The mystery of a man

As part of Six Bridges Literary Festival, I’ll be at the Ron Robinson Theater in downtown Little Rock at noon Thursday talking with New Yorker writer Ben McGrath about his 2022 book “Riverman: An American Odyssey.”

Admission is free and I hope you will come. “Riverman” is a superb work of journalism by an elite writer with a precisely calibrated sense of tone. It reconstructs the journeys of a pure product of America named Dick Conant, a former Navy quartermaster who, in 1999, after suffering serial disappointments in his life and career, retired from his job as a janitor in Bozeman, Mont., bought a cheap plastic canoe at Walmart, and took to the Yellowstone River, meaning to paddle to the Gulf of Mexico.

He spent most of the next 15 years homeless on the continental river system.

McGrath, who lives along the Hudson River, had a chance encounter with Conant in 2014, and wrote about him for the magazine. Then, a few months later, McGrath received a call from North Carolina authorities. It seemed his contact information had been found in an overturned canoe among Conant’s gear, which inside “bags within bags within knotted bags” tied inside the canoe, were found, among other things, “17 toothbrushes, 14 ChapSticks, six cigarette lighters, a sewing kit, a socket, a digital camera, three Louis L’Amour novels, a mud-caked Samsung flip phone, two thumb drives, 11 pens, a deck of playing cards, a marine radio, a fourfoot extension cord, two CVS key fobs” and a copy of Samuel Eliot Morison’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “John Paul Jones: A Sailor’s Biography.”

There was no sign of Conant. McGarth wrote a follow-up story for the New Yorker, them embarked on his own journey to discover the presumed dead Conant and maybe to find out what happened to him— though not necessarily in the sense of what ultimately happened to him.

“Riverman” is about the trajectory of Conant’s life and the Rashomonic ways in which he was perceived by dozens of people he came in contact with during his journeys. I don’t want to write too much more about “Riverman”—as a fifth grader delivering a report might say, if you want to know more, you’ll have to read the book.

I understand why McGrath would undertake to delve into the mystery of this man, who is often described as a kind of folk hero. I don’t suppose Conant was actually that, not in his lifetime anyway, but, like all of us, he contained multitudes.

One of the first non-sports stories I covered in my career started at a private airfield outside Jennings, La., on a Saturday night in October or November 1981. A local dentist coming home from a college football game was landing his Piper Navajo Chieftain and felt a big bump after landing. He figured he’d hit a small animal. After he taxied to a stop, he walked back down the runway to check and froze when he saw a disturbed sleeping bag. He called a Jefferson Davis Parish sheriff’s deputy that he knew, and that deputy—who was my landlord—called and asked if I wanted to ride out to the crime scene with him.

It was not my first dead body. Some weeks before I’d walked into a shotgun house that was across the railroad tracks from the newspaper office where a 10-year-old girl had plunged her grandmother’s sewing shears into the side of her 12-year-old sister because sister wouldn’t stop laughing at her.

That corpse had seemed peaceful, like the victim was asleep. This was the first time I saw the human form mangled and pulled apart.

Tangled in the ripped-up sleeping bag was a a young man about my age. His legs were weirdly angled; his face looked like it had been molded from wax. The worst part was the tarmac rash; it was apparent he’d been

dragged 50 feet or so.

There was nothing to do but call the coroner. We waited there for a long time, the deputy, the dentist and me, and after they came and took away the body I went back to the sheriff’s office where my landlord went through the man’s wallet. The dead had a Massachusetts driver’s license, a few dirty dollar bills and a folded flier from a music festival in New York that had occurred the week before. He was 22, just a little younger than me.

The deputy made a couple of calls and found the man’s parents. He talked to a local police officer who offered to notify the next of kin, because it was the kind of news that shouldn’t be delivered over the phone.

I waited a couple of days and called his parents myself. I’d make a lot of similar calls over the years, but this was the first and the hardest to make. I talked to his father, who told me he hadn’t seen his son in six years. There were issues with drugs, but it was more than that, the father believed. Some sort of mania, some desperation the father didn’t understand, propelled his son.

I got it in my head to write about this random man; I tried to do it. But I wasn’t good enough then. Still, in an age before the Internet, before Google, I somehow managed to track down a girl who had seen him at the festival, and a friend from high school with whom he sporadically kept in touch. I was able to roughly reconstruct a few days in his life, but had no luck in finding out how he’d managed to get from New York to Louisiana. All I really knew was that he was homeless, that he traveled more or less constantly, that he played guitar.

It was not the sort of project I could continue to pursue at the Jennings Daily News. There was high school football to cover. I never wrote anything beyond my initial five-inch story. I don’t even remember the kid’s name, though I thought I’d never forget it.

These days we live near a river, near what was once the busiest railroad bridge in the world, in an area of reasonable affluence. We often walk along the riverfront and meet beaten people who won’t meet a human gaze but will stoop to pet a small dog, tattooed young travelers with iPhones riding the rails with their rolling bags, occasionally the gregarious sunburnt old guy who can (and will) hold forth on the political issues of the day like some junior college faculty lounge lizard. And I wonder where they all come from, and what kind of country could produce them in such number.

I understand the margins are slim, driven by the same urges and temptations that I feel. It’s only that we feel grief, guilt, disappointment, the need to transcend the everydayness of our times in different measures, and that luck decides more than almost any of us will admit.

I don’t know what made Dickie Conant get in his cheap canoe and paddle away from the straight life, but don’t imagine him much different from me. Braver, certainly, and perhaps prouder, less inclined to eat the unpleasant stuff requisite to our society. These are the people of the periphery, background blurs in the canvases of plein air painters, moving while we sleep, gliding in their plastic canoes and sleeping on the riprap, haunting us with their stories, untold and fantastic.