Free The Last American Man by Elizabeth Gilbert Page A

getting used to
     (“In the middle of the night it began to rain and so I reluctantly got out of bed and closed the smoke flaps, which should
     have been taken care of earlier”), but Eustace Conway felt almost immediately that he was at last living on this earth as
     he had been meant to live. “I slept until seven in the morning,” he wrote after one of his first nights in the teepee, “when
     the sun beaming down on the smoky canvas called my attention to the world. I got up and washed my face in spring water. Oh,
     how my body loves me! Happy day to all!”
    His teepee was wonderful—a fort and a temple, a home so satisfyingly light and transient that it had none of the psychological
     impact of a house’s overstability. He could put it together or break it down in a matter of minutes. He could pack it up,
     load it onto the top of a friend’s car, drive it to an elementary school, and throw it together again on the playground for
     the delight of some grammar school kids he’d been hired to teach about nature that day. He could haul his teepee off to a
     powwow in another state for a weekend of dancing and fellowship with the Native Americans he had befriended over the years.
     He could pack it in storage while he went hitchhiking across the country on a whim, or he could hang out in his teepee, hidden
     somewhere in the woods, completely jazzed by the knowledge that nobody could find him.
    He took a job after high school, but only for a little while. He headed down to Tennessee to work as a nature educator for
     learning-disabled and troubled kids at a place called the Bodine School. He was brilliant with the students, even though he
     was not much older than they were. He had terrific rapport with them, but he didn’t hit it off so well with his bosses. Eustace
     Conway, it should be said, does not take much truck in working under the authority of other people. It rubs him wrong. He
     quickly got into a dispute with the principal, who had promised Eustace that he could live in his teepee on the grounds of
     the campus but had reneged on the promise. And Eustace Conway does not take much truck from people who renege on their promises.
    So, restless and irritated, he took off to visit a woodsy young guy he knew named Frank, who was going to college in Alabama.
     They had a good weekend visit. Kicked around in the forest and shot at things with an old-fashioned black powder rifle and
     made jokes. But Eustace had a sense that his friend was bothered by something, and, indeed, it emerged in subsequent conversation
     that Frank had broken up with his girlfriend and was floundering wildly—had quit doing sports, quit going to school, then
     quit working at his job. He didn’t have the first idea of what to do with himself next. When he finished telling Eustace his
     sad story, Eustace said (“and the words just leaped out of my mouth like a frog leaping out of a hot frying pan”), Let’s hike the Appalachian Trail .
    He couldn’t even say where the idea had come from. But suddenly it was out there.
    “Sure,” Frank said. “Let’s do it.”
    So Eustace called the principal of the Bodine School and quit his teaching job (no big deal; the guy was a jerk who broke
     his word, and who needs a damn job, anyhow?), and four days later the two young men were standing in a bus station in Montgomery,
     Alabama, waiting for a Greyhound to take them up to Bangor, Maine. The suddenness and brashness of the decision surprised
     even Eustace’s mother, who could usually be counted on to encourage such adventures.
    “Your phone call with news came as a big surprise,” she wrote to him in a quick note, trying to catch him before he was gone.
     “I have mixed feelings about your planned hiking trip. I can understand why you desire to make such a trip and agree with
     the good aspects of it, but on the other side of the seesaw, it shows irresponsibility at keeping your word and inability
     to put important things