The New Yorker Radio Hour - Episode 8: The Missing Boater, and Robert Glasper

Episode Date: December 11, 2015

On shows as different as “Jessica Jones,” “Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt,” and “Game of Thrones,” characters confront sexual violence in ways never shown before on television. Emily Nussbaum, The New Yorker’s television critic, thinks this is probably a good thing. Robert Glasper is a jazz pianist who explains why sometimes you don’t need to take a solo. And a troubled man takes to the water for a series of adventures, like something out of Mark Twain. New Yorker Radio Hour listeners, we want to hear from you.  We have a few questions about the show and how you listen to it. The survey takes about twenty minutes, and your feedback will help us make our podcast better.  Take the survey here.

This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. There he is. Hello. How are you? All right. All right. How are you doing? Good.

Are you off for a while? Yes. I just got home yesterday from tour. Who's the actor they say you look like? Because there's one guy that's killing me. Jeff Goldblum or something? Oh, not the fly. Not him.

That guy. Not Jeff Goldblum. He looked good in the fly. Not anymore. Not anymore. No, there's another guy. He's like more comedic actor. I think Clooney is who you think.

Maybe Brad Pitt. Yeah, that's it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You got it. You got it. Denzel. I forget which one it is. You get Denzel a lot. I was about to say that too.

Huge. I can't walk down the street. I feel you. That's it. I'm David Remnick. Thanks for joining us for the New Yorker Radio Hour today. I'll be talking with the pianist Robert Glasper about trying to keep jazz from becoming a museum piece. And he'll give a fantastic live performance from his recent album.

That's later. in the hour. Now, I watch my share of TV, or possibly more than my share of TV, according to some people, but one of the news shows that's getting a lot of attention, and I haven't seen yet, is called Jessica Jones. It's based on a Marvel comic superhero who's become a private investigator. A big part of the job is looking for the worst in people. Turns out I excel at that. Jessica Jones is a superhero who is also a rape survivor. That's Emily Newsbaum, the New Yorker's television critic. The backstory of Jessica Jones is that she was traumatized by a supervillain who kidnapped her,

used mind control, and forced her to be his girlfriend. So it's about a specific kind of trauma that involves not just sexual violence, but a kind of brainwashing, something that has left a feeling of guilt and collusion in her. We used to do a lot more than just touch hands. Yeah. It's called rape. What? Which part of staying in five-star hotels, eating in all the best places, doing whatever the hell you wanted is rape?

The part where I didn't want to do any of it. And one of the reasons that the show is so powerful is that it's not simply about sexual violence, but about a much broader, richer metaphor that has to do with consent, coercion, abuse, the excuses people make, and the traumatic aftermath for people who go through things like this. And what's powerful about it is that the survivor of the assault is at the center of the show. Jessica Jones may be the first superhero show to confront rape in any significant way, but Emily has written about a surprising number of programs on the air now that deal with rape very differently from what we've ever seen on TV. She points out that it's not just a plot on crime shows, but in family dramas, fantasy, even in comedy.

Some people have criticized this and they've seen it as very exploitative. But by and large, I think this is a really encouraging moment because I actually think, what can I say? I mean, I think sexual violence is a part of the world and that as women's lives become more central to TV portrayals, that's part of it. I think there was actually a big breakthrough moment in terms of TV presentations of sexual violence in general. And honestly, it was the Sopranos. There was this period when it was the show everybody was talking about. And then a while into the show, one of the main characters, Tony Sopranos, psychiatrist, Dr. Melfi, was raped by a stranger in a parking lot on a staircase, and it was shown. It came out of the blue. And this is not in general the way that rape had been shown on TV. Shut up. Don't turn around. I said, shut up.

And so the Melfi rape plot became this cracking point for what could be shown on television and how it could be shown. And people wondered what the aftermath would be. Hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey, hey. What's the matter? What's the matter? It's okay. Go on. What? I mean, you want to say something?

This is a clip from Kimmy Schmidt, which is a show on Netflix that Tina Faye and Robert Carlock created. That's a very strange sitcom about a girl who's moved to New York and has been through this enormously traumatic circumstance where she was trapped for years in a bunker. by this psychopathic guy, along with some other women. She's very chipper and very upbeat, but in the middle of the night, she has terrible nightmares. And her roommate is essentially saying to her, you have to get help.

What am I doing? You tell me, this isn't the Chinatown bus. You can't just choke someone who's sleeping. Titus, I'm so sorry. Kimmy Schmidt, you are clearly repressing some stuff, and it is very unhealthy. For Titus, you need to talk to somebody. Absolutely not.

What if you take a lover and you murder him and sleep. Who are they going to pin that on? Rainbow Bright or gay Tiki Barber? I'm not taking a lover. That's gross. One of the writers, I think, is really great on how pulp culture represents women is Lindy West. She's written on issues like rape jokes and comedy, and she's dealt with a lot of controversy about that. She's currently writing for GQ.com and The Guardian. Hi, Lindy. Hi. How are you doing? I'm doing great. One of the things about Kimmy Schmidt is, although it is never explicit about the fact that she's been raped. It's something that's so implicit in the situation because it's based on all of these other experiences that have happened, you know, these terrible stories in real life.

But in a way, the whole thing is about the way that that experience has manifested in her life and the way that she copes with it. So in that way, it's very present. Every part of her kind of wacky personality you could read as a coping mechanism. So to me, it feels like the shadow of those sexual assaults are there all the time. Yeah. Her whole sense of joy and excitement about living again after the terrible thing has happened and trying to find a way to be the hero of her own story is also presented as something very feminine and sweet in a way that I actually found kind of fascinating and unusual. Yeah. And if you look at the way that a lot of people actually function, people use humor as a coping mechanism for really, really dark things. If you want to make a comedy show about a rape driver, you kind of have to balance it by making. it really funny and bright and almost surreal. The other part of these conversations is that people

say, you know, you can't take rape out of comedy. You can't make rules about what people can address because people use comedy as catharsis. And yeah, they do. Survivors use comedy as catharsis. Yeah. And actually, we should go to the Amy Schumer show. That's a parody of Friday Night Lights in which the coach is telling the guys on his team the three rules and one of the rules is no raping. and this does not go down well. Can we rape and awakens? Nope. What if it's Halloween and she's dressed like a sexy cat?

Nope. What if she thinks is rape? But I don't. Still no. What about like a sexy ladybug? Oh yeah. Nope. You gotta stop.

No, you gotta stop. If you write anything about rape, people fall all over themselves trying to find loopholes to make it okay to violate women's boundaries. It's really, really amazing how that sketch plays like a satire, but it's so accurate. People love to paint feminists as the opposite, like feminism as the opposite of comedy. But I love how all the stuff coming out of Amy Schumer this

season, it really knocks that down, the idea that you can't be edgy if you want to talk about rape responsibly, and of course you can. One of the things that's very thrilling is that there are so many more female voices on television that you get each person coming at it with their own aesthetic. Amy Schumer has a particular one, your broad city doing a different thing. The more they have women running shows and women's characters at the center of them, the more you get arranged and the more each show doesn't have to be the representative for this. Because I think that's been some of the difficulty in talking about sexual violence on television in the past is that when there's just one show that's doing it, that show has to represent. And people can much more understandably look to that show and say, is it doing it? the right thing is it educating people? And while I would obviously like portrayals of rape and sexual

violence on TV to some extent spread good messages, I think that's a very limiting way to talk about any kind of art. And what's exciting is just seeing the field expanding. So you get all of these things in contradiction with one another. Let's talk about Game of Thrones because you're way more of an expert on that than I am. But what do you think about that show in terms of the portraits of sexual violence? It's a universe where rape is a constant threat. I've, thought about this a lot. And I'm pretty conflicted about the way that women's bodies and women's sexuality are used in that show. I think a lot of times they use nude women as set dressing, basically. When it comes to the actual plot lines involving sexual violence, I think it's actually done

really well the way that they are really honest about what it would be like for women in this kind of a lawless, hyper-masculine society. It's like I would find it insulting if the female characters in Game of Thrones were not constantly in peril. It would be a lie. It would feel like men letting themselves off the hook. Leave her face. I like her pretty.

And my lady's overdressed. I'm burden her. There are a lot of shows that use sexual violence for titillation and are hugely popular, which is... Yeah, I would. I was wondering what you felt about that. I'm always conflicted about this because, first of all, I actually have no problem in some cases with people using anything for titillation because I actually like a lot of pulp and horror and things like that, as long as it's intelligent and it's doing it in a powerful way that actually has something to say about the world. On the other hand, it's hard to deny that some things actually are blatantly exploitative. Actually, we should probably talk about SVU. Yeah, yeah. Because I know both you and I have watched that show quite a lot. Why do you think you're so drawn to watching SVU? Because it would be hard to deny that. that that show is often, especially in the way that things are filmed, like blatantly exploitative in a sort of an old school lifetime woman in peril kind of way.

Totally. I think the show depicts a wide range of rape victims. There's so many tropes that victims and survivors tend to fall into. And so I think there's some diversity on SVU in terms of how women handle assaults. It's also, this is kind of a fantasy, but it's nice to see justice done once in a while in a world where justice is quite often not done.

You know, Eddie, I've been doing this for a while and I can see that you are you got a lot of weight on you. And I can also see that you want to let it go. I can take it. I can carry it.

Carry what? What do they do to you? I actually think the cheapness of it and the way in which it's sometimes accidentally funny and has this very formulaic feeling is kind of helpful to me as a viewer in this odd way because it makes it a safe thing to watch. I mean, it's only going to affect me so much. I know that the vast proportion of the audience for that show is a female audience. This is a side thing, but I wanted to bring up the Fosters, which is a show in ABC

family, the main character is Callie. She's been in several different foster homes. And one thing that happens before the show begins is that she was raped by her foster brother. She's the kind of character that could easily be a character in SVU. But instead of her being the somewhat exotic victim girl, you end up seeing her path through life. It's rare that characters who've been raped on TV get to be more than a rape survivor, where, you know, they get to be whole characters where, because that's how it is in real life. You aren't your trauma, you know? I mean, obviously, these traumas are hugely affecting and change people's lives. But you're still a human being and you're still complex and, you know, you have interests.

This is one of the things I think, frankly, is one of the big advantages to TV as a, you know, immersive serial storytelling thing is because it takes place over so much time. This can be an element in a character, but not the element in the character. Okay, what are we doing here? You hear about that meteor shower tonight? What about it? seats. It was very nice talking to you. Yeah, great talking to you too.

This was fun, I guess. I don't know. I guess. I'll talk to you another time. Okay, bye. Emily Nussbaum, television critic for the New Yorker, talking with the writer Lindy West. You can find Emily's writing on the Fosters,

Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt, and some of the other shows they talked about at New Yorker Radio.org. I'm David Remnick. Later this hour, a modern-day adventurer, crisscrosses America by canoe. And I'll talk with pianist Robert Glasper, who's trying to save jazz from itself. Stick around. Stand clear of the closing doors. Please make way the doors are closing. They can cause injury,

and injury is strictly against MTA policy. Please move your bike away from the closing doors. Sir, your huge tub of snack mix can't be there. Man, that goat will be pulverized by these powerful doors. One, two, three. You fools, how do you not understand the majesty of the doors? All doors are closing. You are taunting powers greater than you can imagine. Oh, how the doors are closing.

Closing, closing, closing. You feel them closing, not only in the vibrating anxious air, but in the fearful screams inside your head. Be aware of the closing doors or be unaware and perish. Stand clear of the closing doors by Emmett von Stalkleberg. He was performed by Charlie Pellett, who's actually the voice of the official New York City subway announcements, and he appeared courtesy of Bloomberg Radio.

This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. For almost a decade now, pianist Robert Glasper has made a name for himself as a crossover musician, a guy with an absolute mastery of jazz technique who brings that to pop. He's recorded with some of the biggest names in soul and hip-hop and contemporary R&B, and in 2012, he won a Grammy in the R&B category for his record Black Radio. Earlier this year, he changed tack a little bit.

He released an album of piano, bass and drums, old-school jazz. It's called Covered. It includes recent songs by R&B and hip-hop musicians, people like Bilal and Kendrick Lamar. but also some of the most familiar standards in the jazz catalog like this version of Stella by Starlight. Stella by Starlight's been recorded by, I don't know how many musicians. 500 million, $500,000.

Is that the exact number? Did you listen to all of them? I listened to half of them, about $250 million of them. And when you do that, do you say, do you back away, or is there an idea in mind that you want to put forward on that? My thing is, yeah, it's either you do it totally different or you don't do it at all. I try to put me in everything I do because if you're not putting you in it, then it's already been done, so what's the point?

And what's the you in it for the uninitiated? What I naturally feel, I can't say, oh, well, if you put a hip-hop beat to it is me, because everything about me isn't always hip-hop, you know. For this thing, it was the sound of my band. The best bands are the bands that have personalities on each instrument. You know, I write with those guys in mind, and I make arrangements with those guys. in mind. So I leave a lot of, even when I arrange something, I leave it kind of open so they can interpret it their way. So then you have an actual sound of a band. Not one guy dictating everything

everybody else does. In the hip-hop world, you're known to some extent as that jazz guy. Right. And yet you stand in relationship to jazz in a complicated way. A few years ago, you told Downbeat this. I've gotten bored with jazz to the point where I wouldn't mind something bad happening. Right. Slapping hurts, but at some point it'll wake you up. I feel like like jazz needs a big-ass slap. Totally. Meaning what? Meaning jazz, the jazz world

a lot of times is on all the pilot. A lot of the jazz world is very much stuck in history. Two in golf with the 60s and the 50s and the 40s and all of our heroes, you know what I mean? But music has to keep living. Do you think the jazz world has become a museum of itself? Without a doubt. Easily, without a doubt.

You're getting a history lesson. This is how you swing. Now, this is how you do this. The beauty about the music, it always evolved. You know what I mean? That's why when the 70s came around, you know, started getting more electric because there were more electric instruments. So you keep getting influenced by what's around you at the time. And yet when Miles Davis brought electronic instruments to the fore, he got a lot of guff for it, to say the least.

Totally. Not everybody loved it. Not everybody's a genius. Not everybody is a forward thinker, you know what I mean? So you're not going to please everyone off top because they don't know what you're doing at first. It's crazy to them. Let's hear the first taste of liftoff from Black Radio, which was the album that won you the R&B Grammy a couple of years ago.

Oh, yeah. Hello, world. Peace of love. I wish you the best. And now for the next. Coming to your mind, live and direct from the ethers. Now it's all in your speakers. Down to your sneak-up.

Do you ever think or do you ever worry about hip-hop itself? burning out in the same way that you were talking about jazz, maybe becoming dangerously close to a museum of itself? Not really because it's such a young music, there's so many young artists, and the labels and the business of it all are pushing the young artist. That's what keeps hip-hop booming and keeps it alive, really. So I don't fear that it's going to die out anytime soon at all.

The new album is much more of a jazz album. Yes. Than Black Radio, Black Radio 2, much more. more. Other than producing beautiful music, or you have a mission here? You're trying to guide people back into younger people into listening to not only your record, but Miles and Monk and Sonny Rollins and all the rest? Somewhat is that. Somewhat is, it's just like it's about Christian Scott and Marcus Strickland and Kenneth Whelham. Yeah, contemporaries, my friends. Miles doesn't have a problem with selling records. It's my contemporaries that are having

a problem. So that's why I chose to do jazz trio, but do songs that people. people of my time today, no, Kendrick Lamar, Janay Naiko, Bilal, John Legend, Radiohead, you know, because those are people that, and albums and artists that are relevant now. So, Robert, to give people a sense of your latest album, maybe we can listen to a bit of one of the original pieces you were working from and then have you play something. Sure. Maybe the Balal cut called Levels. Could you play your version for us?

Sure. We've got a big old piano here in the studio. Oh, I didn't even see that big old piano over there. Look at that. What is that? Steinway? That's something like that. Not convenient. That's beautiful, Robert.

Thank you. You leave yourself room to improvise in the spaces. Yes, yes, exactly. For me, you know, sometimes solos can take the song too far out of context. I feel like when it's needed for the music, I take a solo. But sometimes songs are so beautiful that you don't need that extra stuff in the middle. You kind of just play the song. So you don't see these as vehicles.

It's not like Coltrane playing my favorite things. which has a theme, it's repeated, and then it's 15 minutes of exploration. Right, not this particular song and not this particular album, you know, but there are times where I do explore and really get in there. Let's stretch out. Yeah, exactly. There are times for that, but this particular album wasn't necessarily for that. It was built more for the person who just likes to listen to, you know,

pop and R&B and hip-hop, that kind of vibe. What do you like as a listener? You have a little bit of everything on this record. There's a radio head cut called Reckoner, hip-hop covers. Johnny Mitchell and, yeah. You know, I grew up with so much music in my home. My mother was a singer. She'll do a Broadway gig one night, a jazz gig, one night, a pop gig, one night, a country gig, funk gig.

And then she was the music director at church on Sundays. You know what I mean? So there was... You grew up in Houston. Yes. And your mother was in which... What kind of church? Baptist church.

was the director of the choir. She would take me to all the rehearsals and to church and even to a lot of her gigs I would be at her shows, you know, when I was like literally two years old. You know, I was on the main stage and I was 11 playing at church. You got lessons, I assume. Kind of, every blue moon, but not really. Just kind of did it. I kind of, once I started playing, I kind of just went off on a tangent and just learned songs. You had never had lessons in your life? I took six months of classical lessons when I was in seventh grade. And then I took, took one year or two years of gospel lessons when I was in seventh and eighth grade. Okay, hold the phone. After you just played that, you've never taken more than a year or two of lessons?

No, no. Mothers at home are listening to this and crying. They have no way to convince their kids to sit there like I did for years. But I was the only child, and all I did was play the piano. Once I started playing, that's what I love to do. So my mother... And you could play on the keyboard what you were hearing in your head? Yes. I could play what I're hearing in my head, and I would love to live. learn songs off the radio. I hate you. You know? And Theory, too, you could just pick this up like nothing.

Theory, yes. And I, you know, I got really good at theory once I went to the high school for performing arts in Houston. Now, are you going to make a gospel record at some point? Yes, I am going to make a gospel record. I'm putting it together in my mind now. I don't know when it's going to come out or when I'm actually going to do it, but I see it being done in the next year or two,

for sure. Now, before we leap off of this the current album, I have to say that the covers are all over the places, a Joni Mitchell, a John Legend. And you cover a song by Kendrick Lamar, who may be the figure in hip-hop today. And you've worked with him a lot. And you've taken Dying of Thirst,

one of his best-known, most political tracks, and made it your own. So you hear that, and you say to yourself, now I'm going to do my version. This song just speaks to me. So what I did was I got my son and a few of his friends to just say the names of some of the people who were killed by the police in the last few years, you know. Eric Garner, Trayvon. And unfortunately, even since we've recorded, there's been so many more, you know.

It's unfortunate that I might have to do a part two. Now, when you work with Kendrick Lamar, how does, how does, how does, how does, that collaboration? It was really cool because I literally recorded that album the same night I recorded my album

covered. Before I did my recording Terris Martin, a good friend of mine who is a producer that I called me and said, hey, when you finish your recording, can you run over here to Dr. J's recording?

Kendrick's here won't you play on some stuff? And I was like, cool. With no preparation with no notion. No, none. They played me the track they wanted me to play.

I listened to it once or twice and then I played it. It was lucky you had a year and a half of lessons. Yeah. So then after that, after I played that one track,

Kendrick was like, oh man, pull up so-and-so, pull up this track, pull up that track. So I literally sat down and played like seven or eight songs that night. Robert, is it a problem as well as a gift in the music business to be someone who is trying all different kinds of things? Is it a commercial difficulty? It can be because most people, when they do something, they do one thing and they do one thing well. You know what I mean? This is what I do and this is what it is. I play jazz.

That's what I'm going to play and that's what it is. That's hard enough. And that's hard enough, and people put a label on you, and you have to stay there. But, you know, I was blessed to be good at more than one thing. So why am I only going to do one thing, you know? Especially when it's – we're talking about music that come from my people, like African-American music. We're talking about rock music. We're talking about hip-hop music.

We're talking about jazz music. We're talking about blues. Talking about gospel. And the list goes on and on. And all that music is in my blood. I don't see where it should be a problem or where it should be, like, a mystery. Do you feel the music business is putting any demands on you? you were, do you live outside of that?

People try to put demands on me, but I'm trying to knock those down whether they like or or not. And what are the demands? What do they want to want to keep you in a box? They want to keep you in the jazz box. So when you get out of that, it's like, what are you doing? Even the jazz community is like, hey, what are you doing? You're leaving us.

You know, how dare you leave us? You know, it's like a crazy ex-wife or something. Like, I'm not leaving. I'm going to the store. I'll be back. I'm not abandoning you, jazz. Chill out. Robert Glasper, thank you so much.

much. Thank you. I appreciate it. Thanks for having. Robert Glasper. This year he released the record covered. He's on tour now playing this week in Chicago. I'm David Remnick, and this is the New Yorker Radio Hour. More to come. I'm David Remnick. Welcome back to the New Yorker Radio Hour. Now I'm going to try to describe a long, complicated journey. So get out your mental map

of the United States. Start at the headwaters of the Mississippi River in northern Minnesota. Get in a canoe. Go all the way down the Mississippi, past New Orleans, to the Gulf of Mexico. That would be pretty amazing, inconceivable as far as anyone else is concerned, but we're not done. Now turn around and head north, paddling up the Mobile River. Take a couple of turns into Tennessee, almost to the Virginia border, hit your ride over the Appalachian Mountains, then get back in the water, and go down the James River, eventually reaching the Atlantic

near Portsmouth, Virginia. It sounds incredible, but a man named Dick Conan spent years taking voyages just like that. He wasn't some wild kid. He didn't start until he was in his 40s. He was already overweight

with a lot of medical problems behind him. And he described his life to Ben McGrath, who's a staff writer at the New Yorker, right after they met absolutely by chance, right outside Ben's house in the suburbs of New York. And now Ben has this story of a difficult but truly remarkable life.

So here we're in the town of Piermont, New York, which is about 15 miles north of the George Washington Bridge on the west side of the Hudson River. And I like to go kayaking, usually in the mornings. And the day I met Dick, which was Labor Day of 2014, I was going to take my two-year-old kayaking, and my neighbor peaked his head over that wall. and he said there's somebody in here who I think you might want to meet.

So I started walking over to my neighbor Scott's house, and before heading inside, I noticed at this point that there's this dirty red canoe tied up to the base of his seawall. It's covered in tarps and some trash bags maybe, and it's got army duffles. I mean, it really looked like it had been packed for the apocalypse. And inside, sitting at the head of a long rectangular table, was Dick Conant. He said he was 63, and he had a big beard,

and he was bright red, and he probably weighed 300 pounds. He had these dusty denim bib overalls. I mean, I remember having the impression that it was as though Santa Claus had canoed into town. And he was kind of holding forth, and I gathered that he was about two months into a journey that he expected it to last at least another six more months, and he had begun up by the Canadian border, and was basically going to be taking a chain of rivers and canals down the Atlantic seaboard and ending up in Florida.

And he was on this journey, from what I could tell, no particular reason. It quickly became clear that this was not his first insane voyage. In fact, within a couple of minutes of my arriving, he was telling a story about how he almost got run over by a barge on the Mississippi at night. As it happened, he'd basically been crisscrossing the country alone in a canoe for the better part of two decades. But I missed the opportunity to really draw him out on the particulars of those trips because I did, after all, have my two-year-old with me,

and he was threatening to destroy my neighbor's house. So it wasn't really until the next morning when I woke up and thought, okay, I got to find this guy again. So I got some binoculars and drove down south. And after a while, sort of hiking along the shore I was able to see up in the distance this flashing yellow plastic paddle.

When he got within earshot of me, I yelled his name and started waving him ashore. And he backed the boat in and he just decided to set up camp right there. I'm due for a good break. I might make camp right here. I'm exhausted. Right.

Is there a place you can sit? Do you have something that drank, like a Cota Pop? I don't, I'm unfortunately. Sorry. Did you like one? No, no, I don't want to waste your supplies. Yeah, it's no waste. Believe me.

And I started talking, and I began to learn the very long and mysterious life of Dick Conna. I was born in Germany. We lived in Germany for three years. My dad was with Army Armour, so we moved down to Kentucky, Port Knox for four years he had grown up actually a bit of an army brat he'd been all over the place but most of his schooling

as a boy was done in Pearl River New York Pearl River is a pretty ordinary suburb now but in the 50s and 60s when he was there it really did really think of it as kind of Mark Twain country it was winding country roads and the upper reaches of the Hackensack River were there

and they had a little dingy and they would kind of go up and down Dick in fact invented a club that it was called Catfish Yacht Club. So there's a way in which throughout all of his life he saw himself as a kind of an epic adventure. He was at the top of his high school class. He had a full scholarship to college. He was a hugely talented man who had, because of various troubles he had,

not amounted to much in a conventional sense. I had a really checkered career, what he called. I worked on the railroad in Wyoming for a couple of years. He had worked on the railroad. in Wyoming he had worked on the oil rigs he was a coal miner he was a janitor he worked in hospitals he was a weather observer he was in the navy he worked selling most recently before i met him he'd been selling bus tickets at a greyhound station so i think you know the fact that he hadn't achieved in one of the phrases that he didn't have a white picket fence he didn't have a he didn't

have a family i'm at 63 years old right you know this is these adventures are They really are. However, I would much rather be at home with a woman. Right. And a family like you had. Right. And he was homeless. Well, one of the reasons I go on these trips is because, well, I don't have an apartment.

Okay. When he wasn't paddling, he camped outside in what he called a swamp in Bozeman, Montana. People call it homeless. I don't know. I've been living like this since two years. From talking to him, it was clear that he was extremely well-read, both, in a historical sense with literary references and historical references, but also could more than hold his own in talking about current events.

When this trip is over, I'll sit down and write a prose account. He told me they'd written several books, and in fact, I think had a couple of them with him in the boat on flash drives. Well, I've written three books. I'm just not published. Okay. By the time I get finished writing a book, I'm ready to go on another trip. The books read like journals.

Each of them is a chronological account of a particular transcontinental canoe trip. November 13, 1999. I visited with a dog. This damn thing followed me for two miles along the riverbank after I got underway. November 14th, 1999, I saw an interesting sight today. A bald eagle was pestering and chasing a great baron in midair. August 12, 2009, I'm up at dawn. I paddle all day.

I see eagles and other wild jane. January 18, 2010, I'm on a tawny sand beach listening to squawking birds. January 4, 2000. My abode, my bedroom is a gravel riverbank, and my living room is the greatest river system of the most beautiful country on earth. August 20, 1999, some guy and his wife woke me up from a nap at Lewis and Clark State Park. He asked me if that was my rig in the river. I said the red canoe was mine. He asked me where I was going.

I said the Gulf of Mexico. He asked me, eventually, why? I told him I got tired of TV and automobiles, and so I just took off and jumped in the river. He and his wife stared at me blankly. Like Pat Schroeder used to say, Some of you people just don't get it. He was physically a very striking man, you know, very large,

always wore overalls. He apparently rode a bike that was often too small for him. He had a kind of a booming, if gentle voice. And in a town, in a place, you get a man who looks like that on land, and that person sticks out in a way that makes people uncomfortable. And he was very aware of that. Bozeman, Montana is a relatively small town where if you're a 300-pound man who wears overalls and rides a bicycle back and forth,

people do know you and notice you again and again and probably do roll their eyes or whisper things. one of the layers that guy on the bike again. When he's on the river and he emerges into a new town, he's not that guy, he's this guy. And the difference between that guy and this guy was everything to him. September 17, 2007, at the risk of sounding like a whining crybaby complainer, I've got to get some baggage off my shoulders.

The people in Bozeman did not appreciate my talent or skills or, God forbid, my robust personality. I am not a wealthy man unless I consider the innate skills granted to me by nature. As this present Odyssey can convey, I am an unabashed and gifted adventurer. Because he had been a successful kid and student and athlete and all these things, he had a strong sense of his own talents and potential. And yet by middle age, he clearly hadn't reached any of it in a conventional sense at least. And so the canoeing, which really he took up, I think, his first long trip, he was 43 years old.

So in a way you could think of it as a midlife crisis. But it also became a way for him to shift that sense of squandered potential into a real sense of accomplishment. It became a career in which he could excel. September 17, 2007, this is a good opportunity to reiterate a concept which is very real and quite stabilizing in a psychological aspect. Though I am no king of the Irish, or any warrior king, when I am out on the water in my canoe, I do call the shots. My time is my own. It belongs to me. Though in most places I visit, I am treated with friendship and generosity and often kindness in the extreme, I am beholden to no one. My main goal at the time had been simply to write a short talk of the town story for the magazine about an unusual man who had passed through town.

And I think the story came out in late September. October 20th, he sent me an email saying that he was Hale and Hardy in Delaware City, Delaware. And at that point, I believe he said he was preparing for his next leg, which was across Chesapeake Bay. And didn't hear anything again until November 29th. It was a Saturday, and I was getting lunch ready for my kids, and I got a phone call from a number I did not recognize, and it was a wildlife officer in North Carolina saying he was investigating a missing boater.

And it took me no more than two seconds to realize who he was talking about. As it turned out, some duck hunters had found a canoe, but not a canoeist. And in going through the boat, they had found my phone number in it. The point where they found the boat, it was turned upside down, up against some Cyprus knees. And it was on the Al-Marl Sound in North Carolina. And if you look south across the sound at that point, it's like 12 miles across.

I mean, you can't see the other side. You might as well be on Lake Michigan. So they thought they had a huge search area, and they didn't know when he'd gone missing because no one, his itinerary was known only to himself. Dick had seven living siblings. Not one of them knew where he was or what he was up to. If they knew, it was only because I'd written an article

in the talk of the town section. I wanted to visit my mother and siblings. Some of them I had not seen in over 25 years. If you don't visit once in a while, you end up forgetting altogether. After he had gone missing, I went back to my notes and I saw the part in my conversation with him

when he mentioned his older brother Joe in Peachtree City, Georgia. I looked up Joe's phone number at that point when I got the call from the officer and I gave the officer Joe's phone number, and that's how the family found out. Unfortunately, I think there was an initial wish on the part of friends he'd met and his family members to think,

well, maybe he, you know, look, he lived a free and kind of untethered life to begin with. Maybe he just decided to ditch the boat and go somewhere else. The thing that makes that seem unlikely is that, you know, he already lived pretty close to off the grid, as much as he wanted to, he was able to accomplish it.

You know, he lived outside in Bozeman, Montana. He paddled where he wanted to, when he wanted to. They found a mountain of stuff in his boat, his wallet, his naval discharge papers, his journals, his maps, his money, his food, his tent. His body is still not accounted for. They have been tracking his bank account since he went missing. And the only activity in his bank account is the monthly automatic deposit of his Social Security. It was weird and almost unsettling feeling to think that sort of just by happenstance, I'd become the link between Dick and his largely estranged family.

And it felt very personal. A few months after the news had kind of settled in, I ended up meeting with a couple of his brothers who live closer to me. And they began sharing with me some of his manuscripts and talking to me about their childhood. One of the things that became clearer was that he was sensitive to an extreme and sometimes paranoid and delusional degree. In fact, when he was in the Navy in his 30s, he was briefly placed on mental leave.

But I think the most elegant way of putting it is something Dick himself said to his mother, apparently, after he completed one of these trips. And that's that he told her that he'd been contending with mental barnacles. March 31st, 2010. I am paranoid, so I spent some time camouflaging my camp. It is small and tight, but I'm getting paranoid. It looked like another setup. If I got friendly with one woman, the other would have...

September 16th, 2009. One can never be certain of what another will do when he or she is truly afraid. March 5th, 2010. Now I am increasingly thinking that my visit had more sinister aspects to it than I... November 15th, 2007. I began to think in terms of the infinite variety of turns a human mind can twist to fabricate and mold. Given irrefutable facts, a determined mind can construct a total delusion out of a whole cloth and thereby satisfy a gnawing yet wishful thought process.

This is one of the reasons why he would often move is I think he, ultimately, if he spent too many days in one place, he began to worry that he'd overstayed his welcome. and he felt that he had to go, which is a shame, because in many cases, when I call the people who were there, they only remember him fondly. They don't remember the offending incident

that made him think that he had to go. December 20th, 2007, I began to feel like a heel when I finally empathized with him, with Wayne. The feeling that I had offended him and his friends began to gnaw at my mind. It will continue to do so for some time to come. I just, frankly, didn't know.

any better. My ignorance of social niceties this late in life is fairly deplorable, but I guess it comes with the territory. I find it a bit disconcerting that of the many friends I have met on this adventure, most I will never see again. You know, when I look back at the talk story I wrote, I wonder sometimes in light of what happened about a comment that an old family friend of Dix made. I think it was something like, you know, what Dickie needed was not an article in The New Yorker, but an intervention. I feel pretty strongly that that isn't true. I really think in light of what I've come to understand about his past and some of the difficulties he faced in his head is that I really think that the rivers were a survival mechanism for him. And he himself would often write that he was

surprised that he was still alive. And not because he'd been doing this crazy river paddling, but because of other things that had happened in his life. For Dick, it was. It wasn't a lark. It was simply his way of being. January 18, 2008. Frankly, if somebody prefers the domestic life, that is the life he leads or pursues. If he prefers to wander, then he takes off.

This stuff about finding oneself is a bunch of baloney. I repeat that I am not out here finding myself. I was never lost. What I am doing is paddling. around, finding geography I have not seen, observing various industry and transport, experiencing wildlife, meeting new people, most of whom are worth meeting, and having a jolly good time before I die. It was the only way that Dick could be happy in the world was moving along through a river. He himself seemed to think that when he first began doing this as a serious line of work, so to speak,

which was more than 15 years ago, that that was the beginning of saving his life rather than ending it. Yes. Thank you so much. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I love telling him about my trip. You know, I don't care if I get published or not. But I do enjoy relating.

Yeah. That's half the front of course. All right. Drive safely. Very good. Best for your wife and child. We'll do. One and the other.

All right. Thank you. We'll do. Ben McGrath talking with Dick Conan. excerpts from Conan's journals were read for us by Peter Gallagher. I'm David Remnick. Thanks for joining us, and please join us again next week. Stay in touch with us on Twitter at New Yorker Radio, or leave us a comment at new yorker.org. The New Yorker Radio Hour is a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.

Our theme music was composed and performed by Merrill Garvis of Tune Yards. This episode was produced with special assistance from Catherine Wells. Thank you.