Sunday, May 15, 2005
Here is a man
The other day I was browsing at Leon's, and I came across a book called "The Last Man in America". Holy fucking shit. Apparently a man named Eustace Conway left his home in South Carolina when he was 17, and decided to live off the land. He spent the next, I don't know 20 or 30 years traveling and living in a tepee. He ate roadkill, he hunted, he gathered fruit and nuts, he dumpster dove. He through-hiked the Appalachian Trail living entirely off of the land the whole way at 19, met a girl on the trail, and they decided to ride horses to California. He enrolled at Community College, transferred to Appalachian State University and double majored in English and Anthropology. Today, he is a disgruntled semi-hermit. Hebecame somewhat famous and set up some kind of apprenticeship program, but all the guys taking his class were too soft and gave up. He runs some kind of environmental activism thing and works in an office. He wants to build a dream home of some kind. It was both the greatest, most inspiring book I've ever thumbed through, as well as the most disappointing.
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2 comments:
You should have talked to me, I could have got you a bargain copy for like two dollars. No shit.
You should look into Scott Nearing. He was an economist at the University of Pennsylvania who wrote alot about how wild speculation in the stock market would eventually bring down the whole US banking system. The academic community basically blackballed him and labeled him a communist. So he left academics. Then came The Great Depression.
In the 30's, he and his wife moved to Vermont and started living off the land. They wrote a book, called "the good life" or something like that.
I saw a documentary about them many years ago and it was quite amazing. Mr. Nearing--90 years old at the time the documentary was made--trudging across a field with a wheelbarrow full of rocks. His 80-odd year old wife setting rocks to build the walls of the THIRD house they'd build completely by hand using materials from their farm. Using really interesting organic farming techniques to grow all their food. Pretty amazing stuff. Most of all, though, I remember the camera on Old Man Nearing, waving his 90-year-old arm toward a small group of raised planters growing corn or something saying: "Last year, that was a small pond. I brought in 25,000 wheel-barrow loads of backfill, and now its some of the most productive land we have." And I complain about having to carry the laundry to the laundry room...
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