Stern man

Liz Gilbert’s latest gets back to her journalistic roots

By John Freeman

Stern man By Carol Gilligan. Alfred A. Knopf, 256 pages, $24.

MAN HUNT: Liz Gilbert tracks the elusive American Man.

Elizabeth Gilbert has proven a knack for locating America’s small but lively fringe element. As a journalist, she’s profiled poker players, rodeo riders, homegrown musicians, even the good folks at a New York City watering hole called the Coyote Ugly. Yet Eustace Conway, the subject of her new book, The Last American Man, takes the cake. Here’s a description:

“By the time Eustace Conway was seven years old, he could throw a knife accurately enough to nail a chipmunk to a tree. By the time he was 10, he could hit a running squirrel at 50 feet with a bow and arrow. When he turned 12, he went into the woods, alone and empty-handed, built himself a shelter, and survived off the land for a week. When he turned 17, he moved out of his family’s home altogether, and headed into the mountains, where he lived in a teepee of his own design, made fire by rubbing two sticks together, bathed in icy streams, and dressed in the skins of animals he had hunted and eaten.”

Since then, Conway has done some remarkable things. He hiked the Appalachian Trail at age 19, kayaked across Alaska, and rode horseback from coast to coast in a record 103 days. Now, at age 42, he lives happily in the backwoods of North Carolina, on 1000 acres of land with a few followers, a fleet of rattle-trap trucks, and the bounty of nature.

In The Last American Man Gilbert tells the story of Conway’s life, using his peculiar story to meditate on American manhood. “The American boy,” Gilbert writes, used to “come of age by leaving civilization and striking out toward the hills.” Now, of course, the numbers of boys who actually do this have dwindled, and those who do are under auspices of Outward Bound, Boy Scouts, or a two-week summer camp.

Conway, as Gilbert reveals, thinks we have it all backward. That we should grow up into the woods and stay there. And he travels around the country proselytizing this belief with the vigor and magnetism of a revival preacher. Here he is talking to a group of sullen adolescents about the “circle of life.”

“Do people live in circles today? No. They live in boxes. They wake up every morning in the box of their bedroom because a box next to them started making beeping noises to tell them it was time to get up. They eat their breakfast out of a box and then they throw that box away into another box. Then they leave the box where they live and get into a box with wheels and drive to work, which is just another big box broken up into lots of little cubicle boxes.”

Sound familiar?

Gilbert is more than a little sympathetic to this message. After growing up in Connecticut, she moved to a ranch in Wyoming and pretended to be a cowgirl from Texas. Her writing throughout this book is frothy and punchy, as if she is trying to prove she is man enough to take on such a unique character.

And yet, for all her strutting about the page, Gilbert maintains a superbly subtle journalistic distance from Conway. The best parts of this book are not the digressions that link him to Davy Crocket and Jim Bridger, but rather in the psychological portrait she sketches of Conway himself.

We learn of how the young mountain man to-be grew up under the thumb of his father, a math genius who attempted to recreate himself in his son. When young Conway did poorly in school, he berated and verbally abused the boy into submission. Surprisingly, it was Conway’s mother, the daughter of a ex-military camp leader, who imparted to her son his love of the great outdoors, allowing him to stay in the nearby woods all summer.

And in later sections, we see how these childhood relationships replicate themselves in Conway’s adult life as he attempts to turn his 1000-acre preserve into a kind of utopia. Conway has problems maintaining friendships, and it’s easy to understand why. As a grown man, Conway sounds remarkably like his own father must have sounded drilling him in math, so many years ago.

“My way is the only way. And I believe the best work is done when people surrender to one authority, like in the military . . . If I was the general of an army, for instance, the discipline would be more organized and I could insist that everyone do exactly what I said, and then things would run properly.”

Could Davy Crocket use a little therapy? In the end, by faithfully sticking to her subject, Gilbert reveals that the problems with the American man go beyond boxes and circles; that, sadly, not even an escape to the wilderness can salve the wounds of childhood.

John Freeman can be reached at jfreeman@nyc.rr.com.