Why, they might become effete, pampered, decadent. Christ save us, they might become Europeans.

For obvious reasons, this is a terror that has never entirely left us. A century later, some of us are still concerned about the state of American manhood, which is why some of us are so grateful when we get to meet Eustace Conway.

Eustace Conway moved into the woods for good when he was 17 years old. This was in 1978, which was around the same time Star Wars was released. He lived in a tepee, made fire by rubbing two sticks together, and bathed in icy streams. At this point in his biography, you might deduce that Eustace is a survivalist or a hippie or a hermit, but he's not any of these things. He's not storing guns for the imminent race war; he's not cultivating excellent weed; he's not hiding from us. Eustace Conway is in the woods because he belongs in the woods.

Eustace started off on a small parcel of land, but over the past twenty years he's accumulated 1,000 acres of pristine wilderness in the southern Appalachian Mountains of North Carolina. He calls his home Turtle Island, after the Native American legend of the turtle who carries the very earth on its back.

Eustace travels through life with perfect equanimity. He has never experienced an awkward moment. During his visit to New York City, I lost him one day in Tompkins Square Park. When I found him again, he was in pleasant conversation with the scariest posse of drug dealers you'd ever want to meet. They'd offered Eustace crack, which he'd politely declined, but he was chatting with them about other issues.

"Yo, man," the drug dealers were asking as I arrived, "where'd you buy that dope shirt?"

Eustace was explaining to the drug dealers that he did not, in fact, buy the shirt at all but had made it out of a deer. He described exactly how he had skinned the deer and softened the hide with the deer's own brains and then sewed the shirt together using strands of sinew taken from alongside the deer's spine. He told the drug dealers that it's not a difficult process and that they could do it, too, and that—if they came to visit him in the mountains—he would show them all sorts of wonderful ways to live off nature.

I said, "Eustace, we gotta go."

The drug dealers shook his hand and said, "Damn, Hustice. You something else."

Eustace Conway has perfect eyesight, perfect hearing, perfect teeth, perfect balance and reflexes. He has a long, lean body. He talks real slow. He is modest but truthful, which means when I once asked Eustace, “Is there anything you can't do?" he had to reply, "Well, I've never found anything to be particularly difficult."

I should say not.

By the time Eustace Conway was 6 years old, he could throw a knife accurately enough to nail a chipmunk to a tree. By the time he was 10, he could kill a running squirrel at fifty feet with a bow and arrow. When he turned 12, he went into the forest alone and empty-handed for a week, making his own shelter and living off the land.

This may sound like extreme behavior for a child, but it was only what was expected of Eustace. It's something of a family tradition, anchored in the philosophy of Eustace Conway's extraordinary grandfather. Eustace's grandfather was an upright World War I veteran, whom everyone called Chief. Chief was not about to stand back and let America's youth grow up effete, pampered and decadent. No, sir. Not on his watch. Immediately upon returning home from the war, Chief founded the North Carolina branch of the Boy Scouts of America. This was a good start but not good enough. Chief did not believe that the Boy Scouts program went as far as it could in developing sturdy, capable citizens. And so, in 1924, he established an extremely rigorous summer camp in the mountains near Asheville. He called his project "Camp Sequoyah for Boys: Where the Weak Become Strong and the Strong Become Great." He asked of his campers only this simple request: that they ceaselessly strive to achieve physical, intellectual and moral perfection.