Dick Conant is a one of a kind man. This book tells his story. He doesn't really fit into typical norms of behavior. Over his life he will traverse the entirety of the UNited Staves by canoe. He is larger that life physically (over three hundred pounds) but also by how much people he meets remember and rever him over his travels. It is clear that the author is one who has fallen under his spell. We find out that Conant has turned up missing on a trip and much of the book deals with the search for him through people he has known over the years. ( )

Borrowed it from the library but this is a book I think I'd like to own. ( )

McGrath writes well, but there just isn't enough about the Riverman. Or, perhaps what there is isn't all that compelling in the end.

> The air was so clear, and free of dust, that he realized he had gone a couple of weeks without the urge to pick his nose

> “These adventures are incredible,” he said, repeating a sentiment that he’d voiced earlier in the day. “They really are. They’re wonderful to have. They’re dangerous, and full of excitement. However, at this point in my life, I’ve had enough of this excitement. I’d much rather be at home with a woman, and a family like you have, than out here on the water. But this is the alternative.”

> Before taking his leave of Jason and Tom—he offered handshakes, they gave him hugs—Conant presented them with a regift of his own, in the form of prisoners’ MREs. These were leftovers from the cleanup crew, and surprisingly delicious, at least by itinerant standards. (“They swam in a thick, delicious savory gravy,” Conant wrote of the dumplings he’d sampled. “Yum yum.”) Of the seventeen meals that remained, he kept four for himself, abstemious, and left his would-be tormentors with the other thirteen, “subconsciously hoping,” as he put it, that the odd number would prove a source of tension.

> By the standards of type A expedition athletes, Conant can’t claim even a proper descent of the country’s grandest river (“old pal, unpredictable friend,” he called it), whose official headwaters are at Lake Itasca, fifty-odd miles upstream of where he put in for his own ostensible full-Mississippi voyage, in 2009. But you can’t catch a Greyhound to Lake Itasca, so he settled for Bemidji, where “one of a string of lakes that form the headwaters,” as he explained it to me, was within walking distance of a store that sold cheap canoes.

> He recalled the time, in Bozeman, in the dark, when he had inadvertently put the boots on the wrong feet and scarcely noticed any discomfort, and he now determined to switch them regularly as a matter of preservation, as if rotating the tires on a car.

> Conant’s annotations on them were sparse, mysterious, and at times alarmist. An asterisk in the middle of the shipping channel, south of Annapolis, was accompanied by three exclamation marks and the words “OUCH DISASTER.”

> At a rest stop, they overheard a couple of men in the parking lot making disparaging references to the spectacle of the two of them, with their truck bed full of junk. “They called us Sanford and Son,” Wells said. “It kind of hurt Dick’s feelings. I was like, ‘Dick, don’t worry about it. Those guys are stuck in Hampton, Virginia, picking up trash. Their whole lives, they could try, and they won’t see the things you’ve seen, and meet the people you’ve met.’ ” ( )

Having read the New Yorker articles, this book was on my list. I loved it. Conant is such a character and McGrath brought us into his world which is outside what most of us know. It showed how Conant's generous character positively affected most he met despite his unusual appearance. It was heartwarming to see how many people gave him the benefit of the doubt. I do wonder if Tracy ever contacted the author. ( )

Ben McGrath is a New Yorker staff writer. He encountered an odd character along the Hudson and got to know him better and wrote a magazine piece. This is the book-length version. I really wanted to like it more than I did. The writing is of course excellent, any New Yorker writer will have access to other great writers and editors. The "cook" is thus top-notch. The problems are with the ingredients, the main character and story. They are not that strong. As his life-story unfolds, the impression is of a college drop-out acid causality from the early 70s, who apparently tripped over 1,000 times, leaving him with a life-long mental-health crisis that manifested as homelessness, paranoia, aimless drifter. The book then is sort of horrifying. But McGrath doesn't present it that way, he looks for some deeper meaning in the American character. I didn't buy into that. This guy was troubled. To be charitable, it is a character study reminiscent of the 1930s era New Yorker writer Joseph Mitchell, in particular his work on Joe Gould, another troubled but colorful wanderer who traveled that fine line between hobo and outsider artist. ( )