At age 17, Eustace Conway moved into the North Carolina woods. He hasn’t compromised since.

Eustace travels through life with perfect equanimity. He has never experienced an awkward moment. During his visit to New York City, I lost him 1 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. “Eustace, we gotta go.”

The drug dealers shook his hand: “Damn, Eustace. You something else.”

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