Free The Last American Man by Elizabeth Gilbert

the enjoyment of external things.
    —Daniel Boone
    D avy Crockett ran away from home when he was thirteen years old, to escape an irate father. Daniel Boone’s father used to
     beat his sons until they begged for mercy, but Daniel would never break. (“Canst thou not beg?” his father would demand.)
     Instead, young Daniel spent whole days alone in the woods to get away from his father’s domain and, by the age of fifteen,
     had earned a reputation as one of the best hunters in the Pennsylvania wilderness. The explorer John Frémont was five when
     he lost his father. Kit Carson lost his father (who was killed by the falling limb of a burning tree and left his wife to
     raise eight children alone), and Kit ran away from home when he was sixteen. The mountain man Jim Bridger was on his own at
     fourteen.
    None of this was unusual for the time. The wagon trails to the West were filled with young boys who had left home for any
     number of reasons—but no small number of them, we can be sure, hit the frontier because they believed that even the most dangerous
     unknowns in the world were more appealing than whatever business was going on back there in that small cabin in New England
     or Virginia or Tennessee. There is a lot of talk in our history books about what drew young men to the frontier, but I wouldn’t be at all surprised if bad relationships with tough fathers was one of the major
     factors that pushed them out there.
    And so it is that every generation finds a new wave of boys busting out of their homes, just dying to go anywhere that takes
     them away from Dad. It sure is a good way to populate a country pretty fast, although perhaps not ideal for the emotional
     lives of our families. Eustace Conway was trying to do the same—trying to escape. His adolescent years were an endless trauma,
     and he dreamed constantly of running away.
    “Right before I went to bed,” he wrote in his diary as a fourteen-year-old, “daddy came in and lectured me about how I should
     act toward people and about how I only care about myself. He said that nobody will like me and that I boss everybody and that
     I do not do anything for anybody else. Although it would be a dumb thing to run away, I think I would be happier anywhere
     in the woods. If I do leave, I will try my best not to come back, even if I am starving. Anything is better than this.”
    But he didn’t bolt. He stuck it out for three more years. Only when he had dutifully finished high school did Eustace Conway
     split. He took the teepee he’d made by hand (an older Native American woman who knew Eustace at the time described it as “the
     prettiest thing I’ve ever seen”) and he took his knife and he took some books and he was gone.
    “I hope that I am right,” he confided to his diary when he moved out of his parents’ home, “and that I am following a path
     that is indeed good for me.”
    What followed were probably the happiest years of Eustace’s life. And the freest. He owned a teepee and he owned a motorcycle,
     and that was about it. He lived in and around the mountains near Gastonia. He re- built the motorcycle to learn about the
     workings of an engine. He sewed all his own clothes. He ate nettles and hunted small game with a Cherokee blowgun, using darts
     he made from sticks, thistledown, and strands of deer tendon. He carved his bowls and plates from wood polished with beaver
     fat. He made his water jugs out of the clay he dug from the basins of creeks, the same creeks where he bathed. He slept on
     the ground, on animal skins. He wove ropes out of bark and his own hair. He split white oak and wove it into baskets. He cooked
     and warmed himself over fire, and he did not touch a match for three years.
    “My lodge looks in passable shape,” he wrote in his diary, once his new home was in order. “And I hope that I grow to know
     it and myself better through the lifestyle that I am taking up at the present.” His new life did take some