RIVERMAN
An American Odyssey
By Ben McGrath
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| Riverman |
Wonderful starting for this amazing book by these sentences.
A businessman goes down to the river with a bottle of pills and liquor, intent to suicide. He gets nice and comfortable on a blanket when the landowner arrives carrying a shotgun."what are you doing on my land?" "Suicide. Say, may I borrow your gun? It'd be quicker than pills." "Sure, here." So the businessman shot the farmer, thought twice about it, and kept the gun. Page 7
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. page 9
The neighbor, named Scott, said that the boat's owner was in the midst of paddling "from Canada to Florida" and was presently enjoying a pit stop inside his house. Page 15
"He left Buffalo New York in early July, paddling alone down there rivers from New York to the Mississippi and then to the GIWW ( Golf Intracoastal Waterway West , Louisiana)" page 20
the whole adventure lasted nearly 14 months. page 26
He laughed again, more nervously this time and paused." That's kind of sensitive," he said. He paused some more mumbled about how he supposed it would "get out anyhow," then took a deep breath and said, "well one of the reasons I go on this trip is because I don't have an apartment. I am homeless. People call it homeless. I don't." I'd planned to ask next about how he financed his travel but he kept going and answered without my prompting," I was discriminated against in both housing and apartment," he continued "I was having a rough time. and I managed without going to jail or getting thrown into a mental hospital. Now I'm old enough where I can collect social security - and going on a trip like this? it's cheap even though I make very little on social security on a trip like it is I can actually save big dollars he left again like I said this is much too sensitive But! it's the truth." Page 34
" I was scared," he said. " I had made it through a tremendous challenge, but I just had more respect for the river than I had ever had before. page 37
Forest Camp, in my recollection, was a guileless dope, whose life kept improbably interesting with history and celebrity, whereas one the things I appreciated about Canant was his heart-earned wisdom and his honesty about the costs associated with freedom. page 54
I found myself unable to come up with a holistic assessment on the spot and asked if I could borrow them for a closer look, figuring, if nothing else, that they might serve as a vicarious thrill ride for a man stuck at home with a newborn and a toddler and a view of a storied river out to the window. Page 60
Kelly told me that Conant reminded him of an old friend, Harry Heckle," the oldest man to sail around the world twice." As it happened, Kelly was talking to me from the banks of the James River, near where he had met Conant- and where, more recently, he had scattered Heckel's ashes." what a legacy for someone to have," Kelly went on. "I mean, he dropped memories all over the place. We all could be so lucky." Page 79
A journal in the overturned canoe contained notes for an aborted book project that Conant was thinking of calling THE ANATOMY OF FAILURE a sort of capstone project begun in the immediate years before I met him, at a time when he believed his canoeing days where finished (" death is near," he wrote). But he wasn't able to bring himself to follow through on it. The same journal shows him keeping tabs on his rent payments for the storage lockers, unwilling to give up hope, growing impatient with his own bitterness and resentments, and starting to dream about rivers again: the Clark Fork, the Columbia, the Cumberland, the Colorado, the Red, the Rainy, the St. Lawrence, and the course of the Hudson, on which he floated into THIS book not as a failure but as an unlikely success story. page 85
Looking back as adults in their high-school years, several classmates claim him as their best friend. "Dicky was the first real love of my life," an ex-girlfriend says. "I took a bottle of aspirin to kill myself when he left me for the next girlfriend. I love that guy so much" For the yearbook, he was voted "picture perfect." page 91
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Conant had left from just downstream of Stanley in a snowstorm on his forty-third birthday, bringing with him three books: a Gideon Bible and biographies of Einstein and Bismarck. Over the next six weeks, occasionally negotiating Class IV rapids, he covered 350 miles. He stopped- far short of the Pacific - only after losing fifteen inches of his bow to a steep plunge off a rock ledge that left him Maytagging, or whirling round and round, as in a washing machine. Speaking of it two decades later, to me, Conant called this a " learning experience,' a proof of concept. Among the lessons were that memorise should be prized over material possessions ( which could easily break or sink) and that traveling light had its downside. Without ballast, you were more likely to be tossed. "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." page 110
" Conant sees any 'purpose' in game ... No game man can device is harmless. the truth is that there can only be one chess master." page 113 by Donald Crowhurst
"Please do not think I am trying to break a record." It read " Record, is a very stupid word at Sea. I am continuing non-stop because I am happy at sea, and perhaps because I want to save my soul. page 113
" I can, I will!" Conant kept repeating, on an island in upstate New York, of his intention to paddle all the way to Florida. page 119
What fun, to be young, carefree, and descending a river! Page 119
The American river-trip canon can be understood as a play in three acts. It begins with Lewis and Clark, whose journals of exploring the Western frontier on the Missouri,and Snake and the Columbia Rivers, among others, were literally compelled by the president.The country had just doubled in size, with the Louisiana purchase. As a New York Times columnist once wrote "More was known about the moon before Neil Arestaurang touched down in the Sea of Tranquility in 1969 then was known about the land between the Mississippi and the Pacific in 1803." page 129
Next comes 'the adventures of Huckleberry Finn, set several decades later in a nation where the river no longer represents a frontier but the world unto its own, offering freedom from an imperfect society (sivilization," as Huck spelled it, can be plenty savage) and a place for forging unlikely friendships. page 130
Last, we get Deliverance, James Dickey's novel of city slickers seeking relief from middle -age doldrums and finding trouble afloat. Deliverance gives us a river at once threatened by commercial interests , in the form of a proposed dam, and threatening to all who dare go near it. page 130
Canoe by paddle from New Orleans to Noma, Alaska." Kruger, writing in his book The ultimate canoe challenge added, "I have not seen verification of Jerry Pushcar's trip," sounding a little tweaked. in three years. Page 134
Waters Beneath My Feet: New Orleans to Nome... My 3 Year Canoe Odyssey , by Jerry Pushcar
A pond (or a swamp) is a microcosm- a retreat, a closed system, which is always at risk of being spoiled by the arrival of an outsider. is "Earth's eye," as Thoreau called it, "looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature." But a big river, as T.S. Eliot said, is "the only natural force that can wholly determine the course of human peregrination." Rivers are the basis of civilization itself. page 140
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It was as if America's rivers, far from delivering the future, had continued vacuuming up ambitious as they slid, preserving along the water's edge a snacking time capsule. page 151
Lakes doesn't work for me", he said. "You can't go anywhere." page 168
There was this phrase that stuck with me: " I can and I will. !" He kept repeating that, and with that belly laugh. It surprises me that no one in a position of authority tried to stop him. page 211
What's your whole purpose, thought? page 222
Hooper Island Maryland page 225
"This has been described as a Nation's Paradise." the water, purplish and foamy, is so high in tannic acids that bacteria can't breed; drink freely, in other words, without boiling. "We learned that from the Indians: "This water won't go bad," peek said. page 235
"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. page 245
Roger turned to Rob and said, " Dicky accused you of being a raconteur, but he was the real one. Except his stories were true." page 256
Dicky Connant
Ben McGrath is a writer for the New Yorker and this is his first Book.
Salmon River ID
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Red River NM
Tombigbee River. P AL
#52 Riverman, An American Odyssey w/ Ben McGrath
