The Last American Man Read Free Page A

Wyoming, and winters helping
     tourists catch trophy fish in the Florida Keys.
    “Intent on learning how to fish saltwater and in hopes of getting a job on a charter boat,” he wrote to me, on his first trip
     to Florida. “I’m staying with a couple I took horseback riding one day in Wyoming. Got to talking, and here I am . . . Been
     spending a lot of time in the Everglades National Park, birdwatching and wrestling alligators.”
    “Not making a living,” he wrote, on his first trip to Alaska, “just living .”
    Judson always swore he’d come and see me sometime in New York City, where I had since moved. (“Does the Hudson have fish in
     it?”) But the years passed, and he didn’t swing by, and I never quite expected him to. (“Gettin’ married, huh?” he finally
     wrote, after a long letter of mine. “Guess I waited too long to visit . . .”) And then one day, years after we’d last spoken
     in person, he called. This was in itself astonishing. Judson doesn’t use telephones, not when there are perfectly good stamps
     to be had. But the call was urgent. He told me he was flying to New York the very next day, to visit. Just a whim, he said.
     Just wanted to see what a big city was like, he said. And then he added that his older brother, Eustace, would be coming along,
     too.
    Sure enough, the Conway boys arrived the next morning. They stepped out of a yellow cab right in front of my apartment and
     made the most outrageous, incongruous sight. There was handsome Judson, looking like a young swain from “Bonanza.” And there,
     right beside him, was his brother, Davy Fuckin’ Crockett.
    I knew this was Davy Fuckin’ Crockett because that’s what everyone on the streets of New York City started calling the guy
     right away.
    “Yo, man! It’s Davy Fuckin’ Crockett!”
    “Check out Davy Fuckin’ Crockett!”
    “King of the wild motherfuckin’ frontier!”
    Of course, some New Yorkers mistook him for Daniel Fuckin’ Boone, but everyone had something to say about this curious visitor,
     who moved stealthily through the streets of Manhattan, wearing handmade buckskin clothing and carrying an impressive knife
     on his belt.
    Davy Fuckin’ Crockett.
    So that’s how I met Eustace Conway.
    Over the next two days, against the unlikely backdrop of New York City, I heard all about Eustace Conway’s life. One night,
     Judson and Eustace and I went drinking in a lowdown bar in the East Village, and while Judson kept busy dancing with all the
     pretty girls and telling thrilling stories of life on the range, Eustace sat in a corner with me and quietly explained how
     he had been living for the last seventeen years in a teepee, hidden away in the Southern Appalachian Mountains of North Carolina.
     He called his home Turtle Island, named for the Native American creationist legend of the sturdy turtle who carries the entire
     weight of the earth on his back. Eustace told me he owned a thousand acres of land back there in the woods—a perfectly contained
     and unspoiled basin, with a protected watershed.
    It seemed curious to me that somebody who eats possum and wipes his butt with leaves could have managed to acquire a thousand
     acres of pristine wilderness. But Eustace Conway was, as I would discover, a most cunning man. He had amassed that property
     slowly and over time with money he made by going into the local school systems and talking to riveted schoolchildren about
     eating possum and wiping one’s butt with leaves. Land, he declared, was his only major expense in life. Everything else he
     needed he could make, build, grow, or kill. He hunted for his own food, drank water from the ground, made his own clothing
     . . .
    Eustace told me that people tended to romanticize his lifestyle. Because when people first ask him what he does for a living,
     he invariably replies, “I live in the woods.” Then people get all dreamy and say, “Ah! The woods! The woods! I love the woods!”
     as if Eustace