Free The Last American Man by Elizabeth Gilbert Page B

first.”What she then added was a little provocative (in addition to being obvious) but she probably
     threw it in there to punctuate her own concerns: “Your father feels that you are a playboy and will never settle down if you
     don’t start taking life seriously and think more about preparing for your future. He thinks you should be working more and
     being more dependable to keep your promises of commitment. He disapproves!”
    Well, tough. That’s what people turn nineteen for.
    Their adventure started right off with an adventure. Eustace and Frank bought their bus tickets but couldn’t get on the bus
     until one last problem was solved. They were waiting at the station for a girl, a friend of Frank’s, to show up with his sleeping
     bag, a vital piece of equipment. They waited and waited, but the girl never showed. They begged the Greyhound driver to stall,
     but he finally had to take off to keep to his schedule. Frank and Eustace were devastated. And then, only moments after the
     bus pulled away, the girl and sleeping bag arrived. Frank and Eustace jumped into the girl’s station wagon and took off down
     the interstate, chasing the bus. When they caught up with it, Eustace told the girl to pull up alongside. They honked and
     waved, but, though the other passengers were staring, riveted, the driver pretended that they didn’t exist. Eustace Conway
     wasn’t going to be ignored and he damn sure wasn’t going to miss this Greyhound to Maine. So he told the girl to pull her
     car—speeding away at seventy-five miles an hour—right up under the bus driver’s window. Eustace rolled down his passenger-side
     window, pulled himself out, and stood on top of the station wagon, gripping the roof rack with one hand and clutching his
     and Frank’s bus tickets with the other. He waved the tickets in front of the driver’s face and kept hollering into the wind,
     “ Let us on this bus! ”
    “At that point,” Eustace remembers, “the driver decided maybe he’d better pull over and let us on. All the passengers were
     cheering, and as we walked down the aisle this one big fat lady shouted, ‘Lawd! Y’all coulda been in a movie!’ ”
    They got to Maine and hitchhiked to Bangor and found that they had arrived too early in the year. The rangers warned them
     not to even think about going over the timberline while there was so much deep snow and heavy ice on the ground. Of course, they ignored the
     warning and headed up the mountain before dawn the next day, and on that afternoon they saw a bald eagle careening in the
     cold and thin air, and they were on their way, a month ahead of other climbers.
    Here’s what they hadn’t figured on: they never had enough to eat on that trail. Never, never, never. They were ravenous. They
     were hiking twenty-five and thirty miles a day on barely any food. They had some oatmeal with them, and that was about it.
     Each would have a cup of oatmeal every morning. Frank would gulp down his puny meal and then stare mournfully at Eustace while
     Eustace savored every flake as if it were a precious square of chocolate. On the first leg of the trip they found virtually
     no game on the trail to hunt; it was too early in the year for the animals to come up this high above the timberline, and,
     moreover, the ground was solid ice, with no edible plants in sight.
    When they got to New Hampshire, half mad with hunger, Eustace spotted some partridges in the underbrush. He whipped out a
     length of string he’d been keeping in his pocket, fashioned a noose about eight inches in diameter, wrapped the string around
     a long stick, and sneaked up on the next partridge he spotted. He dropped that noose over the bird, tightened the string,
     made a grab, and ripped off its head. Frank was screaming and dancing and shouting and hugging and kissing Eustace while the
     still-flapping bird sprayed blood over the packed, white snow. “My God,” Eustace recalls, “but we ate the hell out of