American Chronicles

December 14, 2015 Issue

The Wayfarer

A solitary canoeist meets his fate.

By Ben McGrath

Dick Conant in Mississippi in 2010. When not in a canoe he had been living under a leanto at the edge of a swamp in...

Dick Conant in Mississippi in 2010. When not in a canoe, he had been living under a lean-to at the edge of a swamp in Bozeman, Montana. “People call it homeless,” he said. “I don’t.”Photograph by Victor Schrager for The New Yorker; Source: Courtesy The Columbus Packet (Photograph)

On November 29, 2014, I received a phone call from an officer of the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission named John Beardsley. He was investigating a missing boater, he said, and explained that some duck hunters had found a canoe and that my phone number had turned up among the gear in the boat. He wanted to know where it had come from—he hoped, in fact, that I might be the canoeist. It took me a second or two to realize that the boat must have been Dick Conant’s. It had come practically from Canada, I explained—from Plattsburgh, New York, twenty miles south of the border.

Conant had paddled past my house, on the Hudson River a dozen miles above Manhattan, on Labor Day morning. As I was about to take my toddler son kayaking, a neighbor called out that there was a man in his house I might want to meet. A red canoe was tied up at the base of the seawall. It was filthy, and packed as if for the apocalypse, with tarps and trash bags and Army-surplus duffels. My neighbor, an adventurous spirit who once pedalled a bicycle from New York to Cocoa Beach, had spotted the unusual traveller in the water and waved him ashore.

Inside, Conant was sitting at the head of a table, facing down a kingly spread of caviar, sausage, doughnuts, and vodka, and holding forth for several guests. He was headed for Florida, he said, and was two months into a journey that he figured would take six more. He was sixty-three, and spoke in a mellifluous high timbre that seemed almost childlike. He wore denim bib overalls, a T-shirt, and muddy brown boots, and stood six feet one and weighed three hundred pounds. He had a rust-colored beard, with patches of white, and his face was as red as a boiled lobster shell—a riparian Santa. He laughed with great heaves of his gut. His handshake offered the firmest grip I’ve ever felt.

On the phone, I explained to Officer Beardsley that I was a journalist, and that I had written a short article (in this magazine) about Conant’s ambitious voyage. I mentioned that he had e-mailed me a month or so earlier, in late October, and sounded healthy and happy, in spite of the fact that waves had drowned his laptop. He was at a public library in Delaware City, Delaware, “and preparing for the next leg across Chesapeake Bay,” he wrote. I suggested that Beardsley check the local library, or perhaps a dive bar, where Conant might be raising eyebrows with his story about nearly getting run over by a barge one night on the Mississippi. Or was there a V.A. hospital nearby? Conant was a Navy veteran, and he suffered from gout and high blood pressure. He regularly stopped at V.A. hospitals where he could renew his scrips.

The canoe had been spotted floating upside down near the mouth of Big Flatty Creek, by a father who was fishing with his young boy and feared what they might discover if they drew their boat any closer. Big Flatty discharges into the not so flat brackish waters of Albemarle Sound, about twenty miles west of the Outer Banks. The father called his friend Grover Sanders, who had been hunting ducks nearby. Sanders, a stout soybean farmer who hadn’t trimmed his beard in three and a half years, drove his skiff out to have a look. “It was flipped over and hung up in them stumps,” he recalled. He was referring to the cypress knees that perforate the northern shores of the sound, giving it the color of tea. Behind the stumps was a swampy forest and, behind that, miles of tilled fields. Sanders spent fifteen minutes eying the canoe from various angles, trying to get a sense of what might be underneath, before attempting to right it.

Ropes pulsed beneath the boat like the tentacles of a jellyfish. They formed a kind of loose cage, trapping bags—or, as Sanders soon discovered, bags within bags within knotted bags, containing enough air that they amounted to a flotation device. Righting the boat without severing the ropes was impossible. Finding no body, Sanders called 911, loaded what bags he could onto his skiff, and towed the canoe inland, via a narrow canal, passing the rickety docks and large oyster middens of a shellfishing operation called Frog Island. A sheriff’s deputy and Beardsley and Chase Vaughan, another wildlife officer, met him there. A light breeze blew from the northeast, a remnant of a storm that had dumped several inches of rain a few days earlier. The men began combing through the effects, looking for clues.

Among the canoe’s contents were seventeen toothbrushes, three Louis L’Amour Western novels, a frying pan, a digital camera, and some soggy stapled papers, on the back of which I’d written my e-mail address and phone number, more than four hundred miles up the coast. Receipts and other assorted documents bore notes and inscriptions, written in blue and black ink:

If you allow poverty to hold you back, it means you have neither imagination nor will.

Idea ~ Sci-Fi: USB port from human nervous system directly into Internet.

I have been denied what our men are supposed to do. So I do what I want, which is to navigate.

I’m not good @ everything. I’m good @ long-distance canoe.

The nation’s largest Coast Guard facility is in the nearest town, Elizabeth City; it dispatched a boat, a plane, and, eventually, a helicopter to aid in the search. The wildlife division called in a plane of its own, and Beardsley and Vaughan began searching in their boats as well.

“All right lets do it again. This time youre good at acting.”

“All right, let’s do it again. This time, you’re good at acting.”

Beardsley felt that he should alert Conant’s family, and sought my advice. Conant had told me that he was one of nine siblings and mentioned that he had a brother who lived near me. But he hadn’t bothered to call him (or anyone else) when passing by. “That way, they don’t worry,” he said. Conant had mentioned another brother, Joe, as his closest kin. “Down in Peachtree City, Georgia,” he said. “He used to fly for Delta. His wife is one of those fussbudgets that everybody who has a birthday gets a card. So she’s just kind of like the glue that keeps our disparate family together.” I looked up the Conants in Peachtree City and sent their number to Beardsley.

If you asked Conant about his experiences on the country’s waterways, he would grin sheepishly, pause, size up your listening capacity, and then let go with a monologue as unstoppable as a river. In recalling a trip that began in July, 2009, and concluded in September, 2010, for instance, he said, “I took a Greyhound bus, like usual, out to northern Minnesota, place called Bemidji. I went to Gander Mountain, bought a boat, got some supplies at—not Walmarts, but that other big one? Kmarts! Got all my supplies ready to go, put in my boat on a lake next to Bemidji, one of a string of lakes that forms the headwaters of the Mississippi. So I took the Mississippi from Bemidji to New Orleans. I got on the Intracoastal Waterway east, going toward where Lake Borgne empties into Lake Pontchartrain, and vice versa. At Rigolets Pass, I ran into a duck hunter who also happened to be a lawyer for one of the parishes, for the sheriff’s department. I was going looking for ice. We got to talking. He goes, ‘Holy mackerel, you already came all that distance?’ I said, ‘Yeah, I’m not even halfway where I’m going!’ He asked if I need anything. I said, ‘If there’s a hardware store nearby, I’d like to get some fixings so I can make a little cart. I got about a hundred miles portage from here to Mobile, Alabama.’ He says, ‘The heck with that, I’ll give you a ride!’ I became good friends with the guy.”

Conant extolled the hospitality of the man’s family, and resumed navigating aloud—describing how he went up the Mobile River to the Tombigbee, in western Alabama, and on to the Tennessee and then up the Holston, to Kingsport.

“Now, when I had gone through Huntsville, Alabama, I met a guy who was a kayaker. He invited me to go to church the next morning. Very nice, devout people in the South. Was it Christmas? No, I think it was Easter. So that was the other big one. I said, ‘Well, when I get to Kingsport I got about a two-hundred-and-thirty-mile portage,’ or something like that. Take it up over the divide into western Virginia. He said, ‘Well, heck, I’ll give you a ride!’ This guy was a nasa scientist. He did software programs for the Saturn rocket. Well, anyhow, he was just finishing up a missionary trip up in Alaska. Took a couple of days for him to sleep off some of that lag, and then he drove me over the mountains into the upper half of the James River, I’m thinking Lynchburg, Virginia. Got on the James River, and I took it down through Richmond over what they call the Fall Line. It drops, like, a hundred fifty feet in three miles. It’s a rapids, big boulders and stuff. Then it turns into a tidal estuary, and the James River meanders down to the Atlantic Ocean at Hampton Roads, where the Monitor and the Merrimack had their battle in the Civil War. So I took it down to Hampton Roads, and I turned right at Norfolk and went up the Elizabeth River, and finished my journey there at Portsmouth.”

The nasa man’s name is Stanley Lett. (It wasn’t the Saturn rocket, though; it was the J2X.) Lett still has the paddle that Conant sent him, as a gesture of gratitude for the long lift. The parish sheriff’s lawyer is Chuck Hughes. Conant neglected to tell me (but wrote in a journal) that Hughes, when they met, had just saved a canoeist’s life on Lake Pontchartrain—an ex-marine, who had gone out fishing, swamped, and swam to a buoy, to which he was clinging, nearly hypothermic. Hughes told me that, shortly after he picked Conant up, they ran into a young backpacker from Pittsburgh who turned out to be trekking from the Pacific Ocean to the Atlantic, after having already made the opposite journey. Hughes took a picture of the two nomads. “We called them Surf and Turf,” he said. He also instructed his secretary to arrange and pay for Conant’s return flight, at the conclusion of his adventure, to Bozeman, Montana—where, for the previous several years, when not in a canoe Conant had been living under a lean-to at the edge of a swamp, behind East Main Street. “People call it homeless,” Conant told me. “I don’t.”

The most recent family sightings of Conant were in 2008, when he hopscotched up and down the East Coast, visiting his siblings: Joe, in Peachtree City; Mary, in Cape May, New Jersey; Roger and Jim, in Orange County, New York; and Rob and their elderly mother, Claire, in Sharon, Connecticut. He had just completed a canoe trip from Olean, New York, seventy miles south of Buffalo, to Port O’Connor, Texas, via the Allegheny, the Ohio, the Mississippi, the Atchafalaya, and the Gulf Intracoastal Waterway, into Matagorda Bay, where he fled from a blacktip shark, and then was swamped by a succession of three-foot waves from abaft and had to swim and wade ashore, towing his boat by the painter.

Dick Conant on the upper Mississippi in 2009. Courtesy Neal Moore

Those visits were mostly happy ones, although he confided to his mother that he was contending with “mental barnacles.” He did not attend her funeral, in 2011. “I think a physical meeting once a decade and a Christmas card once a year is sufficient for me,” he wrote to his brother Jim. “I don’t want to say goodbye forever.”

He wasn’t estranged, exactly; just distant. It had been that way for decades. Dicky, as he was known in the family, was the middle child, born fifth, in 1951. The first seven—all boys—were each about a year apart. They lived in Germany, where their father, Perry, was stationed as an Army colonel, and then moved for a few years to Fort Knox, Kentucky. When Dicky was seven, they settled in Pearl River, New York, a Rockland County suburb that was then rustic enough to resemble “Mark Twain country,” as Chris Kelly, a family friend, recalls.

The upper reaches of the Hackensack were their Mississippi. Using a small fibreglass dinghy with a rusted three-horsepower engine, the Conant boys and their friends explored the wooded inlets and dunes and swimming holes around Nauraushaun Brook and Muddy Brook, and beyond. They referred to the thicket where they launched the boat, near an abandoned Revolutionary War-era cemetery, as Catfish Yacht Club. Dicky had business cards printed up, with membership numbers and titles. Chris Kelly, the club’s commodore, still carries his Catfish card in his wallet.

The Conants’ marriage was unhappy. The Colonel, as he was known to some, was a charismatic and imposing raconteur who boasted of his world-travelling encounters with Patton, Eisenhower, and the Pope. Returning from Vietnam, in the late fifties, he brought two tiger skins—hunting trophies—and displayed them in the house. When he drank, he could be vicious. Claire, who worked at a psychiatric hospital, was overwhelmed. Reflecting on his childhood, Conant later noted, “As I got older and visited more with friends and their families, I noticed that many adults showed affection and warmth not only to us youngsters but to each other as well! How strange.”

At Pearl River High School, Dicky was a member of the National Honor Society and served as the junior-class president. With his blue eyes and wispy blond hair, he was a “magnet” for pretty girls, according to Erich Ziller, a pal since elementary school. “I always looked at Dicky like I wished I could be him—be more spontaneous,” Ziller said.

Conant graduated near the top of his class, and was offered a scholarship to suny at Albany, where he played varsity soccer. It was the late sixties, and he also got into other things. “He was way out there,” Steve Lippincott, a college friend and former teammate, remembers. Conant was an art major. Always ebullient in person, Conant the artist showed hints of torment. Of his pieces, a friend remarked, “They weren’t anything happy-go-lucky or joyful. It wasn’t spring. It was always winter, if you know what I mean.” He cited an image of a man with his legs cut off above the knees, stumps dripping blood, muscles tensed, and an agonized expression. In the background, as he recalled, horses drooled over the severed shins and feet.

Conant belonged to the Edward Eldred Potter Club, a kind of anti-Greek fraternity. A friend from high school who accompanied him to Albany recalls that sport was made of spiking Conant’s beer with LSD. “There was one guy who thought it was hilarious to watch Richard go deep under the influence,” he said. His studies faltered. In 1972, he was asked to leave school, so he went home and found work at Nyack Hospital for a couple of years, first as a custodian and then as a surgical technologist, thrilling to the gore and drama of the E.R.

Dick Conant the Missing Boater

During this period, Dicky “just seemed different,” Joe Conant, the second eldest, remembers. Rob, the fourth eldest, recalls Dicky occasionally oversleeping and accusing him or their mother of stealing his alarm clock, early inklings of a paranoid tendency.

“Then, when he came back to Albany, people said, ‘Dicky came back but he won’t talk to anybody,’ ” Steve Lippincott recalled. “I ran up to him, and I said, ‘Dick! Dick!’ He looked right past me. I said, ‘It’s me, Steve! I’m your friend.’ He said, ‘I don’t have any friends,’ and he kept walking.” Lippincott never saw him again.

Conant’s academic focus was now stronger, and he pursued a pre-med curriculum. Yet neither parent attended his college graduation, in 1976. They had separated, and each feared running into the other, or so the wounded son reasoned. Conant applied but was not accepted into medical school. He moved out West, following his older brother John, who had become a roughneck in the Wyoming oil boom.

He worked briefly on the rigs; underground, in a coal mine; and, on the railroad, manning freight-train cabooses for the Union Pacific, a job in which he invested particular pride, believing, as he put it, that “the efficient transportation of mail, consumer and capital goods, bulk commodities, etc., is vital to the health and growth of our country.”

In 1981, John committed suicide. In the economic recession, Dick lost his railroad job. He enlisted in the Navy in the fall of 1983, and served on a frigate tracking Soviet submarines. The rigid hierarchies of Navy life didn’t suit him, and his occasional bouts of insubordination attracted the attention of naval doctors. “Our medical corpsman, also known as ‘Doc the pecker checker,’ conspired to have me ousted from the service through a medical discharge,” he later wrote. “Some time was wasted ashore as various head shrinkers examined me and tried various exotic psychotropic potions on my delightful yet non-addled brain. . . . I told them that I may have been slightly delusional for a while but that I was much better now.”

He received an honorable discharge, in 1989, at the rank of quartermaster second class, but the humiliation of being placed on medical leave seems to have stuck with him. Years later, when a social worker at a V.A. clinic in Austin, Texas, asked him if he had ever received psychiatric treatment, he smelled a conspiracy. “I suspected she had access to my official medical records from naval service,” he wrote. “I know to lie while applying for benefits is a crime, so I told the truth. We spoke about benefits available for men like me (there are no men like me).”

Jacksonville, Albuquerque, Phoenix, Salt Lake City, San Antonio: Conant lived seemingly everywhere, never staying put for long, and often enrolling in classes—physics, microbiology—at the nearest university, while he sought more hospital work. In 1992, he applied to medical schools again, explaining in an accompanying essay that he was particularly drawn to the growing field of neurosurgery. “It was a sense of adventure which drove me to work on the railroad,” he wrote. “There I worked with heavy, noisy, dangerous equipment in all extremes of weather. In the Navy, I sailed to far corners of the world and met many good people.” Neurosurgery, he continued, “is like navigation in the sense that success depends upon truthful information. Facts, good judgment, and deliberate action yield good results.” His applications were denied.

Two years later, Conant sent an old friend a postcard from Idaho, saying that he had “fashioned a kayak” and was planning to paddle it to the Pacific Ocean. It was the last the friend ever heard from him. To me, Conant later characterized the trip, along the Salmon River, as a “learning experience.” He left on his forty-third birthday, in a snowstorm, and covered three hundred and fifty miles in the next six weeks. He brought along three books: a Gideons Bible and biographies of Einstein and Bismarck. It rained much of the time, and his lovingly made kayak, which looked like an angular torpedo when he began, was battered beyond reusability. He stopped far short of the Pacific, but he had established a template for channelling his frustrations into cleansing river trips. “The peace of mind I found, largely alone, on that white-water mecca, convinced me that life was capable of exquisite pleasure and undefined meaning deep in the face of failure,” he wrote. “The experience itself is the reward.”

In middle age, Conant continued shedding past acquaintances who might remind him of his squandered potential—his “checkered career,” as he often put it—in favor of an endlessly renewable social resource: the riverbank. Working odd jobs, and with studious planning, he was able to finance ever more ambitious trips, gradually building a uniquely adventurous canoeing résumé.

“I survived a terrible storm last night and woke with a resolve to go to my demise without regret” Conant wrote his...

“I survived a terrible storm last night and woke with a resolve to go to my demise without regret,” Conant wrote his brother Jim. Map by Carl DeTorres

Map by Carl DeTorres

He began to describe himself as “a canoeist who writes books.” The books—unpublished manuscripts, some of which he shared with his siblings and other river pals—recount his journeys in vivid detail. They are by turns funny and sad and journalistic, stuffed with biographical information about ordinary strangers, as though Conant saw himself as the Studs Terkel of the waterfront. “This stuff about ‘finding oneself’ is a bunch of baloney,” he wrote. “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.”

He was also, arguably, fleeing from the ordeal of his “paranoid disorder,” as the Navy had called it, which made establishing roots fraught. “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,” he wrote. “When I am out on the water in my canoe, I do call the shots. My time is my own, it belongs to me.”

Conant moved to Montana because of a woman, or so he often said. His journal entry recording their introduction reads, “Met Tracy from Seattle & Chesapeake Bay Retriever, Haley, very nice lady, while packing boat.” This was July 21, 1999, the day after what he had called “the most wonderful day in my life so far,” a rigorous paddle on the Yellowstone River, in Montana’s Paradise Valley, during which he negotiated Class II rapids and managed to strike only two rocks, amid clouds of snowy discharge from the cottonwood trees along the banks. He was at Sacajawea Park, in Livingston, and on his way to the Gulf of Mexico, via the Yellowstone, the Missouri, and the Mississippi. A few weeks earlier, he had quit his job at the Boise V.A. Medical Center, where he worked as a janitor, and had withdrawn from Boise State University, where he was taking biochemistry. He was, as he later wrote, “angry at my co-workers and superiors and angry at my neighbors and angry at the national Congress (due to the Clinton impeachment proceedings), and I was angry at modern life.”

During his conversation with Tracy, he wrote, “She asked if I would come back. I said I would and that I expected to study bacteriology at Montana State University in nearby Bozeman, MT. I told her that I was a little rough around the edges but that I expected some lady, someday, would tame me and we’d get married. She smiled and lightly jumped at that. She was very pretty and a bit demure.”

Tracy never accompanied Conant on any of his future trips, but she became a recurring character in his writing:

At the rich man’s bar I met “Pumpkin,” a large, good looking blonde haired gal in her thirties. She was giggly and fun until I mentioned I had a sweetheart, Tracy, back in Montana.

I assumed they thought I was out on the make. I wasn’t. I never am. I’ve been faithful to Tracy ever since we met over 8 years ago.

While I am writing I see two bright stars or planets. They are far apart and remind me of Tracy and me.

In Bozeman, where he worked at Montana State University as a custodian, and at the Greyhound depot, Conant kept mostly to himself. He told me that for entertainment he overate: “I go out to Chinese restaurants and they have these all-you-can-eat-for-ten-bucks deals.” He was known as the enormous man in overalls riding a small bicycle all over town, knees splayed. At the library, he worked on his voluminous accounts of his adventures. To the extent that his journals of life in and around the swamp reflect a near-constant concern that others were wary of him, and even whispering about him, he may not have been wrong. With acquaintances and co-workers, he spoke often of Tracy, but I couldn’t find anyone who ever saw her. A couple of librarians mentioned that he showed up once at a public concert on the lawn carrying a bouquet of roses—and said that they’d watched from the window as he roamed the grounds, seeming to look for a date who never arrived.

“Im pretty sure middleaged upperarm jiggle is the one thing theres not a niche market for.”

“I’m pretty sure middle-aged upper-arm jiggle is the one thing there’s not a niche market for.”

One evening, late in 2012, Conant returned to his campsite in Bozeman only to find charred ruins. The swamp, as he called it, was part of a wetland with mountain views and a soundtrack of howling coyotes and rumbling trains. It had been his residence longer than any other place had been since his childhood home in Pearl River. He suspected arson, and resolved never to spend another winter up North. The next morning, he bought a bus ticket to Austin, Texas, where he would sometimes be the lone Anglo among the transient population. “Here is my current plan of action,” he wrote in a marble composition book. “I must secure Social Security benefits. Then I want to secure a small laptop computer. . . . In the spring of 2014, I will be 63 y.o. and hopefully in good health. I can live on the rivers easily for $700 a month, and less if I pinch pennies.” Biding his time in Austin, listening to an astronomy radio program on his headphones and scavenging from dumpsters, he thought of himself as a locust, lying in wait, hidden from civilization until his bank account began to grow again.

In June of 2014, having amassed more than six thousand dollars, he took a bus east, eventually alighting in Plattsburgh, to begin the trip to Florida. “When I got up there, the public was watching me like a hawk, you know?” he told me. “See if I was eyeballing any of the women, as a single man will do.”

He bought a canoe at Dick’s Sporting Goods, for three hundred dollars, as well as portage wheels, which he used to drag the boat a few miles along the Adirondack Northway to his put-in, on Dead Creek. It was a Coleman Scanoe—a skiff canoe, fourteen feet long and with a wider than usual thirty-eight-inch beam.

He launched on July 5th, and was almost immediately overcome by two-foot swells on Cumberland Bay. Ten gallons of water washed over his gunwales, and he camped for two nights by a dock for a fishing charter, waiting for the gusting northwest wind to let up, before proceeding south into Lake Champlain.

A few days later, he attracted the attention of a state trooper named Edwin Scollon, who wrote to me recently:

My time with Mr. Conant was brief. He was the subject of a suspicious person complaint. A woman was enjoying a late summer afternoon on her back deck with friends. Her deck overlooks Lake Champlain and Vermont’s Green Mountains from Willsboro Point. Mr. Conant paddled past her home, heading south, in his plastic canoe. Although he waved and offered a “hello,” his being there unsettled her; especially when she observed him coming ashore behind a neighbor’s vacant camp. She called the state police.

I found Mr. Conant in a bed that he had made upon a pebbled shoreline and under a canopy of cedars. He hadn’t heard me come around the house and I took a moment to size him up. He looked quite comfortable; he had a book propped up on his midsection and all that was left of his dinner was the can that had once contained it. It was readily apparent to me, from all that he had in and about his canoe, that Mr. Conant was making a long trip. If I hadn’t had a job to do, I would have left him alone. He had made this little piece of shoreline his own for the night and even though he was outdoors, I did feel that I was about to disturb his privacy.

As I approached, I called out a greeting to him in an attempt not to startle him. He did start a little, but I offered him my hand to put him at ease. He looked at me a little warily at first. I told him exactly why I had been summoned there and that I could understand why someone may be concerned about him being behind a vacant home. He told me that he had walked up on the lawn, had seen a realty sign posted there, and didn’t think he’d be disturbing anyone. I asked him if he had made any attempt to enter the home and he assured me that he hadn’t. I took him at his word. He asked me if his being there was unlawful. I told him that as far as I was concerned, it was not; and since it was getting too late to be on the water, I told him that I’d prefer that he stayed put . . . .

It was a short but very cordial conversation; especially considering the circumstances under which it was initiated. He was an easy man to talk to. I couldn’t help but be impressed by his wanderlust and his courage in undertaking such a long journey, all alone. I shook his hand, wished him safe travels and left him to his quiet night on the point.

Scollon continued to think about Conant in the days that followed, and stashed some old two-way radios in his cruiser, thinking that he might run into him a second time, and offer them as a parting gift. “But I wasn’t fortunate enough to see him again,” he said.

On the Mississippi, which he likened to “a vibrant monster you just let out of its cage,” Conant typically hugged the east bank, seldom straying more than fifty yards from land. On Lake Champlain, and later on the Hudson—“an old uncle that has its moods”—he mostly stuck to the west bank, although, toward the end of July, at a narrowing south of Ticonderoga, he paddled across to Vermont, just to say that he had, and walked a short distance, spotting a bald eagle.

He recorded his observations—of wind and water conditions, eagles and ospreys, and human behavior—and other free-associative thoughts on a New York State Road Atlas, writing tidily in block letters, a habit left over from his Navy days spent keeping the ship’s log:

Pelfershire was originally called Pilfershire as local folks were renowned cattle rustlers!

Sewage settling ponds. Stinky.

At visitor center fellow said he was reminded of movie “The Jerk.” It was a veiled insult directed at me. I said that it was not very charitable but one cannot help what they are reminded of.

Insects are funny. They just land on me like I was a piece of wood or a rock.

For a few days at a time, he might not speak to a soul, content with his Western novels and his chores. A circling beaver at dusk. A waning moon over the Green Mountains. Hooded Merganser ducklings at play. And then, suddenly feeling a social tug, he would beach in a river town and make several stops: a grocery, a church, a library, a bar.

Navigationally speaking, the lake and the Hudson were the easy parts: straight, wide shots (more or less), connected by a canal, with a dozen locks, which reminded him, in places, of the Louisiana bayous, flanked by high, mature trees and by swamps. The art lay in the selection of campsites, and in trying, to the extent possible, given his six or seven inches of freeboard, to keep dry. He carried as much as fifty pounds of water with him, in plastic jugs, which he stowed around the hull in varying arrangements, for ballast. When anticipating turbulence, he drew down his supplies, drinking without replenishing, to increase maneuverability. “If I’m more buoyant, I can rock and roll a lot better,” he told me.

His progress was slow at first: a few miles a day, seldom more than ten. He was out of shape. His preferred contingency rations were a jar of hot dogs preserved in pickle juice. Candy, too: “Chocolate has—not endorphins, but similar compounds that make you happy, and they taste really good!”

To break the monotony of paddling, Conant counted “cycles,” as he called them, or groups of four strokes—one-two-three-one, one-two-three-two, and so on, up into the thousands, in some cases, without resting. The tallies gave him a rough sense of distance covered, using a formula of about two hundred cycles per mile, give or take the current. Sometimes he imagined the cycle counts as dates on a world-historical time line, which allowed him to view his progress down the river as part of an epochal continuum. Beginning at 1951, his birth year, he’d try to think of a memory from his own life to associate with each advancing cycle. 1966: building kayaks based on an ad in Boys’ Life, to paddle on the Delaware. 1969: Woodstock, where Jimi Hendrix made eye contact, and said, “Hey, man, keep the Pope off the moon.” 1973: sleeping on a feather bed in a farmhouse, in Böchingen, Germany, with Erich Ziller. 1985: strolling through the souk in Manama, Bahrain, with a beautiful young woman dressed in a black abaya.

The nostalgic effect was amplified as he approached West Point, with a rush of memories of childhood trips with the Colonel to see the Sherman-tank graveyard and the Mothball Fleet. “From the water this part of the Hudson is breathtaking in a subtle way,” he wrote. “Not as shocking as a view of the Tetons coming west over Togwotee Pass in Wyoming, but every bit as beautiful.” East of Storm King, he floated in the middle, looking south, and was reminded of Jackson Hole.

Soon afterward, he suffered a gout attack; the flareup conspired with thirty-mile-an-hour gusts from the north to keep him laid up in Cold Spring for a couple of days, popping naproxen pills and discussing the phenomenon of “cityots” (city idiots) with a local dog owner who resented the weekend crowd of heedless kayakers.

A couple of days after he resumed paddling, he reached Nyack, where he had worked in the hospital, and wandered into town for the first time in thirty-seven years. He felt, he said, like Rip Van Winkle, disoriented by the different sameness of everything.

The day after I met Conant at my neighbor’s house, I went looking for him on the river. I drove south to a marina in Alpine, New Jersey, and asked some men who were smoking in the parking lot if they had seen a hillbilly in a canoe. “You mean the guy going to Florida?” one said. I drove farther south, parked, and began hiking back upriver, along the edge. After a mile or so, looking through a pair of binoculars I saw the flash of a yellow paddle blade, and there he was, bobbing in the ebb tide, riding so low that he appeared almost to be sitting on the water. He came ashore when he spotted me.

“I’m due for a good break,” he said, after carefully backing his canoe into a sandy beach beneath the Palisades, near some Jet-Skiers who had come over from the Bronx side to swim. “It don’t feel like much, but these damn swells are coming from the southeast,” he said. “They’re not hitting me in my face, but they’re reducing my progress tremendously.” He arranged several sticks of driftwood crosswise, as a makeshift ramp for pulling the boat above the high-water mark. His overalls were draped across the bow, air-drying after a laundry dunking earlier in the morning. He was wearing swimming trunks and a salt- and sweat-stained T-shirt that said “New Orleans French Quarter.” His digital watch, I noticed, was set to Mountain Time. Rummaging around in his cooler, he asked me if I wanted a soda pop, and mentioned that he planned to have some ice water. He gave a few shakes to an old Gatorade bottle that he’d been re-using. “I got peaches,” he said. “You want one?”

He spread a tarp on the ground, and said that he was going to seek “as close to a prone position as possible.” Across the river from us were Spuyten Duyvil and the Henry Hudson Bridge. He had come twelve miles. Conant’s tarp lay unnervingly close to some poison ivy at the southern edge of a narrow grass strip abutting the stone ruins of a bathhouse. The Palisades offered shelter from the hot sun. “God, look at this beautiful afternoon,” he said. “It’s nice being in the shade for once.” He showed me his atlas, and began reading highlights from his notes. I didn’t have much time—I had promised my wife I’d pick up our son from day care. Because Conant had no schedule to maintain, he agreed to stay there for a couple of days, so that I might visit with him some more while he rested his muscles for the difficult stretch ahead, past the city and into the harbor.

“Let me tell you one more story before you go,” he said, and recalled an encounter with a great blue heron during a previous trip, a few curves north of New Madrid, Missouri. “I was doing what I call night passage, full moon and a four-knots current in the middle of the Mississippi River. He comes swooping in right next to my port gunwale, and he just flapped his wings in place, so he was hovering. This went on for probably five seconds. I could feel the wind in my face. His beak looked like a dagger. I could see his eyeballs. We’re looking at each other like this.” He flashed a look of alarm, and then smiled.

When I returned, the next afternoon, I found Conant napping near a spread of cheese and condiments. I was not his first visitor. A man had come by to fish early in the morning, before work. Conant told me the man’s name, age, and home town, as well as his work history (a truck driver turned dispatcher) and the whereabouts of his parents.

Then he began talking about his “sweetheart.” He said, “I don’t want to give you her last name, but her name is Tracy. Lovely woman. She’s younger than I am. Comes from good stock. And she keeps in touch. You know, they asked me up at the V.A., when I went to get my medications up in—oh, what’s the name of that town, it’s north of Beacon? Castle Point, which is really in the town of— It’s got an old-timey name. Wappingers! They asked me, if I had a disaster, would I want her to find out about it? I said no. I didn’t tell ’em why: because she’ll know about it before anybody else! She’ll know about it before the Red Cross. She is an unusual woman—keeps tabs on me—and eventually she’ll show up on this trip somewhere, probably in disguise.”

He went on, “She might get some false stories, but anytime she’s ever checked on me she’s always found me to be fair and square. Plus, the other thing is she’s looking to see if I’m healthy and alive. I appreciate that. I really do. Nobody else does that.”

I noticed at one point that he’d been pouring himself caps full of soy sauce to drink, and sipping straight from a Tabasco bottle. “I’m energizing the flavor buds,” he said. He put the condiments down. “These adventures are incredible,” he went on. “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.”

Conant made it from his Palisades campsite to Hoboken in what he called “an extraordinary transit”: a three-hour pull on an outgoing tide, fighting through the occasional ferry wake. “Wonderful memories of NYC flood my brain,” he wrote on his atlas. “Grant’s Tomb, Riverside Church, G.W. Bridge, hurray!” He visited Elysian Fields, the site of the first organized baseball game, in 1846, and asked a lineman from the electric company to take some pictures of him with the city skyline in the background. “Talk about universe and he is drifting,” Conant wrote. “I told him to marry his woman. It would help center things.” They ended up retiring to Maxwell’s Tavern. “Gave me a hug and many heartfelt compliments. Hard to say goodbye. It always is.”

“It seems as though all this global warming has had very little effect on my bucatini carbonara.”

“It seems as though all this global warming has had very little effect on my bucatini carbonara.”

The next day, September 5th, he rested: “electrolytes, bananas.” Police roused him from his beach camp (“blocks from where Frank Sinatra grew up”) at 4:30 a.m. on the sixth, and he was under way, into New York Harbor, by six-fifteen, having promised to write the officers from Florida. Through fog, he paddled past Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty, and was visited by more cops, this time in a motorboat, as he reached the port of Bayonne. Their warnings of heavy commercial traffic ahead were borne out, and steep waves from tugs and container ships chased Conant ashore in the Staten Island neighborhood of New Brighton, where he soon diagnosed himself with a case of anemia.

On September 10th, a fifty-seven-year-old harbor pilot named Dougy Walsh went down to the creek on the Kill Van Kull, near his house in West New Brighton, to catch some minnows to use as bait for an annual fluke tournament he liked to fish in, and noticed a red canoe, a tarp, and a bedroll. “You kidding me?” he blurted out. “You’re camped in here? What about the rats?”

Smiling, Conant replied, “I’m looking for the Raritan River. You know where that is?”

They ended up talking for four hours, about the tugs, and about Walsh’s sick father—also a harbor pilot—and about Conant’s plans to game the tides past Newark Bay and on down, in order to ride an ebbing current south of the Rahway River mouth toward Tottenville, at the bottom of the island. “I was blown away by this guy,” Walsh recalled. “He didn’t have any nautical charts! He was using a road atlas!”

The next day, Conant woke up to the memorial towers of light above Ground Zero. “Unexplained trepidation but determined nonetheless,” he wrote. Walsh, after visiting his father in the hospital, returned to the campsite and invited Conant back to his house, a landmarked Gothic Revival dating to the mid-nineteenth century, for crab macaroni and sangria. His wife was away, out on Long Beach Island. Conant was still weak, and struggled to climb the stairs, but he took pleasure in the house’s historic significance, as a stop along the Underground Railroad.

“He cut me right to the heart,” Walsh said, choking back tears. “He said, ‘I thank God there’s people like you.’ ” Walsh added, “My wife said, ‘I don’t believe you. You meet all these fucking weirdos.’ ”

Conant made his way into the industrial heart of New Jersey on the Raritan. Arriving in Princeton, via the Delaware and Raritan Canal, he put on a button-down and a clean pair of overalls and played Ivy Leaguer for a few days, visiting the Paul Robeson Center for the Arts, listening to a lecture on justice during the American Revolution, and attending a football game, under the lights (Princeton, 56; Davidson, 17). He also made himself a regular at the Yankee Doodle Tap Room, in the Nassau Inn, where he marvelled at the names carved in the wooden tables, including “Doctor Einstein.” (“Brooke Shields is said to have carved her name as well but no one can find it.”) Another customer, Robert Dix, Class of 1967, and a financial heavy, saved a napkin on which Conant had scribbled his e-mail and P.O.-box addresses, and stored it in his desk, hoping to maintain contact. “He did leave a very favorable impression as an authentic person,” Dix said. “Pretty well dressed in ironed overalls and checkered shirt is what I remember for someone staying in a canoe.”

While preparing to leave town, Conant discovered that one of his backpacks, containing months’ worth of reserve medication, had been stolen. Trying not to panic, he paddled on, toward Trenton. A few of the bridges over the canal were so low that he had to lean back and retract his chin, sliding underneath, as though into an MRI scanner, while cars rolled overhead. Then, eight or nine miles north of the city, he encountered some differences between the canal as it flowed and the map in his mind, formed from advance Google satellite scouting. He spied a corrugated culvert pipe, off to the left, through which water was leaking down into a creek—the Assunpink Creek, he presumed—and he decided to have a little fun, paddling into the rusty chute. Down he went, into the dark, gaining speed as he bumped along for thirty or forty feet. He was briefly airborne before splashing out at the bottom and taking on about a gallon of water, a small price for the experience of canoeing “like a ski jumper!,” as he put it. The canal runoff provided the creek with some helpful momentum, and for the next several hours he negotiated snags and shoals and descended minor rapids, all while looking for a plausibly private campsite.

He eventually stopped near some woods abutting an abandoned factory, in East Trenton. Squeezing through a gap in a fence, he walked three blocks to a bar, Choppy’s Gallera, where he joined a man named Carlos, who had just got out of prison, for happy hour, to celebrate a day that had begun in fear and ended in wonderment. Conant paid for the beers and took Carlos across the street, to a bodega, for beans and sauce. “Adios, my friend, de mi corazón,” Carlos said, as Conant slipped back through the fence and into solitude.

Dick Conant the Missing Boater

Nearly everyone he’d met on the trip had advised him to bypass Trenton. The objections seemed to be based mainly on the popular conception of New Jersey’s capital city as a punch line for despair. But Trenton’s real challenge was navigational. Assunpink Creek goes underground as it reaches downtown, buried beneath a highway interchange, some train tracks, and the D.M.V. Conant spent the morning after his ski-jumping triumph investigating options for portage. His best bet, he concluded, was to disembark beneath the Wall Street bridge, a few hundred yards from the courthouse, amid a partial dam of fallen branches, trash, and tires. For two or three strenuous hours, lugging his gear piecemeal, he scrambled up and down the overgrown bank, at the top of which lay the rotting carcass of a stray dog. Then came the challenge of dragging the canoe itself up the forty-five-degree grade, using a rope.

He was sitting at the top, recovering in the shade, in earshot of the scavenging flies, when a slender, middle-aged black man walked by, dressed in a leather jacket and a leather cap. “What’d you do? Paddle that river?” the man asked, incredulous. His name was Kevin Jolley—“like the Jolly Green Giant, except with an ‘e,’ ” he said—and he was carrying a couple of hot meals home from a nearby soup kitchen. Jolley offered to put Conant up in his open-air garage, for a more proper rest. Conant hesitated at first, and then, an hour and a half later, reconsidered, after having reckoned with the constraints of urban portage: stoplights, crosswalks, potential thieves. At the rate he was advancing, he wasn’t likely to see water again before dark. “I rested and read paper as sounds of the not-wealthy neighborhood engulfed my senses,” Conant wrote of his stay with Jolley. “It was a very happy sound.”

Dick Conant in Trenton in 2014. Courtesy Jonathan Gordon

Jolley Portage, as Conant took to calling his dry-land slog through downtown Trenton, resumed early the next morning, and became a kind of slow-motion spectacle, as he traversed a couple of city miles, in small increments. He caught the attention of a young civic activist and local booster named Jon Gordon, who, inspired by the poem “In Flanders Fields,” had made a habit of planting red poppy seeds in vacant lots as an urban gardener’s commentary on the effect of heroin on Trenton and the surrounding region. Gordon handed Conant a Tic Tac container full of seeds, and enlisted him in some future river-bank scattering, but not before shooting commemorative videos, with his iPhone, of “this giant in overalls with a canoe in the middle of the hood,” as he put it.

Scene: Conant, sitting on a street corner, leaning back against a green duffel, boots crossed, maps in his lap, hands knotted over his midsection. He has a Camaro Z28 cap on his head, and a toothbrush and a pen poking out of his breast pockets. The canoe is off to his right, parallel to the curb. A white brick building advertising “Plumbing & Heating Materials” squats in the background. Strewn backpacks and bags, a crate, a blue bucket, a Gatorade bottle: a landlubber’s boating picnic. A man in a motorized wheelchair cruises west, not on the sidewalk but in the street, against the flow of traffic, and doesn’t so much as turn his head to acknowledge the strange voyager.

“Where you headed?” a voice offscreen asks.

“I’m headed down to Florida,” Conant says, laughing.

“What made you stop through Trenton?” another voice asks. “Just the map?”

“Well, no,” Conant says. “I want to get on the Delaware, so I can head down to—there’s a Chesapeake-Delaware Canal that I can take into Chesapeake Bay. Now, Chesapeake Bay’s a large body of water, and I’ll be exposed. But it’s not as large as the Atlantic Ocean.”

The first offscreen voice asks, “Yeah, man, what’s your whole purpose, though?”

Before Conant can finish answering, a black S.U.V. pulls up alongside the curb, looming over the canoeist, and the camera turns away. A woman leans out the window. “Excuse me,” she says. “I’m looking for River View Plaza?”

Conant hitched a ride across Chesapeake Bay with Jim Greer, a seventy-five-year-old former Merry Prankster who was piloting a solar-panelled trimaran called the Ra and attempting to set a Guinness record for distance travelled on water under power of the sun. Greer, who went by Fish Monger on the Furthur bus, tied Conant’s canoe off to a cleat on the stern, and marvelled at the fact that his passenger seemed to stay up much of the night talking—to Tracy, Conant explained. The Ra’s port pontoon sprang a leak (“ouch disaster,” Conant wrote), and they sought help at a marina south of Annapolis in the last week of October.

From there, Conant, fearing the onset of winter and needing to re-up on meds, asked one of the shipyard hands, Moses Wells, for an overland lift. “I fell for him,” Wells said. “He was one of those people you can just connect to.” Conant also accompanied Wells on a fishing trip. “He enjoyed being on a boat that had a motor,” Wells added. He loaded Conant’s canoe into the back of his pickup truck and delivered him to the naval hospital in Portsmouth, where he had finished his long journey in 2010.

By the time I found Wells, nearly six months had passed since Conant’s disappearance. I was headed to North Carolina to retrace his last known movements. When I got there, I informed John Beardsley, the wildlife officer, of the trimaran and truck rides, and that Wells believed that Conant might still be alive and had merely got sick of canoeing. “You can’t fit a canoe on a Greyhound bus,” Wells said. He told me that Conant had gone shopping for a tent and some propane tanks on the drive to Portsmouth, but local news reports gave no indication that those items had been recovered with the boat.

“Well, that all sounds great, but here’s the problem,” Beardsley said. “We found a tent.” They also found sleeping bags, food cans, and credit cards—which led to a bank account that had gone inactive, with the exception of automated monthly deposits from Social Security. If Conant had intended to hop on a bus, he would have been better off abandoning his canoe in town, where there was public transportation within walking distance—whereas, through a tip line printed in the Daily Advance, the local paper, Beardsley had learned that Conant likely paddled on at least fifteen miles more. A father and his daughter reported seeing an old man in a canoe, with a tarped mound in the bow, approaching Wade’s Point, where the Pasquotank River meets Albemarle Sound. He looked content.

By the time that lead came in, after a weekend of scattered searching, the Coast Guard had already recalled its vessels—too vast a search area, too little chance of survival. Beardsley and his colleague Chase Vaughan continued investigating for several more days. But, because it was peak hunting season, they were soon called back to their regular patrols. “You start spending a lot of money just looking,” Beardsley said. “Budgets, man.”

The Conant case, technically still open, nagged at him. He had been on the job for eight years, and never failed to find a missing person, dead or alive. As with others whose paths crossed briefly with Conant’s, Beardsley couldn’t help seeing aspects of himself in the wayward traveller, whom he now called Dicky. He asked me, “Do you ever think about doing something like that yourself—just going on a crazy adventure?”

Beardsley and Vaughan offered to take me out on the water. The wind was blowing five to ten from the northeast, producing conditions similar to those on the morning that Conant’s boat was discovered. It was a pounding, hold-on-tight chop. The Pasquotank seemed about as wide as the Hudson at its broadest but without the steep slopes on either side that lend a feeling of containment. Looking south into the sound, I couldn’t see any land on the horizon.

After heading east for a few more minutes, Beardsley slowed down, and picked up a pair of binoculars. “Hey, is that another tarp in there, right near the green bush?” he asked, pointing toward the cypress knees and the scrub growth behind them. I saw only an errant crab pot. Vaughan thought he saw plastic wrap from a case of bottled water. We were a few hundred yards out. Vaughan took a long boat hook, stuck it in the water until he hit muck, and then pulled it out again; the pole was wet only up to his navel. The relative lack of depth of the sound increases the frequency of waves, and can make a two- or three-foot chop more treacherous than surfable ocean swells. Had Conant capsized or been swamped, he might have been able simply to stand up and walk ashore. The problem was the shore, and hypothermia. The swampland was impenetrable, except by hounds. “Even if your life depended on it, you couldn’t have walked that far,” Vaughan said.

In the fall of 2014, a few weeks before they learned that he had gone missing, Jim Conant and his wife, Marie, received an e-mail from Dicky. It began:

Dear Jim and Marie, I survived a terrible storm last night and awoke with a resolve to go to my demise without regret. I want to mend fences with you and not end my days with any (as you term it) angst in my heart. So I am sorry if I wrote or said anything to you that was offensive or unkind or hateful. Of course you have my love as always.

In early November, Robert Peek escorted an overloaded canoeist through his post at what he likes to describe as “the oldest continuously operated man-made canal and locking system in all of the Americas.” Peek has for the past twenty-one years been the lockmaster of the Deep Creek Lock, at the top of the Dismal Swamp Canal, which extends twenty-two miles down into the Pasquotank, in North Carolina. “The average boat that comes here is between a thirty- and a seventy-five-foot vessel, and I’ve had as much as a hundred-and-forty-foot vessel come through,” Peek said. “Not even one per cent of the boats that come through here are trailerable boats, meaning something that you or I could have in our back yard.” He added, “For a canoeist to actually go from one end of this canal to the other? That’s odd. That’s rare. That’s really, really rare.”

“Ywhubenqmfpki YWHUBENQMFPKI ywhubenqmfpki.”

“Ywhubenqmfpki, Y-W-H-U-B-E-N-Q-M-F-P-K-I, ywhubenqmfpki.”

One morning about a week later, a man named Dan Smith noticed someone in a sleeping bag on the dock where he keeps his sailboat, in Elizabeth City. Smith, who is an administrator at Mid-Atlantic Christian University, or “the Bible college,” as it is known locally, had his golden retriever, Baxter, with him, and had to call the dog off its sudden rush toward the interloper. “I don’t need the guy getting startled with a hundred-pound golden licking his face, and then rolling into the water,” Smith recalled thinking. He brought Baxter back inside and fed him breakfast, and when he returned to the dock, alone, fifteen minutes later, the sleeping bag and whoever had been using it were gone. Then Smith noticed an unfamiliar canoe tied to one of the slips, using the hitch knot of an experienced boater. “I just felt nudged,” he said. “I pulled a bunch of acrylic and wool socks out of my drawer, and I had, like, fifty dollars in cash—put it in a shopping bag, double-bagged it, and just kind of tossed it into his boat.”

The next day, a student at the college reported that she’d discovered a scary man sleeping under a gazebo, near the river. Smith went out again and introduced himself. The man explained that he was a Navy veteran, and that he had begun paddling up by the Canadian border. He hoped to make it as far west as Edenton, some thirty highway miles distant, before attempting to cross Albemarle Sound. “I was just enchanted,” Smith said. He and his wife had long talked about how they might like to spend a few years living on their boat, after retirement. “I remember walking into the house and telling her, ‘You wouldn’t believe the guy who’s out there.’ Because you just never know who’s going to wander in and out of your life. Sooner or later, we’re going to be some of those wanderers.”

While in Elizabeth City, Conant ate at the Colonial Restaurant and at Sidney’s, on Main Street, and paid five dollars for a shower at a riverfront gym. He spent his afternoons at the library, upstairs, studying and copying maps. The librarians, whispering among themselves, called him Grizzly Adams, and occasionally had to remind him to put his shoes back on, because he was starting to get too comfortable.

On Saturday, the fifteenth, Conant walked into Page After Page, an independent bookstore on Water Street, and startled the proprietor, Susan Hinkle, who was alone and getting ready to close for the evening. “It was rainy and freezing,” she said. “And he came in, and he was a very big burly guy, carrying bags, with a bright-red face, and a hat, and layers and layers of clothing.” Conant bought a book, a navigational aid, and stayed nearly an hour, telling Hinkle about his travels. “He was showing me how he has to paddle along the edge, because the canoe was so loaded down, you know, that he couldn’t take any waves,” she said. He showed her a piece of paper that he kept in the bib of his overalls, on which he was recording the names and addresses of future pen pals. “He was planning to get married!” she said.

The next day was stormy, and Hinkle found herself unable to get Conant out of her mind. “Nice to see that there’s still people like that, you know what I mean?” she said. “I was like, ‘God, I hope he didn’t go today,’ because it was so windy, and pouring rain.” In the afternoon, she went out for an errand, and she kept an eye out the window, looking at the water, but, like so many of Conant’s friends, she wasn’t fortunate enough to see him again. ♦

December 14, 2015, issue.

Ben McGrath has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 2003. His new book is “Riverman: An American Odyssey.”