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.
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