The Last American Man Read Free Page B

spends his days sipping the dew off clover blossoms. But that’s not what living in the woods means to Eustace
     Conway.
    Some years ago, for instance, out hunting for his winter deer, he came upon a gorgeous eight-point buck grazing through the
     brush. He shot. The buck went down. Not knowing if he had killed the animal, he waited and waited to see whether it would
     struggle up from where it had fallen and try to run. There was no movement. Slowly, quietly, Eustace crept toward the spot
     where the animal had gone down and found the massive buck, lying on its side, breathing a thin, red vapor of blood through
     its nose. The animal’s eyes were moving; it was alive.
    “Get up, brother!” Eustace shouted. “Get up and I’ll finish you off!”
    The animal didn’t move. Eustace hated to see it lying there, alive and injured, but he also hated to blow off its beautiful
     head at pointblank range, so he took his knife from his belt and stabbed into the buck’s jugular vein. Up came the buck, very
     much alive, whipping its rack of antlers. Eustace clung to the antlers, still holding his knife, and the two began a wrestling
     match, thrashing through the brush, rolling down the hill, the buck lunging, Eustace trying to deflect its heavy antlers into
     trees and rocks. Finally, he let go with one hand and sliced his knife completely across the buck’s neck, gashing open veins,
     arteries, and windpipe. But the buck kept fighting, until Eustace ground its face into the dirt, kneeling on its head and
     suffocating the dying creature. And then he plunged his hands into the animal’s neck and smeared the blood all over his own
     face, weeping and laughing and offering up an ecstatic prayer of thanksgiving to the universe for the magnificent phenomenon
     of this creature who had so valiantly sacrificed its life to sustain his own.
    That’s what living in the woods means to Eustace Conway.
    The morning after our conversation in the bar, I took the Conway brothers on a walk through Tompkins Square Park. There, I
     lost Eustace. I couldn’t find him anywhere, and I got worried, concerned that he was out of his environment and therefore
     helpless and vulnerable. But when I found him, he was in pleasant conversation with the scariest posse of drug dealers you’d
     ever want to meet. They had offered Eustace Conway crack, which he had politely declined, but he was engaging with them, nonetheless,
     about other issues.
    “Yo, man,” the drug dealers were asking as I arrived, “where’d you buy that dope shirt?”
    Eustace explained to the drug dealers that he had not, in fact, bought the shirt; he had made it. Out of a deer. He described
     exactly how he’d shot the deer with a black powder musket, skinned the deer (“with this very knife!”), softened the hide with
     the deer’s own brains, and then sewed the shirt together, using strands of sinew taken from alongside the deer’s spine. He
     told the drug dealers that it wasn’t such a difficult process, and that they could do it, too. And if they came to visit him
     in his mountain home of Turtle Island, he’d teach them all sorts of marvelous ways to live off nature.
    I said, “Eustace, we gotta go.”
    The drug dealers shook his hand and said, “Damn, Hustice. You something else .”
    But this is how Eustace interacts with all the world all the time— taking any opportunity to teach people about nature. Which
     is to say that Eustace is not merely a hermit or a hippie or even a survivalist. He does not live in the woods because he’s
     hiding from us, or because he’s growing excellent weed, or because he’s storing guns for the imminent race war. He lives in
     the woods because he belongs there. Moreover, he tries to get other people to move into the woods with him, because he believes
     that is his particular calling—nothing less than to save our nation’s collective soul by reintroducing Americans to the concept
     of revelatory communion with the