Riverman

“This quietly profound book belongs on the shelf next to Jon Krakauer’s ; The riveting true story of Dick Conant, an American folk hero who, over the course of more than twenty years, canoed solo thousands of miles of American rivers--and then disappeared near the Outer Banks of North Carolina. This book “contains everything: adventure, mystery, travelogue, and unforgettable characters” (David Grann, best-selling author of For decades, Dick Conant paddled the rivers of America, covering the Mississippi, Yellowstone, Ohio, Hudson, as well as innumerable smaller tributaries. These solo excursions were epic feats of planning, perseverance, and physical courage. At the same time, Conant collected people wherever he went, creating a vast network of friends and acquaintances who would forever remember this brilliant and charming man even after a single meeting. Ben McGrath, a staff writer at ; ;

Autorentext

BEN McGRATH is a longtime staff writer for The New Yorker. He lives outside New York City in a small town on the Hudson, with his wife and two children. This is his first book.

Leseprobe
1

Stone-Age Mentality

The most wonderful day in the very full, topsy-turvy life of Richard Perry Conant occurred in his forty-ninth year, in the summer of 1999. An auspicious start: he awoke without feeling ill. He was camped in a grove on the east bank of the Yellowstone River, whose water he had drunk, untreated, in great quantities the night before. Was it Monday? He wasn’t quite sure. Happily, he was losing track of time. A little more than a week had passed since he’d quit his job, as a janitor at the VA hospital in Boise, declaring himself fed up with the Clinton impeachment indulgence and maybe modernity itself. Before leaving, he’d stashed some frozen fish in the attic of the house he’d been renting, a stink bomb on delayed fuse. Then he’d driven to Yellowstone National Park, where he spied elk, goats, buffalo, and—on the Blacktail Plateau, amid lush meadows—a black bear. Finally, he’d gone to Walmart and bought a canoe, which he launched near the border of Montana and Wyoming. Destination: Gulf of Mexico.

Conant was now downstream of Yankee Jim Canyon, a narrow cleaving of the Absaroka and Gallatin ranges that chokes the river into an angry froth. He had capsized a couple of days earlier while struggling with a rapid known as Boateater, and been fortunate to lose only a machete and a hat in the process. The water was frigid, and he’d briefly reconsidered his options, among them adding outriggers for stability. But he no longer had access to a car, with which to resupply. As he stood on a bridge that morning, gazing nervously ahead, a truck driver stopped and asked, only half joking, if someone had drowned. Not so funny. Conant ate a quick breakfast (hot yams, more river water), and set about rearranging his gear, which included Pepto Bismol and a marble composition book in which he’d jotted a few reminders: “REMEDY FOR BUGS. KEEP SWATTING. How to get through rapids—hold on tight. CLOSE EYES.” Forget the outriggers. He was under way, a lone canoeist amid scattered dories in a seven-knot current, at around 10 a.m.

The canyon walls receded and he shot out into the valley, flanked in the near distance by ten-thousand-foot peaks. Cottonwoods lining the banks yielded summer snow to the flukey breeze. On the water, swirling eddies materialized and vanished inexplicably, while rainbow trout breached in the periphery of his vision. Paradise Valley: a name well deserved. Conant had traveled much of the world, and set foot in all forty-eight contiguous states, and he deemed this the most picturesque river valley he had experienced up close.

Afternoon brought heavy weather and a slalom course, as the straightaways shortened and he coped ably with shoals and rapids. Somehow, in the course of sliding forty-five miles, he scraped just two rocks. And then, half an hour before sunset, he arrived, brimming with adrenaline, in Livingston, a town that seemed composed of equal parts galleries and saloons. Yuppies and cowboys. A man like Conant—an old art major with Falstaffian appetites—could imagine getting used to such a place.

But he was on a mission, of a sort. He had notions of spending Christmas in Mississippi (Natchez or Vicksburg), and of ringing in the millennium in New Orleans. He thought it best not to “tarry,” as he liked to say, thinking of his deceased father, an army colonel with a performative sense of rectitude. He won a little money gambling at a hotel casino on the south end of town, and spent the extra cash on Bernard DeVoto’s abridged Journals of Lewis and Clark, good companionship for a transcontinental river trip.

In a park near some ballfields, while Conant repacked his boat, a young brunette was walking her dog. They got to talking. Her name was Tracy. She seemed intrigued by his plans, maybe even impressed by his derring-do. Conant, who had been dressing more or less exclusively in bib overalls since Woodstock, had grown familiar in recent years with being regarded as a misfit rather than a rugged charmer: a janitor, after all, in spite of a graduate education. A gifted natural athlete, he now carried well over two hundred pounds on his six-foot-one frame. No matter his evocative blue eyes and wispy blond hair. He was highly perceptive, and sometimes sensitive to a fault. Yet here was someone, perhaps, who saw him the way he was still determined to see himself: intelligent, adventurous, charismatic, ambitious.

Tracy asked what he planned to do when he was finished with the journey. It was a natural question, and a heady one. What should a middle-aged man who has quit his job and stink-bombed his home hope for, after conquering more than three thousand miles on one of the earth’s longest unbroken chains of river—Yellowstone to Missouri to Mississippi? He liked university towns and big skies. He liked hospitals: before becoming a janitor, he’d worked as a scrub, prepping for surgery. He said that he was thinking of settling nearby, in Bozeman, with an eye toward studying bacteriology. A little late to resume a medical career, but the vigorous long paddle into town had left him feeling youthful and optimistic. Reflecting on the exchange as he continued downriver, he recalled a bashful glimmer in the woman’s eyes at the prospect of his returning. “I hope I see Tracy again,” he wrote in his composition book.

•••

After a week afloat, he found himself occasionally unsteady on his feet, the ground seeming to rise and fall beneath him, as though carried by waves. He learned to avoid the gunpowder-gray sand, which was deceptively yielding, and capable of sucking the shoes off his ankles, in favor of gravel bars, the rockier the better. The river shed two thousand feet in elevation in a couple hundred miles, and then, having left the mountains behind, began to slow. The temperature climbed above a hundred. The lush valley turned into prairie badlands, with red streaks and coal in the ochre bluffs. He saw paw prints larger than his own hands, and a bobcat the height of a German shepherd.

The vertigo subsided, but bugs were a persistent problem: black flies so adept at the hit-and-run that Conant found himself unable to distinguish between real bites and phantom bites—a kind of preemptive paranoia; gnats, which he inhaled by the cloudful; and mosquitos, never more annoying than when they dive-bombed the moisture of his eyeballs and got trapped in his defensive lids. While studying the ingredients lists in many of the itch-relief products available in drugstores, he noticed that ammonia kept recurring. So he scoured the cleaning supplies, and bought himself a pint of Parsons’ Household, for a buc…