there were the animal rights people, who objected to the cruelty they perceived in watching Eustace push his horses so hard.
“There were people out there who owned fat horses, horses that were nothing but pasture potatoes,” Eustace observed, “and they had never seen a horse that was truly in shape before they saw mine. My horses are lean, long-muscled, skinny, capable animals that have worked and traveled their whole lives. These are athletes built for the long haul. That’s what horses were made to be. Nobody takes better care of animals than I do. But I heard people say, ‘You aren’t feeding those ponies enough!’ and it made me angry. I wanted to say, ‘Listen, people. I’m feeding my horses so goddamn much food it would flat-out kill your lazy old horse stuck in your stupid little pasture.’ But my horses were lean because they were burning it off.”
The most upsetting incident occurred in Gillette, Wyoming. Eustace and Patience and their horses had just finished a 51-mile day. They hitched the buggy to the rail of a dusty saloon that looked like a movie set and went inside for a burger. On their way out of town, an old cowboy swung by and took a look at Eustace’s best horse, Hasty, his trusted Morgan, who, fed and watered, was resting with his head down. The cowboy said, “That horse ain’t got no heart. I’ve been around horses my whole life, and I can tell you that animal has one foot in the grave. You better pull him out and give him up.”
Eustace didn’t say a word. He didn’t tell the cowboy that Hasty had traveled thousands of miles in his life. He didn’t say that Hasty had once kept a 45-beat-per-minute heart rate after trotting fourteen miles—lower than the pulse rate of most horses at rest. Wasn’t even breathing hard. He didn’t mention that Hasty would cover nearly 450 miles in the next eight days. Or that Eustace Conway wouldn’t trade that horse for a million dollars.
“Hasty was just a bay,” Eustace told me. “Brown horse with a black mane and tail. He was the most common-looking horse you ever saw, but he was a hero. People had no idea what I was sitting on with that horse. That cowboy said Hasty didn’t have any heart; I’m telling you this horse was nothing but heart. Hasty was my champion, and he loved to go. We experienced adventures together that this cowboy couldn’t even have imagined, and we understood each other. We pushed each other to go as far and as fast as we could, and Hasty loved it. I’m telling you, that horse hasn’t even found his limits yet. And I never met anyone who understands what that means.”
There’s a guy down in Kentucky who is (because somebody has to be) the world’s foremost authority on the history of long-distance equestrian travel. His name is CuChullaine O’Reilly, and he owns the world’s largest collection of books on equestrian adventure. He himself has ridden horses on five epic journeys across Central Asia, including one trip to the Himalayan Mountains, where one of his horses died and was eaten by the locals.
“You gotta put Eustace Conway in context,” says CuChullaine O’Reilly, who actually can. “I know my stuff, and let me tell you that this guy is the real deal. Because how many people in this country keep horses? Hundreds of thousands, right? And how many of them have ridden their horses more than fifty miles away from a barn? Nobody. Because it’s terrifying to put yourself and your animal out there in the world with no security. I know all about this.
“Look, the distances Eustace has traveled aren’t in themselves remarkable. I know a couple who’ve gone over eighteen thousand miles on horseback. I know a guy from Maine who went for a fourteen-thousand-mile ride a few years ago. So crossing the country is not in itself a big deal. What’s extraordinary is that Eustace did it in 103 days. Unbelievable. That’s the fastest anyone has traveled long distance on horseback in at least twenty-five years, probably longer. The fact that Eustace did it without having been a real
horseman before is astonishing. He used his wilderness skills and audacity and intelligence, and he made this journey virtually free of mistakes. And the buggy journey? To turn around and master buggies so fast? It’s mind-boggling. There are only a few people who are Eustace’s peers in horsemanship, and they are all lifelong horsemen who do nothing else. They do their research for two years before a long journey, and then they get sponsors and bring along private veterinarians and lots and lots of money. And they make lots of mistakes he didn’t make.”
There are three factors, according to CuChullaine O’Reilly, that a man needs in order to be a brilliant endurance rider: courage, resolve, and romance. Eustace has all these, in spades. And something else, too. He has a kind of preternatural gift. To CuChullaine O’Reilly, Eustace Conway’s crossing the country in 103 days was an accomplishment as exciting as an untrained Iowa farm boy stepping up to a footrace and casually breaking a four-minute mile. You can’t just do that. But Eustace did.
In this regard, and in terms of pure and authentic character value, CuChullaine O’Reilly finds Eustace comparable only to one other person, the Alaskan wildman Eugene Glasscock. Eugene Glasscock is a bearded and hard-boiled recluse (“Mr. Mountain,” he’s called at home) who got a wild hair one day back in the 1980s and decided to ride his horse from the Arctic Circle down to the Equator. Wearing, of course, handmade buckskins. The crazy freak. He barely made it alive through the Yukon and Rockies, and he was attacked by machete-wielding bandits in Mexico, and he had to swim beside his horse across some raging rivers down in Guatemala. He liked the jungle, though. That’s why Mr. Mountain still lives down there in Central America, someplace totally off the map. Too bad he’s difficult to get in touch with, says CuChullaine O’Reilly, because it’d sure be fun to get Eugene Glasscock and Eustace Conway together for a weekend “so that they could go off and tell stories and get drunk and eat some possums.”
“Nobody can understand Eustace,” he says. “Because what you get when a modern-day American encounters Eustace Conway and his horse is the twenty-first century running head-on into a six-thousand-year-old nomadic tradition that regular people cannot understand. They are so removed from that episode of their humanity that it is foreign to them. They have no idea what trans-species communication is. They don’t understand that Eustace uses his horsemanship not as a prestige gimmick or as a means of winning blue ribbons or collecting rodeo belt buckles, but as a way to become bonded to another animal so that together they pass through curtain after curtain of incomprehensible and invisible experience until they reach the indescribable other side.”
But there’s one other thing that the world’s foremost expert on equestrian endurance travel believes about Eustace Conway. He says there’s still more to come from Eustace. He thinks Eustace hasn’t even begun to show us what he can do. He thinks Eustace has the capacity for “some real Jason and the Argonauts type of superhuman adventure. Maybe.”
Why only maybe?
“Because,” he explains, “I think he’s reached a plateau in his life. He’s pushed himself as far as he can go using his charisma and courage, and now he needs to go on a spiritual journey. He needs to do something that is private. He’s postured himself in public for so many years that he doesn’t know himself. There are parts of his soul he can’t begin to understand, and until he learns these things about himself, he’ll never be the nomad he’s meant to be. He’s a brave man, but he’s not a spiritual pilgrim yet. Until he goes out in the world, all alone, and cuts away the ropes and publicity and ego and bullshit and does something truly heroic, he’s just blowing smoke up his own ass. And I’ll tell you another thing. He’s no goddamn farmer, and he should quit trying to be one. That’s not his nature. He needs to get away from all that. He should stop trying to save the world. Because until he stops living in his grandfather’s shadow and pretending that he likes digging holes in the ground and planting vegetables on that goddamn farm, he will never be Jason of the Argonauts.”
Adds CuChullaine O’Reilly, “But that’s just my opinion.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
I alone comprehend the true plan and the means of fulfilling it.
—Charles Fourier, Utopian
Eustace Conway’s grandfather founded Camp Sequoyah in 1924 and ran his domain with an exacting command until the moment of his death, by heart attack, when he was eighty. He died in the harness, as they say, never slowing his stride. And he hadn’t named a successor to his legacy. After his funeral, it was revealed that there was no plan for the camp to continue without him. While Chief always had a large staff working for him, he didn’t trust anyone enough to turn over the management of the operation, never having found anyone he believed capable of running his beloved Sequoyah—his “Camp With a Purpose” where “the Weak Become Strong and the Strong Become Great”—up to his rigorous standards.
When campers and staff arrived at Camp Sequoyah for the summer, Chief took over every aspect of their lives. He dictated how they would dress, when they’d exercise, when they would pray, and what they would eat. One counselor remembers the day Chief Johnson took him into his office and spent a full hour delivering a lecture on how best to sweep a room. Another counselor once got a lecture on how best to use a paperclip. (“The big loop goes to the back of the document; the small loop to the front.”) Naturally, Chief prohibited tobacco, cursing, and alcohol from his property. But he also strictly forbade Coca-Cola, vinegar, pepper, and denim. There was a rumor that Chief even put saltpeter in the applesauce to “curb desire” and keep his boys away from the temptations of self-abuse. (“We did eat an awful lot of applesauce,” said one old Sequoyan when I brought it up.) Hair was not to touch ears. Campers were to wear pressed white shirts on Sundays. Camp nurses, the only females on the workforce, were to be matronly and plain so as not to cause sexual disturbance by their presence. Staff members were to be graded throughout the summer on their physical and social progress, with extra credit given for such traits as Loyalty, Readiness to Shoulder Responsibility, and Personal Magnetism.
He was uncompromising. He did not hand out praise. Nobody was ever good enough for Chief. Nobody worked harder or more efficiently than Chief. He carved that camp from virgin wilderness, creating it with his own strength and genius. He had suffered through the first winters up at Sequoyah in a log cabin, had defined every philosophical notion that made the camp unique, had built its every structure, and had kept the operation alive (and thriving) throughout the hard times of the Great Depression and World War II. So who was going to tell Chief Johnson how anything was done? Nobody. As his grandson Eustace would complain fifty years later in his journal about the lackluster employees of his own empire, Turtle Island, “I have worked hard to make this place what it is. What have they done? How can they respect it? What investment have they made in anything that is a serious challenge? How can I put up with them?”
Well, you can put up with them by assuming absolute power over them, body and soul. That’s what Chief did. Chief had a series of “talks” he delivered to the campers at different points of their stay, based on their ages. Included were discussions of God and Nature and Honesty and Courage and How to Become a Man of Destiny, and also warnings about Masturbation and Dating. He spoke to the boys about “The Effect of a Rational Sex Life Upon Marriage and Offspring” (Talk #5) and about “Venereal Disease” (Talk #6). When his boys left Camp Sequoyah, Chief stayed in touch with them—with the many thousands of them—sending them motivational messages every Christmas, as well as sending out his own earnest pamphlets, which he mailed off at key moments of their lives:
A Letter to Boys About to Leave Home for Preparatory School
A Letter to Young Men About to Enter College
A Letter to Young Men on the Occasion of Their Twenty-first Birthday
A Letter to Young Men About to Get Married
A Letter to Young Men Who Have Just Become Fathers
Every boy was Chief ’s son. And his boys went on to become doctors,
judges, teachers, soldiers—the stalwart backbone of the American South for decades. Every one of their achievements was his achievement. One woman wrote Chief a letter back in the 1950s assuring him that her son, a former Sequoyan, had passed through two years of the Navy without appearing to have acquired any “of the bad habits for which sailors are sometimes known. I feel that the vision he caught at Sequoyah has been and will continue to be a shining guiding light along his way.”
Every boy was Chief ’s son, yes. But he also had two flesh-and-blood sons of his own, Harold and Bill Johnson, the brothers of Eustace Conway’s mother, Karen.
“The youth of each generation should be aware of the role some of them will be privileged to play in the progress of man toward a Higher Destiny,” Chief wrote, and no youths had this responsibility thrust upon them harder than Chief ’s sons. And yet Harold and Bill, perhaps we should not be surprised to learn, both went completely ballistic on their dad. They were smoking and drinking by the age of fifteen. Alternatively sullen and willful. Shooting off guns and racing cars. Disobedient and indignant.
“They were just the opposite,” recalled one old Sequoyan, “of what Chief desperately wanted in a son. He had always envisioned them to be the ideal boys.”
Chief could make no sense of why his sons had gone wrong. Maybe it was the mother’s fault. Mrs. Chief, as she was forever known, was always confounding her husband by not being as rigorous a disciplinarian as he would have liked. But what could you expect? Mrs. Chief was not her husband’s doctrinarian equal. She was a gifted pianist and a college graduate and a frustrated urban sophisticate who was emotional and unpredictable and often resentful about spending her life in the woods with thousands of boys. She had, it was always said with great delicacy, “an artistic temperament.” Unlike her husband, who kept a logical hold on the more animalistic aspects of human nature, Mrs. Chief was known to sometimes scream her head off in fits of frustration and anger. She was also known to sneak away sometimes to play sexy and rollicking ragtime tunes on the piano when her husband was out of earshot. She probably liked pepper, too.