I met Eustace Conway through his little brother Judson, who is a young cowboy and a very good friend of mine. I used to work with Judson Conway on a ranch out in Wyoming. This was some years ago. Judson and I had a million laughs together and then went our separate ways, but we’ve always stayed in touch. Like a good Civil War soldier, he corresponds faithfully and eloquently by post, but it happened one day—so unexpectedly!—that he actually placed a telephone call. Judson Conway phoned to announce that he would be coming to visit me in New York City the very next afternoon. Just a whim, Judson said. Just wanted to see what a big town is like, Judson said. And then Judson added that his older brother Eustace would be coming along, too. Sure enough, the Conway boys arrived the following day. They stepped out of a yellow cab, right in front of my apartment building. They made the most 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 it 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 muthafuckin’ frontier!”

Of course, some New Yorkers took him for Daniel Fuckin’ Boone, but everyone had something to say about this curious visitor, who moved stealthily through Manhattan wearing handmade buckskin clothing and carrying a mighty knife on his belt.

Davy Fuckin’ Crockett.

So that’s how I met Eustace Conway.

Briefly, the history of America goes like this: There was a frontier, and then there was no longer a frontier. It all happened rather quickly. There were Indians, then explorers, then settlers, then towns, then cities. Nobody was really paying attention until the moment the wilderness was officially tamed, at which point everybody suddenly wanted it back.

Within the general spasm of nostalgia that ensued (Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, Frederic Remington’s cowboy paintings), there came a very specific cultural panic, a panic rooted in the question, What will become of our boys?

Problem was, while the classic European coming-of-age story generally featured a provincial boy who moved to the city and transformed into a refined gentleman, the American tradition had evolved into the utter opposite. The American boy came of age by leaving civilization and striking out toward the hills. There he shed his cosmopolitan manners and transformed into a robust man. Not a gentleman, mind you, but a man. Without the wilderness as proving ground, what would become of our boys?

Why, they might become effete, pampered, decadent. Christ save us, they might become Europeans.

For obvious reasons, this is a terror that has never entirely left us. A century later, some of us are still concerned about the state of American manhood, which is why some of us are so grateful when we get to meet Eustace Conway.

Eustace Conway moved into the woods for good when he was 17 years old. This was in 1978, which was around the same time Star Wars was released. He lived in a tepee, made fire by rubbing two sticks together, and bathed in icy streams. At this point in his biography, you might deduce that Eustace is a survivalist or a hippie or a hermit, but he’s not any of these things. He’s not storing guns for the imminent race war; he’s not cultivating excellent weed; he’s not hiding from us. Eustace Conway is in the woods because he belongs in the woods.

Eustace started off on a small parcel of land, but over the past twenty years he’s accumulated 1,000 acres of pristine wilderness in the southern Appalachian Mountains of North Carolina. He calls his home Turtle Island, after the Native American legend of the turtle who carries the very earth on its back.

Eustace travels through life with perfect equanimity. He has never experienced an awkward moment. During his visit to New York City, I lost him one day in Tompkins Square Park. When I found him again, he was in pleasant conversation with the scariest posse of drug dealers you’d ever want to meet. They’d offered Eustace crack, which he’d politely declined, but he was chatting with them about other issues.

“Yo, man,” the drug dealers were asking as I arrived, “where’d you buy that dope shirt?“

Eustace was explaining to the drug dealers that he did not, in fact, buy the shirt at all but had made it out of a deer. He described exactly how he had skinned the deer and 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’s not a difficult process and that they could do it, too, and that—if they came to visit him in the mountains—he would show them all sorts of wonderful ways to live off nature.

I said, “Eustace, we gotta go.”

The drug dealers shook his hand and said, “Damn, Hustice. You something else.“

Eustace Conway has perfect eyesight, perfect hearing, perfect teeth, perfect balance and reflexes. He has a long, lean body. He talks real slow. He is modest but truthful, which means when I once asked Eustace, “Is there anything you can’t do?” he had to reply, “Well, I’ve never found anything to be particularly difficult.”

I should say not.

By the time Eustace Conway was 6 years old, he could throw a knife accurately enough to nail a chipmunk to a tree. By the time he was 10, he could kill a running squirrel at fifty feet with a bow and arrow. When he turned 12, he went into the forest alone and empty-handed for a week, making his own shelter and living off the land.

This may sound like extreme behavior for a child, but it was only what was expected of Eustace. It’s something of a family tradition, anchored in the philosophy of Eustace Conway’s extraordinary grandfather. Eustace’s grandfather was an upright World War I veteran, whom everyone called Chief. Chief was not about to stand back and let America’s youth grow up effete, pampered and decadent. No, sir. Not on his watch. Immediately upon returning home from the war, Chief founded the North Carolina branch of the Boy Scouts of America. This was a good start but not good enough. Chief did not believe that the Boy Scouts program went as far as it could in developing sturdy, capable citizens. And so, in 1924, he established an extremely rigorous summer camp in the mountains near Asheville. He called his project “Camp Sequoyah for Boys: Where the Weak Become Strong and the Strong Become Great.” He asked of his campers only this simple request: that they ceaselessly strive to achieve physical, intellectual and moral perfection.

Eustace’s mother was Chief’s only daughter. Raised in the woods of Camp Sequoyah, she was rugged as all hell. When she was only 23 years old, she sold her silver flute for passage to Alaska, where she lived in a tent by a river with her gun and her dog. She didn’t marry until she was 30, and then it was to a Camp Sequoyah counselor. As soon as her children were old enough to walk, she let them loose in the woods, thoroughly unsupervised.

“I suppose I was a bad mother,” Mrs. Conway says now, not very convincingly.

The other matrons in the neighborhood were certainly horrified by Mrs. Conway’s child-rearing techniques. Hysterical, they’d call her up on the phone and shriek, “You can’t let your babies play in those woods! There are poisonous snakes out there!”

Thirty years later, Mrs. Conway is still amused at the absurdity of this concern. “For heaven’s sake!” she says. “My children always knew the difference between poisonous snakes out there!”

Eustace has always done just fine out there. When he was 18 years old, he traveled down the Mississippi River in a handmade cedar canoe. When he was 19, he walked the 2,000 miles of the Appalachian Trail, surviving on only what he could hunt or gather along the way. Over the next few years, he hiked the Alps (in sneakers), kayaked across Alaska, scaled cliffs in New Zealand and lived with Navajo in Mexico.

When Eustace was in his mid-twenties, he decided that he wanted to study a primitive culture more closely, so he flew to Guatemala. He got off the plane and pretty much started asking, “Where are the primitive people at?” He was pointed toward the jungle, where he hiked until he found a remote village of Mayan Indians. He lived with the Indians for months. They liked him a lot.

But his coolest adventure was his most recent. In 1995, Eustace and his brother Judson rode their horses across America. They didn’t know if it was possible or even legal to do this. They didn’t have any corporate sponsors or fancy gear. They just ate a big Christmas dinner with their family and then strapped on their guns, mounted their horses, and headed out. Eustace reckoned they could make it to the Pacific by Easter, although everyone he told this to laughed in his face.

Their horses were in perfect shape, and they trotted almost fifty miles a day. Eustace and Judson ate roadkill deer and squirrel soup. They slept in barns and in the homes of awestruck citizens, but when they reached the dry, open West, they just fell off their horses every night and slept on the ground where they fell. They were very nearly killed by swerving eighteen-wheeler trucks when their horses went wild on a busy interstate bridge. They were very nearly arrested in Mississippi for not wearing shirts.

In San Diego, they picketed their horses along a patch of grass between a mall and an eight-lane highway. They slept there that night and reached the Pacific Ocean the next day. Eustace rode his horse right into the surf. Judson rode his horse right into a bar and sat there—on his horse—for several hours, spinning his six-shooter and telling stories, while the bartender and the customers bought him round after round after round. It was ten hours before Easter. They had crossed the country in 103 days, setting, while they were at it, a world record.

From coast to coast, Americans of every conceivable background had looked up at Eustace Conway on his horse and said wistfully, “I wish I could do what you’re doing.”

To every last citizen, Eustace had replied, “You can.”

Eustace has been living in the woods for twenty years now. He makes, builds or kills anything he needs, so it’s somewhat difficult to buy the guy a house gift. Still, my mama taught me never to visit anybody without bringing a present. This caused a dilemma: What do you give the man who has nothing? In the end, I decided to bring Eustace a jar of my father’s homemade honey. I figured his traditional American heart would appreciate that—the fruits of the labor from a small family farm, etc. I thought it was a very intuitive gift. Something he might actually need.

Days later I drove up the twisted roads of the Blue Ridge Mountains towards his home. Eustace lives way over in the western corner of North Carolina, almost on the Tennessee border. He’s only about twenty miles from the nearest Hardee’s, but they’re a dramatic twenty miles; once you get off the highway, you are in serious Appalachia. As the mountains get higher, the houses become tin-roof shacks, with yards full of fossilized appliances and ancient cars. “It might look like Deliverance to you,” Eustace had warned, “but don’t be scared.” Hoping the locals weren’t too enthusiastic about guns, I drove slowly and politely. I survived a series of convoluted dirt switchbacks, and then I was finally driving on Eustace Conway’s property. There were his horses. There were his antique plows. And there were his rows and rows of goddamn beehives.

“I brought you something,” I told Eustace and held out my gift.

He started laughing.

“It’s honey,” I said.

He hugged me. I hugged him right back, happy to be welcomed but thinking—as I have often thought before and since—This guy likes me, but he doesn’t really need me.

Eustace Conway doesn’t really need anything. He’s transformed Turtle Island into something like a small, self-sufficient planet. It’s a much more sophisticated compound than I had expected. I’d never visited Eustace before, so I was surprised to discover that he doesn’t even live in a tepee anymore.

“After seventeen years in a tepee,” he said, “I decided it was time to move up.”

Now he lives in a toolshed.

There are other buildings on his land, though: a blacksmith shop, a handful of barns, a large open-air kitchen with wood-burning stoves, several log cabins for campers. He’s cleared acres of pasture from his forest. He keeps horses, hogs, chickens, turkeys. There are gardens on his land, and roads. There are bridges, three of which he built in a single day. None of this was here ten years ago, but Eustace cleared, constructed and arranged every sturdy and ingenious piece of it.

Recently, a North Carolina anthropology professor heard about Eustace Conway. She heard there was this young guy living in the hills who farmed with mules. She heard he made his own roofing shingles, built cabins without nails, did his own blacksmith work. Fascinated, she sent an envoy up to Turtle Island to ask Eustace if he would come down the mountain and explain to her anthropology class exactly how he’d done all this.

Eustace, who will generally go anywhere to talk to anyone, sent the envoy back home with this message for the professor: “Tell her I did it by working my fucking ass off.”

The week I was there, there were no campers at Turtle Island, so we had the place to ourselves. The only other inhabitant was a quiet college kid named Christian, who was working as Eustace’s apprentice. Their interaction was simple: Eustace gave brief, articulate instructions; Christian obeyed. I got the feeling the two could pass entire days without speaking a superfluous word. They worked the land from dawn to dusk. Christian made meals, like venison stew and cornmeal pancakes. They ate with wooden spoons, from wooden bowls. Before each meal, the two would bow their heads. A long silence. Then Eustace would say gravely, “We are grateful for this beautiful day and for the blessing of this food.”

I felt as if I’d stepped into an eighteenth-century Quaker household. I felt as if I’d brought a bad smell in with me. I felt that I reeked of the stupidest features of modern American society (diet dog food, beepers for children), and I felt tragically incompetent. (I don’t work the land. I don’t make venison stew.)

But by the next afternoon, Eustace had me plowing a field. It was exhausting, muscular work. His team, a mismatch of a mule and a draft horse, responded perfectly to voice commands, but the field was full of rocks and roots and the air was North Carolina humid. I followed behind the plow, and Eustace followed behind me, hand in his pockets, offering carefully worded suggestions and corrections. His patience with me was remarkable. Eustace needed that field plowed and could have plowed it much faster alone, but he never once said, “Give me that goddamn thing and I’ll do it myself.”

He never says that, because he wants people to learn what he does. That’s his mission. He teaches everyone. He teaches his paying campers and his apprentices and his classes of second graders, but he also teaches the New York City drug dealers and me. You visit Turtle Island; he’ll teach you. Because he hopes—for what? What does he hope for? That you may go home and dig your own canoe? That those drug dealers will make their own clothing from animal hides? That I, living in a one-bedroom Manhattan apartment, will always have the knowledge of the plow beneath my hands in case I ever decide to tear up the pavement on Sixth Avenue and create a hay field there?

Actually, yes.

“I want to tell the world,” Eustace said, “that you are not handcuffed to your culture. You can return to the woods. You can make your own food. You can make your own clothing. You can live without a clock. It’s easy!”

Eustace wasn’t simply handing out cheap talk there. He’s got a vision, fully formed. He’s got the answers. He once wrote a policy plan explaining exactly how Americans can make the transition from insipid modern culture back to a richer natural lifestyle. Eustace recognized that an abrupt move to the wilderness would be a big step for most Americans, so he wrote a phase-by-phase guide to help families make the transformation gradually. He created this manifesto shortly after he’d moved into the woods, back when he was a real zealot, and his words have a marvelous tone of you-can-do-it! optimism.

First, Eustace writes, the family should get rid of the television set. Other appliances should then be abandoned, one at a time. Slowly, the family should stop using electricity and start collecting water from streams. Then the family should move into the backyard, in tents. It should begin learning how to grow and hunt its own food. Of course, the house would be there, as a security blanket, but the family would need it less and less. Eventually, when it comes time to move into the woods for good, the family will have already grown accustomed to the lifestyle.

It’s easy!

Too bad the first step is getting rid of that television. That’s going to pose a real problem. We’re all Americans here, and we all know that any plan beginning with a removed television set ain’t gonna be sweeping the nation too fast.

Eustace exhausts himself trying to prove that we can indeed live like him. But we probably can’t. Perhaps we don’t even want to. If not, what does that make Eustace? A novelty? A fool? What Eustace wants to be, more than anything, is an example, but we seem destined to disappoint him. Our vanities and frailties block us from following him into the woods. I, for one, could not live in the woods. I didn’t mind the hard work, and I appreciated the beauty of Turtle Island, but my thoughts strayed—not to my family, not to hot running water, but to the really gorgeous and expensive Calvin Klein suit I’d purchased recently. While I was up there plowing that field, while Eustace was teaching me how to handle that draft horse, my thoughts were constantly wandering to that Calvin Klein suit, which is the nicest thing I’ve ever owned. I’d picture it hanging in my closet. I’d wonder how it was doing. And, I’m sorry to confess, I’d sigh with deep longing.

How could Eustace Conway ever save a wretch like me?

He lives alone, which I had never questioned.

I speculate about everyone’s sex life, but I had never wondered about Eustace Conway and women. I figured somehow he was above that kind of stuff. Didn’t need it. (Remember: He bathes in icy streams.) Besides, romance has never figured very prominently in the American masculine epic. There’s no love story in Moby-Dick; Davy Fuckin’ Crockett doesn’t have a girlfriend.

But then the scales fell from my eyes. Christian and I spent several days working with Eustace to construct a log cabin, and it happened one afternoon that Eustace looked upon our work and said with satisfaction, “This is going to be a very solid floor. This floor will still be solid when my grandchildren are old.”

Quite suddenly, I realized that Eustace Conway needs an heir. You don’t work your life away to acquire and perfect 1,000 acres of Eden only to have it die with you. He needs children. So he needs a woman.

“He definitely needs a wife,” said a friend of his named Nathan. “But when you’re Eustace Conway and you have this extreme lifestyle and these high moral standards, you’re going to have trouble finding the right woman.”

“He needs a woman who can have a baby in the back of a covered wagon,” I said.

“He needs a woman who can work right up to the day her baby is born,” Nathan embellished. “And who can start again immediately the next day.”

I thought perhaps a simple Amish girl would do. Or maybe some mail-order bride from a Third World country who might be accustomed to plowing while pregnant. That’s what I was thinking. But then, one night, we sat together in his office for hours and hours and hours, and Eustace commenced to tell me the history of his love life, and—of course—it is epic. Like everything else in his experience, it is epic. It takes an icon to attract an icon, after all, so I should not have been surprised to learn that the three loves of Eustace Conway’s life have been the beautiful and mysterious Apache doctor; the beautiful and mysterious east-Kentucky folksinger; the beautiful and mysterious Aborigine rock climber.

Not an Amish simpleton in the bunch.

Eustace claims that he withholds his heart, that he does not fall in love easily. But then he started reading to me from his journals. Damn! “I wanted to ask her to marry me the day that we met,” Eustace writes of the folksinger. “But I didn’t want to scare her off.” He shows no such restraint in journal entries written a scant two weeks later, though, when he inscribes pages and pages to this Appalachian vixen, offering prayers of thanksgiving for her womanly body, her passionate spirit, her burning intellect. He was writing her letters every day, sleeping with her every night, telling her that their souls were forever joined into eternity by the energy of the universe and the depths of the canyons and the howling of the coyote.

If Eustace Conway truly withholds his heart from a woman at first, it is only so he can impale it upon her—intact—at a later date.

“So what happened with the folksinger?” I asked.

“She was perfect in every way,” he reported without malice. “Except that she’ll lie and cheat on a man.”

He continued to read to me from his journals, on other disappointing love affairs, and his language was always so intense. Again with the depths of the canyons. Again with the howling of the coyote. Of course, of course. Of course his amorous appetites would equal his other appetites. Of course a man who builds three bridges in a single day would require heroic lovemaking. And of course he would demand parity. He wants someone exactly like him.

Lonely heart who makes fire with two sticks, eats squirrel brains, quotes Faulkner, crosses continents on foot or horseback, understands Navajo jokes, swings through trees during lightning storms, kayaks across the Arctic, builds homes without the use of nails, climbs sheer cliffs, makes honey and envisions altering the very destiny of humankind SEEKS SAME. SERIOUS INQUIRIES ONLY.

I know lesser men than Eustace Conway (in fact, I only know lesser men than Eustace Conway) who have found marvelous wives, but his zeal is going to be difficult to match. Which he totally realizes.

“I don’t know,” he mused one morning. “Maybe I should just marry a simple farm girl with a pretty smile.”

“I don’t know,” he mused the next morning. “Maybe I should just marry some educated woman from the city.”

He certainly seems ready to consider all comers. One afternoon, for instance, a friend of his hiked up the mountain to have lunch with us. His name was Jonas. He discovered that I was writing about Eustace for GQ, and he started laughing.

“Eustace Conway in GQ?” Jonas said. “Are you going to pose him in a three-piece buckskin suit?”

“Sure,” I say. “And Cindy Crawford is coming up here, too, to shoot a special all-buckskin swimsuit pictorial.”

Eustace’s ears pricked up. “Who’s Cindy Crawford?”

“She’s a supermodel,” I said. “Actually, she’s the supermodel.”

He considered this, then asked hesitantly, “You mean, like for photographs? In newspapers and magazines?”

“That’s right. For photographs. In newspapers and magazines.” (I was not surprised that Eustace had never heard of Cindy, but I had thought he might have a firmer grasp on the general concept of a model.)

“Maybe you should marry Cindy Crawford,” Jonas suggested. “She’s available, Eustace. She’s divorced from Richard Gere, you know.”

“Who’s Richard Gere?” Eustace asked.

Jonas groaned, but I said, “Eustace, don’t you even worry about who Richard Gere is. Don’t you even think about Richard Gere, OK? Because Richard Gere is officially out of the picture.”

He seemed very pleased to hear it.

When people ask Eustace Conway what he does for a living, he replies, “I live in the woods.”

Then people get all dreamy and say, “Ah! The woods! I love the woods!” as if Eustace spends his days sipping the dew off clover blossoms. But that’s not what living in the woods means.

A few years ago, Eustace was out hunting for his winter deer. He came upon an eight-point buck, grazing through the brush. He shot. The buck went down, and Eustace crept toward it. He found the massive animal lying on its side, breathing a heavy vapor. He could see no wounds, but the buck was dazed.

“Get up, brother!” Eustace shouted. “I’ll finish you off!”

But the animal did not move. Eustace hated to blow its beautiful head off, so he took his knife from his belt and stabbed into the 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.

That’s what living in the woods means.

Living in the woods also means that Eustace experiences a degree of cultural isolation that most of us could not fathom.

It’s not just that he’s unaware of the NBC fall lineup. It goes much further than that. Recently, he was teaching in a grammar school, and a child asked, “Do you know who Bill Clinton is?” Choosing his words carefully, Eustace replied, “I believe he’s an American political figure. But I’m not sure.” The kids thought this was hilarious. Eustace is not at all proud of that story, but it does reveal the degree of separation from contemporary American culture. He doesn’t read newspapers; he doesn’t read magazines; he doesn’t own a radio. He is a contemplative man. Every evening before going to sleep, he lights a pipe and sits in silent reflection on his day. He has read the great books, as well as the works of Cormac McCarthy; he does keep that journal; he is a gifted artist. So he’s not an ignorant man. He’s just not very current.

“I can’t relate to any American my age,” he told me. “I feel sometimes like a man without a country.”

If Eustace Conway was a tragedy, that would be it, because he is trying to relate to us. Life would be easier for him if he were just a hermit, but he wants to connect with us. Eustace masters skill after skill to prove what we Americans are still capable of, but the more skills he acquires, the less he resembles us. He grows more different every year. He’s even different from his brother Judson, who comes closest. Sure, Judson is a toughie, but he still belongs to our world. Judson needs to be around people, not because he depends on people for physical survival but because he needs an audience.

I know this because I used to be kind of in love with Judson Conway. When I drove up to that big ranch in Wyoming, Judson Conway was the first thing I laid eyes on, and I kind of fell in love with him at first sight. I didn’t fall in love with Judson like “Let’s get married!” but I fell in love with him like “Mercy!” because he is really, really attractive. He has a flashy grin and a famous saunter. He calls all the ladies “darlin’.” And please don’t forget that he is a working cowboy, so you can imagine the effect Judson Conway has on a girl. But the best part is, he knows all this. Judson’s life is pure joy, because he knows he’s getting to play cowboy and he knows exactly how cool that is.

“Judson is an actor,” Eustace said. “He’s got a glamour streak in him. That’s his style, and I think it’s wonderful.”

I also think it’s wonderful. Judson knows he looks good on a horse; he knows he looks good with a gun, so he needs to be watched, and that need—which makes him an awfully fun companion in the wilderness—separates him from a total meld with nature. Judson could never live like Eustace, and indeed he should not. We need Judson, and he needs us. He represents our desire. People fall in love with Judson, and not just women, either. I’ve sat around campfires in Wyoming with Judson and his hunters, and I’ve seen how they gaze at him. They see his horsemanship and his nifty guns and his aw-shucks charm and his Brad Pittian good looks, and they love him for it. People want to trade lives with Judson Conway. But people don’t want to trade lives with Eustace Conway.

Eustace is too hard.

Late one afternoon, we were all working on the cabin. Eustace had announced that he wanted the floor finished by dusk, so we were working fast. He was using a chain saw. (Yes, he was using a chain saw. These days he will sometimes use modern devices. Some modern devices he actually loves. “Plastic buckets!” he rhapsodizes, for instance. “I love ’em!”) So Eustace was sawing through a log when the chain saw hit a knot, kicked back and jumped toward his face. He deflected it with his left hand, sawing into two of his fingers.

He made one quick sound like “Rah!” and pulled back his hand. The blood started pumping out. Christian and I froze, silent. Eustace shook his hand once, sending out a shower of blood, and then recommended sawing. He was back at work. We waited for him to say something or to try to stop the bleeding, which was prolific, but he didn’t. So we both went back to work, too. He continued bleeding and sawing and hammering and bleeding more. By the end of the day, Eustace’s entire arm, the logs, the tools, both my hands and both Christian’s hands were all soaked with blood.

And I thought, So this is what’s expected of us.

We worked until dusk, then headed back to base camp. I walked next to Eustace, and his arm hung down, dripping. We passed a flowering bush, and (always the teacher) he said, “Now, that’s an interesting sight. You don’t usually see jewelweed with both orange and yellow blossoms on one plant. You can make an ointment out of the stem, you know, to relieve the itching of poison ivy or insect bites.”

“Very interesting,” I said.

Only after dinner did Eustace finally examine and bandage his savaged hand. He mentioned the incident just once, saying, “I’m lucky I didn’t saw my fingers off.”

That’s what living in the woods means.

I asked Eustace what his most serious injury had been, and he said he’s never been seriously injured. Although one time he did accidentally slice open his thumb. It was a deep, long cut “with the meat hanging out and everything.” It clearly needed stitches, so Eustace stitched it. Used his own needle and thread. Healed fine.

“I don’t think I could sew up my own skin,” I said.

“You can do anything you believe you can do,” Eustace said.

“I don’t believe I could sew up my own skin.”

Eustace laughed and then conceded, “Then you probably couldn’t.”

Midway through my visit, Eustace had to leave Turtle Island, and I went with him. He had to leave the woods, as he often does, to make money as a public speaker. So we drove across North Carolina to a small summer camp specializing in environmental education. A group of teenagers skulked into the camp’s dining room that evening for the event, and they all looked like jerks to me—loud, disrespectful, shoving, shrieking, laughing. Eustace was supposed to get these kids all excited about nature.

I thought, this is not going to end well.

Eustace walked across the stage and toward the microphone. He was not in buckskin but in jeans and a plaid shirt. Around his neck hung two large coyote teeth. On his belt, the knife.

The shoving and shrieking and laughing continued.

Eustace stepped up to the microphone with his hands in his pockets. He stood there, thin and serious, for a long moment. Then he said, “I am a quiet-spoken man, so I am going to have to speak quietly to you tonight.”

The shoving and shrieking and laughing stopped. I swear to God. The jerky teenage kids stared at Eustace Conway, absolutely riveted. It was like goddamn To Sir, With Love.

“I moved into the woods when I was only 17 years old,” Eustace began, and then he talked about his life. Those kids were so transfixed, you could have operated on them. When Eustace finished speaking, they approached him reverently, awed. They lined up to shake his hand. Even the baddest-ass gangsta boy of the whole group came over to stand before Eustace. He put his fist to his heart and announced with real solemnity, “You rule, man. You da bomb.”

Later that night, I asked, “Do you get that kind of response wherever you speak?”

“Yes.”

“And why were those teenagers so hypnotized by you?”

“Because,” Eustace said, “they recognized right away that I was a real person, and they’ve probably never met one before.”

The next day, Eustace took me to visit Camp Sequoyah. We were in the Asheville area anyhow, and he wanted me to have a look at the place, although it is somewhat painful to see. After his grandfather died, in 1967, Eustace’s family tried to keep Camp Sequoyah going, but they couldn’t manage it. Chief’s ideology had been so pure, his leadership so strong, his energy so daunting, that he could not be replaced. Without his charisma, Camp Sequoyah slowly fell into obscurity. It’s been abandoned for almost twenty years now, but the log buildings are still in fine shape. Chief built them himself, after all, built them to last until his grandchildren were old.

In the main lodge, he found a pile of books from the 1940s that Chief had once selected as good reading material for adolescent development. They had titles like American Boy Sea Stories, How We Become Americans, Davy Crockett: Young Rifleman. My favorite was a rotting hardback called Rip Darcy: Boy Adventurer! It had beautiful illustrations, with captions robust enough to make a man out of anyone: “He’s Always Wondered How It Would Feel to Be Crushed”; “The Lion Crunched Slowly”; “He Dove at the Fugitive’s Legs!”

These books were already dated when Eustace was young, but of course he had read them all. Back when he was in grammar school, he used to bring about six of these books into class with him every day. He’d read a book until the teacher confiscated it, and then he’d start on another. When she snatched that one, he’d simply begin another book and then another and another. When all the books were gone, he’d stare out the window and plan projects inspired by his reading. He was only in second grade, for instance, when he built himself a five-story tree house, modeled after the descriptions in Swiss Family Robinson.

Naturally, the local public-school teachers had no idea what to do with this odd boy who would not pay attention in class. By fifth grade, Eustace’s teacher had to call Mrs. Conway in for a conference. “I don’t think Eustace should be in school at all,” the woman said. “I don’t think this child is capable of learning.”

But it was too late; he was already learned.

The history of Eustace Conway is the history of man’s progress on the North American continent. At first he slept on the ground and wore furs. He made fire with sticks and ate what he could hunt and gather. Then he moved into a tepee and became a more sophisticated trapper of animals. He got a horse. He began making fire with flint and steel. When he mastered that, he began making fire with matches. He moved out of the tepee and into a wooden structure. He became a farmer, plowing the land and cultivating a garden. He acquired livestock. He cut paths into the woods, which became trails and then roads. He improved the roads with bridges.

He was first an Indian, then an explorer, then a pioneer. Now that he is building a real cabin, he is finally a settler. He is sustained these days by a new dream—that like-minded individuals will buy property near Turtle Island and raise their families as he will someday raise his (i.e., the old-fashioned way—have a bunch of kids, lose a few to childhood accidents, see that the survivors grow up strong and decent). The neighbors will visit one another’s homes on horseback, he speculates, and they will trade goods. When that happens, Eustace Conway will become a villager. He will have created a town.

He evolves before our eyes. He improves and expands and improves and expands because he is so clever and so resourceful that he cannot help himself. He is unstoppable. And we are also unstoppable. We have always been unstoppable on this continent.

When Eustace and I drove back to Turtle Island from Asheville early one evening, we had to pass through the college town of Boone. We stopped at an intersection. Eustace suddenly spun his head and asked, “Was that building there two days ago?”

He pointed at the new skeleton of an office building, and, no, I had not noticed it two days earlier. But it seemed almost finished now. Only the windows needed to be popped in. Construction workers were leaving the site for the day.

“Couldn’t be,” Eustace said with wonder. “Could they really put up a building that fast?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I think they could.”

Eustace sighed. “This country…” he said.

He becomes so morose over stuff like this. He learned recently that developers on the other side of his mountain are planning to build a golf course that would drain directly into the cleanest brook left in the area. What’s more, the developers have a helicopter, which they fly right over his home nearly every day. What can Turtle Island mean with a helicopter overhead? What’s the point of it then? It almost makes him want to give up. Maybe, he thinks, he should forget about America altogether. “Maybe America isn’t ready for my ideas,” he says. Then he begins to dream about moving to New Zealand. It’s a recurring dream of his. He remembers the isolation there, and he imagines finding a truly private life for himself.

New Zealand is the only concept that really connects Eustace to the rest of us because New Zealand is his only impossible fantasy. When Eustace dreams of moving to New Zealnd, he’s like the urban stockbroker who dreams of opening a hardware store in Vermont. Like the stockbroker, though, he just can’t do it. He’s too invested in the life he’s created here.

We drove on toward Turtle Island in silence. Quite suddenly, a family of deer leapt out of the woods and onto the road before us. Eustace slammed on his brakes. The buck stood, staring into the headlights. Eustace honked. The buck stood. Eustace jumped out of his truck. He let out a whoop into the damp night to chase the deer back into the woods, but still the buck stood.

“You’re beautiful, brother!” Eustace shouted at the deer.

The buck regarded him. Eustace laughed. He made fists and shook them wildly in the air. He whooped and howled like an animal.

Again Eustace shouted to the buck, “You’re beautiful!”

The buck held his ground.

And Eustace—delighted—shouted, “I love you! You rule! YOU DA BOMB!”

Elizabeth Gilbert is a GQ writer-at-large.