Man on a Mission Embodies the Pioneering Spirit

THE LAST AMERICAN MAN

By Elizabeth Gilbert

Viking

272 pages, $24.95

Picture him: He’s wearing handmade buckskin clothing with a knife sheathed under his belt. He eats possum and roadkill. He’s lived in a tepee for 17 years. He’s hiked the 2,000-mile Appalachian Trail wearing a loincloth, surviving on what he could find along the way. He’s crossed the United States on horseback.

Meet Eustace Conway, the subject of Elizabeth Gilbert’s insightful “The Last American Man,” a man on a mission to lead Americans away from consumerism and back to the arms of Mother Nature.

Conway, who could be described as a cross between Grizzly Adams and Daniel Boone, has not stepped out of the pages of history. He’s a current-day messiah, a 40-year-old symbol of virility, the surviving manifestation of our Manifest Destiny, a flesh-and-blood embodiment of the pioneering spirit that drove this country in years past. He is an anachronism walking the streets of, say, Manhattan, in his wilderness get-up. He talks to cynical school kids about surviving in the wild, making converts out of the toughest of the tough. He strikes up conversations with drug dealers in New York’s Tompkins Square Park, explaining how he hunted and skinned the deer to make his clothes.

Gilbert artfully taps into this unique life to create a fascinating, deeply thought-out and enthralling narrative. The book--one part psychobiography of Conway and his mission, one part social commentary on what his life says about the altered role of the American male--shines a halogen-bright light on Conway’s lifestyle to show us this throwback to another era when the Western-expansion mythology thrived.

Gilbert (“Stern Men”) first met Conway through his younger brother, Judson, with whom she’d once worked on a ranch in the Wyoming Rockies. By that time, Gilbert was keenly aware of her weakness for the lure of the wilderness and cowboy mythology. “They all called me Blaze,” she writes of her tenure on the ranch. “But only because I asked ‘em to.” Gilbert knows herself to be a “faker” when it comes to authentic wilderness living but sees in Judson’s brother something genuine.

“My initial reaction on witnessing Eustace Conway’s life was relief .... [A]ll I could think was Thank God. Thank God somebody in America was still living this way. Thank God that there was at least one genuine mountain man, frontiersman, pioneer, maverick out there.”

Her reaction is not an uncommon one. Conway’s charismatic presence, style of dress and “Man of Destiny” self-image have a pronounced effect on everyone he meets, an effect Gilbert chronicles even as she begins to peek beyond it. The resulting narrative pushes past the easy infatuation with Conway’s dynamic personality and his save-the-world idealism to uncover a more genuine, complex and, at times, contradictory story.

Raised in suburban South Carolina on the edge of the woods, Conway spent his childhood looking for validation from a father who saw in him nothing to validate. If Conway could not earn his father’s recognition in conventional ways, Gilbert argues, then he’d create his own coming-of-age rituals to celebrate his entrance into adulthood. Ultimately, she argues, this is the driving force behind just about everything he proceeds to do. She details his many exploits with skillful writing, intersecting the stories with well-researched analyses of pioneering legends, as well as the history of utopian societies in America. In Conway’s life, Gilbert traces the vanishing arc of the American pioneer.

With vast plans to change how Americans interact with the natural world, he toils to create (with a loan from his father) Turtle Island, which has become a 1,000-acre educational center hidden in the Southern Appalachian Mountains of North Carolina. He attracts flocks of apprentices who sign on for two-year commitments to work there with no pay beyond the adventure of learning.

Yet after a month or two, most pack it in, unable to put up with Conway’s domineering, at times coldhearted personality. With an overwhelming desire to marry and start a family, Conway woos scores of dynamic women. The love stories all end in heartbreak, though, when his idealism, perfectionism and hard-driving disposition demand more than any modern-day American woman, even the most hearty and wilderness-ready, can give.

Over the course of Gilbert’s sharp account, Conway shifts from a fire-eyed evangelist to a man on the cusp of middle age, who fears he may be losing the battle to bring us all back to nature. “The Last American Man” explores through the lens of Eustace Conway’s particular life our modern infatuation with the myth of the pioneering man and succeeds in uncovering the human reality behind it.