On Labor Day, 2014, the author met Richard Perry Conant, aka Dickie, at the Hudson River shoreline in the small town where McGrath and his family lived, upriver from Manhattan where he worked as a staff writer at The New Yorker.  Conant’s canoe, filled with equipment, was lying low in the water when McGrath met him at a neighbor’s birthday party where Dickie was holding forth having just met everyone at the table.  McGrath was fascinated to learn that Dickie was on his way from the Canadian border to Naples, Florida via canoe, and thus started this amazing tale of adventure and mystery.

Dickie was in the habit of noting people’s names and contact information when he encountered them along the river trips he’d been taking for more than 20 years.  A college graduate, US Navy veteran, and son of a Navy Commander, Conant had never found his niche in life until he began to travel by canoe through America’s waterways in 1999.  When his canoe and his equipment was found washed up on the shore of a Maryland’s Albemarle Sound, the investigators eventually found McGrath’s name and phone number jotted down on the water-soaked Rand McNally atlas that Conant used for navigation and contacted him.  Thus started McGrath on this amazing quest to figure out who Conant was and where he might have ended up.

It’s a quirky book and at least as much about McGrath and his investigation which took him all across America to interview more than 200 people listed among Conant’s journals and manuscripts.  McGrath was given access to those papers by Conant’s brothers who found them in storage lockers in Utah and Montana.  You’re probably getting the idea that Dickie, McGrath, and the whole story are strange and fascinating, and you’d be right.

This is a difficult book to characterize. There are elements of John McPhee’s river trips with fascinating characters and elements of investigative journalism, but most of all it’s a tale about a man who didn’t quite fit into the world he was born into and who took the initiative to create one where he was happy.  I enjoyed the book very much.