http://www.thislife.org/pages/descriptions/98/111.html

Ken Follett wrote:

> ... 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>