One of my favorite Turtle Island apprentices was an intelligent and soft-spoken young guy named Jason. He hailed from a well-to-do suburban family, had been raised in comfort, and been carefully educated in expensive private schools. When I asked Jason why he wanted to commit the next two years of his life to studying under Eustace Conway, he said, “Because I’ve been unhappy, and I didn’t know where else to go to get happy.”
Saddened by the unexpected death of his beloved father, angry at his mother for her “narrow-minded Christianity,” annoyed by his “useless professors,” disgusted with his peers, “who ignorantly refuse to listen to my songs and their warnings about environmental destruction,” Jason had recently dropped out of college. When he heard about Eustace, he thought that a stay at Turtle Island would provide the enlightenment he sought. He saw Eustace as a larger-than-life hero who “goes out in the world and meets his destiny without fear of obstacles, and who can make things work where most people are satisfied to see something stay broken and die.”
In a dramatic gesture, Jason decided to walk to Turtle Island all the way from Charlotte during Christmas vacation, but he got only about five miles down the road. It was freezing rain and he was overpacked and couldn’t figure out where he was going to camp that night or how to stay dry. Demoralized and hungry, he called his girlfriend from a gas station, and she drove him the rest of the way to Turtle Island.
Jason’s dream was to achieve perfect self-sufficiency. He didn’t want to deal with phony Americans and their materialistic stupidity. He planned on moving to Alaska and homesteading up there in the last frontier. He wanted to live off the land, and he hoped that Eustace would teach him how to do it. He dreamed that life would be better in Alaska, where “a man can still hunt for food to feed his family without going through the bureaucracy of getting a hunting license.”
“Have you ever been hunting?” I asked Jason.
“Well, not yet,” Jason said, grinning sheepishly.
Jason was the very model of the young guy who typically comes to Eustace Conway for guidance. He was trying to discover how to be a man in a society that no longer had a clear path for him. Just as Eustace Conway had struggled as a teenager to find rituals to lead him into manhood, Jason was struggling to find some ceremony or meaning that would help define his own ascension. But he had no role models, his culture had no satisfying coming-of-age ritual for him, and his background had provided him with none of the manly skills that were so attractive to him. He was, by his own admission, lost.
This is the same disturbing cultural question that Joseph Campbell spent years asking. What happens to young people in a society that has lost all trace of ritual? Because adolescence is a transitional period, it is an inherently perilous journey. But culture and ritual are supposed to protect us through the transitions of life, holding us in safety during danger and answering confusing questions about identity and change, in order to keep us from getting separated from the community during our hardest personal journeys.
In more primitive societies, a boy might go through an entire year of initiation rites to usher him into manhood. He might endure ritual scarification or rigorous tests of endurance, or he might be sent away from the community for a period of meditation and solitude, after which he would return to the fold and be seen by all as a changed being. He will have moved safely from boyhood into manhood, and he will know exactly when that happened and what is now expected of him, because his role is so clearly codified. But how is a modern American boy supposed to know when he has reached manhood? When he gets his driver’s license? When he smokes pot for the first time? When he experiences unprotected sex with a young girl who herself has no idea whether she’s a woman now or not?
Jason didn’t know. All he knew was that he ached for some sort of confirmation of his adulthood, and college life wasn’t giving it to him. He had no idea where to find what he sought, but he was compelled by the idea that Eustace might help. Jason did have a beautiful girlfriend, and he maintained the romantic idea that the two of them would homestead in Alaska together someday, but she apparently had her own ideas. She was young, affluent, a brilliant student, as reflexively feminist as most of her generation, and she had an itch to see the world. She had limitless possibilities before her. Jason hoped she would “settle down” eventually with him, but that struck me as doubtful, and, indeed, after the next few months she left him. And that hardly made Jason feel better about himself as a man in the making.
Jason’s discomfort in his own skin seemed to me typical of many young American men, who see their female peers soar into a new world and often have trouble catching up. When Jason looks out into American society, after all, what does he see? Aside from the environmental and consumer crisis that so offends his sensibilities, he is facing a world undergoing a total cultural and gender upheaval. Men are still largely in charge, mind you, but they are slipping fast. Modern America is a society where college-educated men have seen their incomes drop 20 percent over the last twenty-five years. A society where women complete high school and college at significantly higher rates than men, and have new doors of opportunity opened to them every day. A society where a third of all wives make more money than their husbands. A society where women are increasingly in control of their biological and economic destinies, often choosing to raise their children alone or not to have children at all or to leave an identifiable man out of the reproductive picture entirely, through the miracles of the sperm bank. A society, in other words, where a man is not necessary in the way he was customarily needed—to protect, to provide, to procreate.
I was at a women’s professional basketball game in New York recently. As a girl I had been a serious basketball player, but there was no such thing as the WNBA back then, so I’ve watched this league grow in recent years with the greatest interest. I love going to the games and seeing talented female athletes compete for decent salaries. Mostly, though, I love watching the spectators, who tend to be enthusiastic and athletic preteen girls. On this night at a New York Liberty game, I saw something amazing. A handful of twelve-year-old girls ran to the railing in front of their seats and unfurled a sheet on which they’d written:
W.N.B.A. = WHO NEEDS BOYS, ANYHOW?
As cheers rose throughout the entire arena, all I could think was that Eustace Conway’s grandfather must be whirling in his grave.
So, given the current culture, it’s no wonder that a guy like Jason would want to move to Alaska and reclaim some noble and antique ideal of manhood. But he had an immense distance to travel—not geographic—before he could consider being a pioneer, before he could correctly learn what he was “for.” Jason was keen and, heaven knows, sincere. He had a terrific smile, and Eustace enjoyed his company and his songs warning of environmental destruction. But Jason had an ego as soft and vulnerable as a fresh bruise, and he comported himself with a certain compensatory arrogance that made him difficult to teach. And, given his protected suburban upbringing, he had a big, fat, gaping lack of common sense. Shortly after arriving at Turtle Island, he borrowed one of Eustace’s work trucks for a trip down to South Carolina and accidentally drove the entire trip at seventy-five miles an hour with the vehicle locked in four-wheel drive.
As Eustace said later in wonder, “I can’t believe my truck even existed that distance in such a condition.”
Indeed, by the time Jason arrived at his destination, the engine was ruined.
“Didn’t you notice anything strange about the way the truck was running?” Eustace asked Jason, when he called to report that the truck’s engine block had “suddenly” cracked.
“It was making a lot of noise,” Jason admitted. “It did seem kind of weird. The engine was roaring and grinding so loud, I had to turn the music all the way up to drown out the noise.”
It cost Eustace thousands of dollars to get his best truck running again.
Over the next nine months of Jason’s apprenticeship (he would quit long before his two-year commitment was up, hav
ing grown unhappy with Eustace’s leadership), he acquired impressive proficiency in primitive farming and other rugged skills, but he also wrecked two more of Eustace’s vehicles. And when Eustace asked Jason to consider paying him back for some of the damage, Jason became deeply offended. How dare this so-called natural man show an attachment to material possessions! What a hypocrite Eustace was!
“Don’t put your shit on me, Eustace,” Jason wrote soon after leaving Turtle Island. “I don’t need to feel this way. I need relationships that enrich my life, not ones that bring me down. I feel your truck is more important to you than I am . . . To borrow words from Lester, the father in American Beauty, ‘It’s just a fucking couch!’ ”
Again and again this shift takes place in Eustace’s life. He is worshipped, and then his worshippers are horrified to find that he is not their godlike ideal. By and large, the people who come to Eustace are seekers, and when they meet this charismatic icon, they are certain that their search is over, that all their questions will be answered, which is why they so quickly and unconditionally hand their lives over to him. And it’s not only young men who fall into this pattern.
“For five days I was in infinity,” wrote one typically amazed young woman, after a short visit to Turtle Island. “Tiny pieces of my breath were everywhere in the white pines and the sassafras. Thank you, Creator! Thank you, Eustace! It has influenced me forever. It is the one place I know I want to be. If you ever need another hand, I’ll give you both of mine!”
After such a glorified introduction, it can be mortifying to learn that life at Turtle Island is grueling and that Eustace is another flawed human being, with his own teeming brew of unanswered questions. Not many seekers survive this shock, a shock I’ve come to refer to as the Eustace Conway Whiplash Effect. (Eustace, by the way, has since co-opted the phrase, going so far as to wonder whether he should perhaps distribute neck braces to all apprentices as a preventive measure to help them survive the inevitable trauma of disenchantment. He jokes, “People will ask, ‘Why do I need to wear this neck brace, Eustace?’ and I’ll nod wisely and say, ‘Oh, you’ll see.’ ”)
This is the same reason that it’s challenging for Eustace to maintain lasting friendships. There are hundreds, perhaps thousands of people intimately connected to his life, but many of them seem to fall into one of two categories: enchanted disciples or disillusioned heretics. Most people find it impossible to drop their notions of Eustace as an icon long enough to befriend him as a person. He could probably count on one hand the number of people he considers close friends, and even those relationships are often strained, both by Eustace’s lifelong fear of betrayal (which has kept him from pursuing full intimacy in friendships) and by his insistence that he cannot be truly understood by anyone (which doesn’t help, either). Eustace doesn’t believe that even the man he would call his best friend—a sensitive, kind, skilled woodsman named Preston Roberts, whom he met in college—completely understands him.
Preston and Eustace used to dream, back in college, that they would form a nature preserve together and raise their families side by side, along with their buddy Frank Chambless, who had hiked the Appalachian Trail with Eustace. But when the time came to buy Turtle Island, Preston and Frank were only marginally involved in the operation. Frank bought a small piece of land near the preserve but sold it years later, to Eustace’s chagrin, to raise money. After that sale, Frank virtually disappeared from Eustace’s life, and Eustace never understood why.
Preston Roberts bought land near Turtle Island and kept it. He has labored on many of the Turtle Island buildings and has taught at summer camp over the years. He and Eustace take off every now and again for a horse journey or a hiking adventure, where they can bask in each other’s company and in the splendor of nature. Preston admires Eustace immensely and would gladly take a bullet for him. But despite Eustace’s repeated invitations, he has not yet elected to move his family to Turtle Island permanently. As Preston’s wife explained, “My husband has always been a little afraid that he’d lose his friendship with Eustace if he had to work with him every day.”
Indeed, that sort of proximity does seem to try most souls. Particularly during apprenticeships. It doesn’t help, of course, that the wouldbe apprentices who come to Turtle Island are often a little emotionally vulnerable to begin with.
“Some of people who want to come and live here,” Eustace told me once, “are the most antisocial and maladjusted and miserable people in society. They think that Turtle Island is the place that will finally make them happy. They write me letters saying how much they hate humanity . . . Jesus Christ, can you imagine trying to organize a work detail out of people like that? Teenage runaways want to come here. There’s someone in the state prison system writing me letters right now about wanting to come here. These are the kind of dissatisfied outcasts that I attract.”
When I visited Eustace in August of 1999, he had a young apprentice whom he’d nicknamed Twig. Twig was from some disaster of a dysfunctional family in Ohio and kept getting thrown out of homes and in trouble with the law. Eustace accepted Twig because it is the very cornerstone of his philosophy that anyone can handle this primitive life if he is fully willing and properly taught. Twig was a major pain in the ass, though. He was a belligerent and untrustworthy little punk, and several of the other apprentices (there were three other young men and women there at the time, about the normal number each year) asked Eustace to dismiss the kid, because he was so disruptive to the spirit of their work. And, needless to say, Twig didn’t have a single hard skill. But Eustace wanted to give Twig a chance, and he invested hours in working with him and calming him down and teaching him how to use tools and trying to show him how to get along with people.
There had been some major improvements. Twig came to Turtle Island weak and pale and lazy. In time, you could see every muscle in his chest and his back while he was working hard. (This transformation from feebleness to fitness plays out all the time at Turtle Island, and it is perhaps Eustace’s favorite thing to witness.) And this screwed-up kid could now hitch a plow to a horse and tend to pigs and cook over an open fire. One evening he even made me soup out of yellow jacket larvae— an ancient Cherokee recipe. But the magnitude of what Twig had yet to learn was positively numbing to think about.
One evening, I went to a distant field with Eustace to watch him teach Twig how to use a disc plow. They had to drag the plow out to this field about half a mile through the woods with a mule and draft horse, using a sturdy old Appalachian sled to carry the machinery. Every aspect of the job spoke of potential physical danger—the ungainly and willful animals, the unsteadiness of the sled, the flying chains and leather straps and ropes, the razor-sharp edges of the heavy old plow. And yet knowing all this, and having lived at Turtle Island for six months, Twig elected to show up for this job wearing flip-flops.
“Personally, I wouldn’t run a disc plow in a rocky pasture using a mule as temperamental as Peter Rabbit while wearing flip-flops,” Eustace told me, as we watched Twig work, “but if he wants to lose a foot, I’ll give it to him.”
“You’re not going to say anything to him?” I asked.
Eustace looked exhausted. “Ten years ago, I would have. I would have given him an earful about the proper footwear for farming and about protecting yourself around animals and heavy machinery, but I’m tired now, I’m tired of dealing with people who don’t have one molecule of common sense. I could correct Twig on this, and I could correct him seven hundred times a day on stuff like this, but I’ve reached the point where all I have the energy for is to keep people from killing themselves or me or each other. You know, when Twig first came here, he begged me to throw him right into the wilderness, because he wanted to live close to nature. The reality is that he’s ignorant. He wouldn’t last five goddamn minutes in the real wilderness. He doesn’t even know how much he doesn’t know. And I have to deal with this stuff all the time—not just from Twig, but from hundreds like him.”
Then,
to Twig, who had begun to plow the vast field in weird and tiny little circles, Eustace said: “Here’s an idea, Twig. Every time you turn the animals, you’re putting pressure on their mouths and pressure on yourself and on the machinery. Try to think of a more streamlined way to plow instead of making so many tight turns. How about making long runs with the plow, all the way from one end of the field to the other, keeping in one direction for as long as you have the momentum going? You understand what I’m saying? You might even want to plow this slope here, but I’d recommend coming at it from below, since you’re still inexperienced and you don’t want to have to worry about running over your animals with your plow.”
As Twig headed off, sort of doing what he’d been told, Eustace said to me, “This is going to take him forever. I’d rather be in my office right now taking care of the seven hundred letters I need to write and the seven hundred tax bills I need to pay. But I have to stay here and watch him, because I can’t trust him yet with my animals or machinery. So why do I bother? Because my hope is that someday he’ll learn how to handle this chore and then I can send him out by saying, ‘Go plow that field,’ and he’ll know exactly what to do and I’ll be able to trust that the job will be done right. But we’re a long way from that. I mean, the boy is wearing flip-flops! Look at him.”
Actually, he was wearing flip-flops and shorts and no shirt, and he had a cigarette tucked behind his ear.
“I like to think I’m teaching these people skills that they’ll someday use in their own lives, but when I think of the hundreds of people who have come through here over the years, I can’t imagine one who could manage a primitive life right now all alone. Maybe Christian Kaltrider will someday. He was brilliant. He’s building a log cabin on his own land right now, and that’s good to see. He learned all that here. There’s a kid named Avi Aski, who was a terrific apprentice. He’s looking for land to buy in Tennessee, and maybe he’ll make it work. Maybe.”