... 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

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