RIVERMAN: AN AMERICAN ODYSSEY
Knopf, 272 pages, $23.49 Matthew Geyer I For The New Mexican This is the true story of a Yankee original — an intentionally homeless and aging itinerant — who explored the likes of the Mississippi, Hudson, Ohio, and even Yellowstone rivers rather than settle down.
Ben McGrath, a longtime staffer at The New Yorker, had written a piece about Dick Conant in 2014, before the man’s boat and some provisions were found submerged in the icy Albemarle Sound. Initially, there was no sign of who owned the canoe or what happened to him.
Armed with reams of Conant’s own diary entries and other writings about his recent wandering provided by family, McGrath and local authorities investigate his disappearance. Stay with it. It is a complex puzzle and can be difficult to follow in the opening chapter, but the big picture slowly unfurls the chain of events, as a good mystery should.
Conant — Dickie to his family — was the fifth of nine children. He enlisted in the Navy in 1983 at the age of 32. He was honorably discharged a few years later and was studying to be a doctor. By 1993, he had “fashioned a kayak” and “was planning to paddle it to the Pacific Ocean.” No one knows exactly why Conant walked away from mainstream America to become an outlier. But two of the Conant brothers share stories with McGrath that deepen that narrative. Some demonstrate that there are people like their brother — homeless but not unintelligent or incapable — who simply can’t “fit in” over long periods. Sometimes, the book suggests, they are itinerant by choice.
Seeking to explain the array of talents and challenges that eccentrics like Conant face, McGrath explores useful contrasts and comparisons to characters like Forrest Gump and Chris McCandless in Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild.
“There is a fine line between a man of exceptional courage and a damned fool,” Conant writes.
“[O]ne of the things I appreciated about Conant was his hard-earned wisdom, and his honesty about the costs associated with freedom,” McGrath writes in Riverman. “He wasn’t an evangelist or an American naif, it seemed to me, just an original . ... There was a touch of Whitman in his eclectic erudition and his reverence of the natural world, and of course an echo of Emerson in his avowed desire to settle down — ‘with a woman and a family, like you have,’ as he told me — while doing the opposite.”
Conant left behind a record, not just of his journeys but of the people he met and the conclusions he drew in his years on the water. His exploration of these along with other diaries give McGrath the fodder for a longer New Yorker piece in December 2015.
At one point, McGrath accompanies Conant’s brother Joe to a rented locker in Bozeman, where Conant had lived for a time. Armed with bolt-cutters, they find more than 300 pieces of original art spanning four decades. An array of genres was represented: trippy ‘70s images with bright flowers against abstract backgrounds and a post-2000 self-portrait depicting a 40ish Conant “standing inside a cracked egg on a snowy mountaintop, dressed only in briefs and holding a glass of milk, alongside deer, raccoons, an owl, and a Dalmatian.”
A friend of Conant’s told McGrath, “If you have his journals and you can’t make a book, then you’re in trouble, dude.”
McGrath provides an account of Conant’s last days, struggling with extreme weather in what became his final journey. His letters include a “gracious note” to McGrath about his New Yorker article and a letter to his brother Jim.
“I survived a terrible storm last night and awoke with a resolve to go to my demise without regret. I want to mend fences with you and not end my days with any (as you term it) angst in my heart. So I am sorry if I wrote or said anything to you that was offensive or unkind or hateful. Of course you have my love as always.”
In January 2018, McGrath learned from a member of Conant’s family that “human remains” had been found along the shoreline in North Carolina’s Albemarle Sound.
This extraordinary account of the good times and bad times of a true American original, told with all the smiles and frowns this essentially homeless itinerant experienced, is a treasure.