The New Yorker Radio Hour - The Missing Boater

Episode Date: April 5, 2022

Dick Conant spent years of his life crisscrossing America by canoe, like a Mark Twain character. On land, he worked a variety of jobs and was often homeless, but paddling on a river, he was king. By chance, on a voyage which began near the Canadian border, on his way to Florida, Conant met Ben McGrath, a New Yorker staff writer, outside McGrath’s home on the Hudson River. McGrath’s piece about Conant appeared in the December 14, 2015, issue of The New Yorker this week; here, he tells the story of a troubled man who found refuge in adventure. Ben McGrath’s book about Conant, “Riverman: An American Odyssey,” will be published in April.  Originally aired December 11, 2015. 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. This is The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. One of the very first stories that we aired on this program, episode 8 as a matter of fact, was about a man named Dick Conan, a kind of adventurer who in middle age began taking trips by canoe, long, extraordinary trips. Take one example. Conan traveled the entire length of the Mississippi River down to the Gulf of Mexico, Then he paddled back upstream on the Mobile River, making his way to Tennessee. Then he gets a ride over the peak of the Appalachians and finally paddles the James River through Virginia out to the Atlantic Ocean. That's just one trip. And by chance, Dick Conan met staff writer Ben McGrath one fine day on the Hudson River.

Eight years later, Ben's book about Conan called Riverman, An American Odyssey, comes out this week. And so we wanted to revisit this story about a very difficult, troubled, 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 he might be. want to meet. So I started walking over to my neighbor Scott's house, and, you know, 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 the chain of rivers and canals down the Atlantic seaboard and ending up in Florida. And he was on this journey, from what I've got, 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 going to say. right is there a place you can sit you have something that drank like a total pop I'm I don't unfortunately sorry I like one no no you don't waste your supplies yeah it's no I started talking and I began to learn the very long and mysterious life of Dick Conant

I was born in Germany we lived in Germany for three years and dad was with army armor so we moved down to Kentucky Court Knox for four years but when I was 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, they 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 Catfishy, 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. Maybe, I had a really checkered career, what he called. I worked on the railroad in Wyoming. He had worked on the railroad in Wyoming. He had worked on the oil rigs. He had worked on the oil rigs. 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, one of the phrases that he didn't have a white picket fence, he didn't have a family. I'm at 63 years old. You know, these adventures are incredible. They really are. However, I would much rather than, be at home with a woman. 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 2007. 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 mid-air. August 12th, 2009. I'm up at dawn. I paddle all day.

I see eagles another while. January 18th, 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 20th, 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 were 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. There's 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 cry-baby 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 a 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 cypress 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. 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. 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 month. the 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 lived closer to me, and they began sharing with me some of his manuscripts and talking to me about their childhood. but 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 16, 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 it in 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. 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 the front. Are you, be careful. All right. Drive safely.

Very good. Best to your wife is child. We'll do. All right. Thank you. We'll do. Ben McGrath's book, Riverman, an American Odyssey,

tell the story of Dick Conan, and it's published this week. Conan is still missing. Excerpts from his journals were read for us by Peter Gallagher. That's the New Yorker Radio Hour for today. Thanks for joining us. I'm David Remnick. See you next time. 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 Garbus of Tune Arts, with additional music by Alexis Quadrato. This episode was produced by Alex Barron, Ave Carrio, Brita Green, Calilea, David Krasnow, Gophane and Putubuele, Louis Mitchell, Michelle Moses, and Stephen Valentino. With help from Alison McAdam and Mengfei Chen, and guidance from Emily Boutin, the New Yorker Radio Hour is supported in part by the Cherina Endowment Fund.