RIVERMAN An American Odyssey

‘Brilliant | clear | and humane’ Elizabeth Gilbert‘Miraculous and hopeful’ Emma StraubRiverman: An American Odyssey uncovers the story of an extraordinary man and his puzzling disappearance | and paints a picture of the singular spirit of America’s riverbank towns.‘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. The experience itself is the reward.’ Dick ConantOn his forty-third birthday | Dick Conant | a golden boy who never quite grew up as those around him expected | stepped into a homemade boat to embark on a journey despite a gathering snowstorm. Among his possessions was a Gideon Bible and biographies of Einstein and Bismark. It was the beginning of an all-consuming odyssey by an unconventional man into the watery arteries of America | a journey to the unreported margins of society. He was to spend the next twenty years canoeing thousands of miles of rivers and their innumerable smaller tributaries | from one end of the country to the other. ‘I can | and I will!’ he said. And then | in 2014 | he disappeared.Not long before Conant’s upturned canoe was found in a brackish North Carolina bay | Ben McGrath met Conant by chance as he paddled down the Hudson | headed for Florida. McGrath set out to find the people whose lives | like his own | had been touched by their encounter with the great river wanderer. Along the way he meets eccentrics and ne’er-do-wells drawn straight from the pages of Mark Twain | a vast network of friends and acquaintances who would forever remember this brilliant and charming man even after a single meeting.Riverman is the story of a restless soul who was as troubled as he was charismatic | a contemporary folk hero who slips the moorings of ordinary civilised life to tap into what Thoreau called ‘a yearning toward all wildness.’ It is also a riveting portrait of an America we rarely see: a nation of unconventional characters | small river towns | and long forgotten waterways.