The Last American Man (29 page)

“ DETI?” I asked.

“Disgruntled Ex-Turtle Islander,” she clarified. “Look, I came here to learn, and I am learning. And I find Eustace to be
fair and patient, even when I’m an idiot. I try to be quiet and private, and that’s the only way to do the work around here
and get something from it. He’s the boss, and you do have to accept his decisions. You have to take his leadership seriously,
but you can’t take it personally.”

It’s the same thing that makes a good soldier—not mindless obedience, but mind
ful
obedience. Which is probably why one of the most successful Turtle Island apprentices was a young woman named Siegal, who,
before coming to North Carolina, had served in the Israeli military. Perfect training! Siegal survived Eustace Conway the
same way she survived her military service. “You must make yourself very small,” she explained, as if that’s such a simple
thing to do.

It’s not at all simple, though. Not many people can subdue their egos. The talent for submission is especially hard for modern
American kids, who are raised in a culture that has taught them from infancy that their every desire is vital and sacred.
Their parents, their teachers, their leaders, their media, have always asked them, “What do
you
want?” I used to see this when I was a diner waitress, of all things. Parents would interrupt ordering food for the entire
table to hover around their toddler and ask, “What do
you
want, honey?” And they’d stare moon-eyed at the child, waiting desperately for the answer.
Oh my God, what will he
say? What does he want? The world holds its breath!
Eustace Conway is right on target when he says parents did not give their children this kind of power a hundred years ago.
Or even fifty years ago. I myself can declare with all honesty that on the rare occasions when my mother and her six Midwestern-farm
siblings ate in restaurants as children, if any of them had dared to make a personal demand of their father . . . well, they
just wouldn’t have.

But Americans are raised differently now. And the “What do
you
want, honey?” culture has created the kids who are flocking to Eustace today. They undergo enormous shock when they quickly
discover that he doesn’t give a shit what they want. And between 85 and 90 percent of them can’t handle that.

And then there’s the food.

One of the things that makes a Turtle Island apprenticeship challenging is that the food up on the mountain can be . . . well,
inconsistent. I have enjoyed some of the finest meals of my life there, after a day of steady labor and an invigorating wash
in the creek, sitting around the solid oak table with my workmates, eating fresh produce from the garden and a flank off one
of Will Hicks’s famous pigs, all sopped up with hot cornbread out of a cast-iron pot lifted right off the coals. It’s nice.
I have eaten gorgeous handfuls of wild morel mushrooms at Turtle Island, irritating Eustace to the point of madness by saying,
after every bite, “Do you know how much these things cost in New York?” (“No,” he says. “Do you know how delicious these things
taste
in North Carolina?”) But I also spent a week at Turtle Island in January when we had the same venison stew for three meals
a day. And it was skanky, old, tough venison. Heat it up every night, try not to
taste
the burn and rust from the bottom of the pot. And the only other ingredients of the stew were apparently an onion and five
beans.

While the paying guests—the special groups and the young campers who visit Turtle Island—get excellent food served by wonderful
cooks hired for the occasion, no such arrangements are made for the apprentices, so the food situation can get pretty grim
sometimes, especially in the winter. The squash, for instance. Squash is the staple of the winter diet of the apprentices.
They turn squash into everything they can imagine—squash bread, squash pie, squash lasagna, squash soup. And then they give
up and eat squash mush until the garden starts up again in the spring. It’s as if they’re sixteenth-century sailors and the
squash is their hardtack, their last provision. There have been mutinies over the squash alone. There have been tearful meetings
where apprentices who have endured every other physical challenge will wail to Eustace, in a unified protest, “The squash
must stop!”

They don’t get a lot of sympathy from him, though. Because it’s not as if he’s holing up there in his cabin sucking the marrow
out of
duck a
l’orange
while his long-suffering apprentices shovel more squash down their gullets. If squash is all there is to eat, it’s what he
eats, too, and let there be no whining about it. There is—as with everything at Turtle Island— nothing he asks of his apprentices
that he himself will not endure. (He’s no Peter Sluyter, the utopian shyster who ran a strict Labidist homestead in seventeenth-century
upstate New York. Fire was forbidden to his followers, though Sluyter always had one roaring comfortably in his own home.)
No, Eustace Conway is cold when his people are cold; he’s hungry when his people are hungry; he’s working when they’re working.
Although he’s usually also working when his people are asleep, for that matter. Eustace has been in hungry places in his life,
places where squash mush would have been an epic feast, so he’s not too sympathetic. Anyhow, if they get really desperate,
they can always head down into Boone for some Dumpster Diving.

Dumpster Diving is a Conway family tradition. It’s something (maybe the most fun thing) the Conway boys learned from their
father. Big Eustace Conway is a lifetime salvage artist. It appeals to his sense of frugality and of adventure to pick apart
the garbage of others. There is no garbage too foul for him to look through in search of a great find. Eustace and Walton
and Judson inherited the skill from their father, but they refined it to the point that they learned to look in other people’s
garbage not only for old record players and air conditioners, but for food. Delicious, decadent food. The Dumpsters behind
the huge super- markets of the American dream, it turns out, are the free-as-the-wind buffets of the truly resourceful.

Eustace Conway, naturally, has made Dumpster Diving into an art. He supported his appetites through college by subsidizing
his blowgun game catches with the juicy remains of the supermarket alleys. And he perfected his system because, you can be
sure, if he’s going to do it, he’ll do it flawlessly, like everything else.

“Timing is crucial,” he explained. “You want to pick exactly the right moment of the day to start foraging in the Dumpster.
It’s best to hang around the store a bit and scope things out, see what time each day the food goes out so that you can get
it at its freshest. It’s also important to walk back to the Dumpster as though you belong there, moving with speed and confidence.
Stay low to the ground and don’t dawdle. I always look immediately for a sturdy, wax-covered cardboard box with nice handles,
and I grab it and jump into the Dumpster. Leaning over the side and poking around is not an economical use of your time. I
waste no time with any produce that is poor quality. Just because you’re eating
out
of the garbage, doesn’t mean you need to
eat
garbage. I fly through the produce, throwing aside anything that’s rotten or of low quality. If there’s a crate of spoiled
apples, I may find the three perfect apples in there and toss them into my cardboard box. You can often find one perfect melon
in a box of smashed melons, and sometimes you can find a whole crate of grapes that were thrown out because they’re off the
stem. And meat! I’ve brought home dozens of sirloin steaks, all nicely wrapped in plastic, that were tossed out because they’re
one day over expiration. I can almost always find whole trays full of yogurt—I love yogurt—that are perfectly good and were
thrown out for the same reason. Isn’t that a sin, what gets wasted in this country? It reminds me of what my old Appalachian
neighbor Lonnie Carlton said: ‘We used to live on less than what folks throw away these days.’ ”

One famous incident occurred when Eustace went into a Dumpster in Boone all alone, on a quiet and routine sortie. Looking
confident, keeping low, finding his special cardboard box, he was making quick progress through the Dumpster and compiling
“the nicest arrangement of fruits and vegetables you ever saw” when he heard a truck pull up behind the store. Then footsteps.
Shit! Eustace ducked down into the corner of the Dumpster and made himself as tiny as he could. And then a man, a nice-looking
older gentleman in clean clothes, leaned over the Dumpster and started poking around. A fellow diver! Eustace didn’t breathe.
The stranger didn’t notice him, but it wasn’t long before he did notice Eustace’s sturdy, wax-covered cardboard box filled
with the finest produce money can’t buy.

“Hmm,” said the stranger, pleased with the discovery.

He leaned far over, picked up the box, and walked away with it. Eustace heard the truck start up again and sat there, huddled
like a rat in the corner, thinking this over. Should he hide until the truck was gone? Play it safe? Start his search over?
But, wait. That man was stealing
his
produce! It had taken him a good fifteen minutes to find those goods, and they constituted the best food available that day.
Eustace couldn’t stand for that. You can’t let a man take food from your mouth! He leaped out of the Dumpster as though he
were on springs and took off after the truck. He waved the guy down, yelling as he gave chase. The stranger pulled over, ashen,
trembling at this wild apparition that had emerged, running and yelling, from the bowels of a supermarket Dumpster.

“Good afternoon, sir,” Eustace began, and released one of his most charming smiles. “I have to tell you, sir, that those are
my fruits and vegetables you’ve taken.”

The stranger stared. He seemed to be considering having a heart attack.

“Yes, my friend, I collected all that food for myself, and it took me some time to do it. I’m happy to share it with you,
but I can’t let you take it all. Why don’t you wait here while I find you a box of your own, and I’ll split it up for the
two of us?”

Then Eustace ran to the Dumpster and found another sturdy, wax-covered cardboard box. He ran back, jumped into the bed of
the stranger’s pickup, and quickly and evenly divided the produce into two even caches. He grabbed one box for himself, hopped
out of the truck, and returned to the driver’s side window. The man gaped at him, dazed. Eustace let fly another big smile.

“OK, then, sir. You’ve got yourself a nice box of groceries now, and so do I.”

The stranger didn’t move.

“You’re good to go now, sir,” Eustace said. “And have a nice day.”

Slowly, the stranger drove away. He’d never once said a word.

So. There comes a time in the residency of any Turtle Island apprentice when the skill of Dumpster Diving is introduced. Most
of the apprentices take to it like rats to a junkyard, enjoying the opportunity to get into town for a field trip and to stick
it to society once more in a subversive way. They call these little shopping expeditions “visits to the Dump Store,” and when
the squash mush has been served up for the fourth consecutive week, that forbidden fruit from the A&P starts to look pretty
good. This helps account for the odd variety of food I have experienced at Turtle Island. Yes, there is the fine homemade
gingerbread with homemade peach butter. Yes, there is the superb spinach, fresh from the garden. But I’ve also dined up there
on such decidedly non-Appalachian fare as pineapples, coconuts, chocolate pudding cups, and, on one memorable occasion, something
I found in a Styrofoam package labeled “white and dainty cream-filled pastry horns.”

“In all the months I’ve lived here,” Candice the apprentice told me, “I’ve never once figured out how we survive. I honestly
don’t know how we live. Dumpster Diving can take you only so far, you know, and in the winter we starve. Sometimes people
bring us food, which is great, because we’re not allowed to buy anything. I’ve been in charge of the cooking most of the time
that I’ve been here, and I’ve only ever spent Eustace’s money twice, on real staples, like cornmeal or oil or pepper. Other
than that, we scrounge.”

I once asked Candice what she used for her excellent bread, and she replied, “Whole wheat. Plus”—and ran her fingers through
a sandy grain she kept stored in an old coffee can—“I always throw in some of this weird stuff. I got it from one of the horses’
feed bins in the barn. I don’t know what it is, but you can’t taste it in the bread, and it makes the wheat last longer.”

Another afternoon, I was hanging out with Candice in the outdoor kitchen, helping her cook, when Jason wandered in.

“Hey, Jason,” she said. “Can you move Barn Kitty for me?”

Barn Kitty was Turtle Island’s most excellent mouser, a hardworking cat that could usually be found in the granary or on the
topmost shelves of the outdoor kitchen. I realized that I hadn’t seen Barn Kitty in a while.

“Where is she?” Jason asked.

“Yeah,” I said. “Where is she?”

“Under the water trough,” Candice replied. “The dogs keep rolling in her and moving her around, and she smells awful.”

I looked under the water trough. Oh, that’s why I hadn’t seen Barn Kitty in a while. Because Barn Kitty was now a matted,
reeking, legless corpse. Candice explained that a bobcat got to Barn Kitty one night a few weeks earlier. Since then, Barn
Kitty’s battered remains kept showing up all over Turtle Island, dragged around by various other living creatures. Jason picked
up the remains with a stick and threw them up on the tin roof of the kitchen, where the sun could bake them dry and the dogs
couldn’t reach them.

“Thanks, Jason,” Candice said, and added under her breath, “Jeez, I don’t know why we didn’t just eat that old cat. Eustace
makes us eat every other damn thing that dies around here.”

I overheard Eustace one day talking on the telephone to a young man who had called all the way from Texas because he wanted
to sign on as a Turtle Island apprentice. The kid sounded promising. His name was Shannon Nunn. He’d been raised on a ranch
and claimed to have done farm labor his whole life. He also knew how to fix automobile engines. And he was a star athlete
of enormous personal discipline. Eustace tries not to get his hopes up about people, but these few factors alone made Shannon
Nunn sound about 1000 percent more promising than the scores of idealistic, romantic, and incompetent college kids who often
arrive at Turtle Island “unable to open a car door.” Shannon said that he’d read about Eustace in
Life
magazine and was calling because he wanted a new challenge for himself. If he could learn how to live off the land, maybe
he’d escape a life in shallow modern American culture, where “everyone is drowning in complacency.”