... in a handmade wooden canoe…
For Mr. Peter Gray & his dad in particular.
I was waiting to get eyeglasses made so I went to the bookstore to kill time.
I had been turned off by the aw' shucks hype on NPR advertising this book,
but I was at a loss for what to occupy myself with. When I saw the book in
the nature section (I was looking for porcupine info) I said, "Why not?"
Thirty-five pages later I was late to pick up my glasses and I bought the
book. By the end of the day I was a lot further. Elizabeth Gilbert is an
exceptional writer. This book reads smoothly and she shows with balance a
depth of personal interest in the subject. I know this is a long section to
post here, but I think it is a book that a lot of BP'rs will find an
interesting read.
"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 ten, he
could hit a running squirrel at fifty feet with a bow and arrow. When he
turned twelve, he went out into the woods, alone and empty handed, built
himself a shelter, and survived off the land for a week. When he turned
seventeen, 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 the
animals he had hunted and eaten.
This move occurred in 1977, by the way. Which was the same year the film Star
Wars was released.
The following year, when he was eighteen, Eustace Conway traveled the
Mississippi River in a handmade wooden canoe, battling eddies so fierce, they
could suck down a forty-foot tree and not release it to the surface again
until a mile downriver. The next year, he set off on the two-thousand-mile
Appalachian Trail, walking from Maine to Georgia and surviving almost
exclusively on what he hunted and gathered along the way. And in the years
that followed, Eustace hiked across the German Alps (in sneakers), kayaked
across Alaska, scaled cliffs in New Zealand, and lived with the Navajo of New
Mexico. When he was in his mid?twenties, he decided to study a primitive
culture more closely in order to learn even more ancient skills. So he flew
to Guatemala, got off the plane, and basically started asking, "Where are the
primitive people at?" He was pointed toward the jungle, where he hiked for
days and days until he found the remotest village of Mayan Indians, many of
whom had never before seen a white person. He lived with the Maya for about
five months, learning the language, studying the religion, perfecting his
weaving skills.
But his coolest adventure was probably in 1995, when Eustace got the notion
to ride his horse across America. His younger brother, Judson, and a close
family friend went with him. It was a mad act of whim. Eustace wasn't sure if
it was possible or even legal to ride a horse across America. He just ate a
big Christmas dinner with his family, strapped on his gun, hauled out an
eighty?year?old U.S. Cavalry saddle (rubbed so thin in places that he could
feel the heat of the animal between his legs as he rode), mounted his horse,
and headed out. He reckoned that he and his partners could make it to the
Pacific by Easter, although everyone he told this to laughed in his face.
The three riders galloped along, burning away nearly fifty miles a day. They
ate roadkill deer and squirrel soup. They slept in barns and in the homes of
awestruck locals, but when they reached the dry, open West, they fell off
their horses every night and slept on the ground where they fell. They were
nearly killed by swerving eighteen?wheelers when their horses went wild on a
busy interstate bridge one afternoon. They were 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 arrived at the Pacific Ocean the next afternoon. Eustace
Conway rode his horse right into the surf. It was ten hours before Easter. He
had crossed the country in 103 days, setting, while he was at it, a world
record."
The Last American Man, Elizabeth Gilbert
XXX
--
To terminate puerile preservation prattling among pals and the
uncoffee-ed, or to change your settings, go to:
<http://maelstrom.stjohns.edu/archives/bullamanka-pinheads.html>
|