Water Words: “Riverman”

Riverman

An American Odyssey

By Ben McGrath

Alfred Knopf  2022

256 Pages

Ben McGrath, a writer for the New Yorker magazine, was with his son on the banks of the Hudson River, when a neighbor, Scott, appeared and pointed to a filthy vessel tethered to a nearby sea wall.  “It was a plastic red canoe, packed as if for the apocalypse with army-surplus duffels and tarps and trash bags.”  The owner, Dick Conant, had paddled up the previous day and now Scott and Conant were best friends.  This chance encounter and the quickly deepening bond is a story often repeated with Dick Conant.

McGrath was charmed and the following day tracked Conant down and interviewed him for a possible article.  Conant, with, “a complexion of a boiled lobster and the build of a manatee,” intrigued McGrath with his plans of continuing his current paddle from Canada to Florida.  It wasn’t Conant’s first long distance solo trip; he had crisscrossed much of the American heartland by canoe.  Months after the encounter, McGrath received a phone call from a wildlife ranger in North Carolina.  An overturned canoe had been found on the northern shore of the Albemarle Sound, near Elizabeth City.  No person, living or dead, accompanied it.   McGrath’s contacts were found in a notebook in the boat as were others and the officer was pursuing leads in a missing person case.

Thus began a detective story for McGrath and a search for the meaning of a person who preferred to live his life without a permanent home and constantly moving,  paddling a canoe.   Wherever he stopped he touched people and they remembered him.  Educated and well spoken but obviously weathered by his life and travels, people saw in him their own secret desire:  the possibility of shucking it all and taking off with what possessions and ambitions a fourteen foot canoe could hold.

McGrath follows many leads in learning about Conant and they were numerous and colorful.   People would meet Conant for a day or an hour and remember him clearly years later.  He often took their addresses and would write a letter or two to them.  His story has parallels to Into the Wild, the John Krakauer book about Chris McCandless’ quixotic travels but McCandless and Conant were very different people.  There are also comparisons to the book and movie, Nomadland, about itinerant people who choose to live life on the move, not homeless but houseless.   They are modern nomads who form communities on the road, dispersing and regrouping in tribal migrations.  And of course,  Huckleberry Finn,  the great American novel about a white boy and a black boy leaving town and sliding down the great Mississippi on a raft, the river “offering freedom from an imperfect society.”

McGrath’s pursuit of Conant’s odd story leads to many other eccentrics and originals.  “You ought to write a book about me,” is a common observation. One of these curiosities is a small town newspaper writer-editor named Roger Larson who interviews Conant and then never publishes an article, saying Conant’s story “didn’t add up.”  Larsen slowly reveals his own originality and wanderlust and gives the Conant riparian lifestyle a structure and philosophy.  Larsen recalls an article from a March, 1928 issue of Scribner’s magazine titled “Riverbank, USA”  describing a “quasi-anarchistic commonwealth.”  Larsen elaborates, “The State of Riverbank it was called.  As in: the state of Delaware.  The idea was there remained a cultural jurisdiction independent of any borders drawn on maps, populated by eccentrics and ne’er do wells, such as might have entertained Mark Twain’s readers many years before.”   How many of us have ever contemplated moving to the State of Riverbank?

McGrath concludes, “ I have tried here to make Conant the hero of his own epic, while not giving anyone the illusion that it was an enviable life.” Perhaps it was not an enviable life or one many of us could sustain but Riverman is a life story both captivating and well told.

Report by Alton Chewning