Episode 167: Ben McGrath author of Riverman: An American Odyssey

Embark on an enthralling exploration of one man's quest to navigate life's currents as a means of coping and finding fulfillment. On this episode we're joined by Ben McGrath, staff writer for The New Yorker and author of "The American Odyssey," who introduces us to Dick Conant, a Navy veteran whose solo canoe journey from near Canada to Florida symbolizes a broader narrative shared by many veterans today. The romance of adventure and solitude takes center stage, revealing the deeper allure and consequences of disconnecting from society. As we unravel Dick's life story, we uncover the genuine eccentricity and vulnerability that mark those rare individuals who truly live life on their own terms.

If you enjoy our content, sign up for our Patreon and get access to additional content, bonus episodes, and access each episode before they drop on Spotify or iTunes. 

 Patreon: securityhaltpodcast

Instagram: @securityhalt

X : @SecurityHalt

Tik Tok: @security.halt.pod

 We greatly appreciate you and your support, so please remember to LIKE, FOLLOW, SHARE, and SUBSCRIBE!

 Get your copy of Riverman by clicking the link below!
Riverman: An American Odyssey

 Make sure that you follow Ben on twitter and check out his website!

Twitter: mcgrathben

www.benmcgrath.com

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:01

Security Hub Podcast let's go.

Speaker 2: 0:07

Sure deal with an expert in the role of warfare, with a man who's the best With guns, with knives, with his bare hands, a man who's been trained to ignore, ignore weather, to live off the land, a job which disposed an enemy personnel To kill period Win by attrition.

Speaker 1: 0:25

You're in for it, absolutely so, ben McGrath, staff writer for the New Yorker and author of this amazing book, the American Odyssey the story of Dick Connett, a Navy veteran and someone that our veterans nowadays can identify with. Something I've figured out in this project is a lot of us have this idea of great adventure and seeking great adventure, but with that great adventure comes a desire to disconnect and to pull away, and maybe we romanticize dealing with our issues and dealing with what we're dealing in here, away from society and the people we love, and we almost don't even realize what we're doing until it's far too late. I've noticed that. I've seen it in my life and I've seen it in my friends and in reading your book I can't help but see a lot of my friends and myself in this larger-than-life American figure, and the way that you connected with them, the way you brought his story to life, is nothing short of amazing. So, ben, thank you for being here and I cannot wait to dive into this.

Speaker 2: 1:40

This in this particular story, just you know it just sort of floated into my life, so you know everything about it was remarkable. Just one amazing occurrence after another.

Speaker 1: 1:51

And so how did you first let's get into this how did you first meet Dick and how did he come into your life?

Speaker 2: 1:57

So you know, I live I'm talking right now. If I were to go maybe 75 yards that way, I would be at the Hudson River, and I was. It was not long after my family had moved to this little town we're, you know, 20 miles north of New York City, very small town and I took my son, my older son, down to the waterfront, which I used to do just to sort of, you know, skip rocks or look for sea glass, and part of it was. I wanted to give him this sense of sort of connection to the place we lived in. There's this, you know, this giant river within our view at all times.

Speaker 2: 2:39

So we went down there and my neighbor, who's himself a kind of larger-than-life and a little bit mysterious character, kind of man-about-town kind of, gestured to me over a stone wall and was like you guys got to come inside and check this out, and so this is our first time actually going into our neighbor's house, but he lives right on the water and so we went in and there were like six people in his house and at the head of the table was this like very large guy in like kind of dirty denim, bib overalls and muddy boots with a beard and just like belly laughing and like just in the middle of like spinning yarns, and my neighbor, scott. He says you know, he's paddling from Canada to Florida. So you know, here we, I'm just north of New York City. He's already come quite a distance. If that's the case, by the way, this guy's like sunburned, like red as a tomato, like, which makes sense.

Speaker 2: 3:37

This was also. It was Labor Day, so it was like we'd just come through and it was like 90 degrees and, sure enough, out the window there's this canoe. And the first thing that I was struck by was which I liked. This is what made me really connect with him initially was that this was not like a fancy-ass canoe. It was not like one of those like you know type A guys who's like a Wall Street guy and then he's got a $6,000, you know thing and he's like doing Carbon fiber.

Speaker 2: 4:09

Yeah, like doing this, you know high-end adventure on the weekends kind of thing Like this was a plastic canoe that he bought at Dick's Sporting Goods for $250, and had made it from the from basically the board. It was Platsburg, as it turned out, not quite Canada, because that was as close to Canada as you could get on a Greyhound bus. He came to learn he got off a bus in Platsburg, walked to Dick's Sporting Goods, bought a canoe and dragged it Four miles to a put-in on a creek outside of a LHM plane and somehow managed to get even just to my house or my neighborhood in that plastic $250 canoe. And that was the thing. To me it was like wow, this guy is like. You know, he's complex, he's not just one of those guys who's like all about being like the best at everything. This guy is Absolutely yeah. So that was sort of the first thing. And then there was something. I guess there was two other pieces to it.

Speaker 2: 5:11

Then at that point you have one thought is like okay, this is amazing and impressive. If you have any kind of taste for adventure in your life, you're intrigued by people who are doing things like that. But on the other hand you also pretty quickly recognize this guy was in his early 60s. Right, you think to yourself okay, wow, that's a long time to be on a journey by yourself. There's got to be some things that aren't going quote unquote right in his life for him to be doing this.

Speaker 2: 5:38

As amazing as this seems, it's not hard to imagine how cool this trip is for him. You know on some level that there's some stuff that he's dealing with. If he's doing this by himself, that's a lot of time to be alone. So that's part one. But then part two is. On the other hand, there was just like a twinkle in his eye, something really friendly at the core of it, the warmth of his smile and his laughter. That made me realize, whatever troubles he's going with, there's still a core to this man that is deeply in love with life and people and he's trying to work it out through this journey and that's cool. But there was that spark that this guy he's not someone who's just giving up. This guy is like he's trying to work through some stuff and there's something kind of noble about him at his core.

Speaker 1: 6:31

It's a common humanity that connected you in that initial meeting, which it's when you think about it. In this day and age, that's a pretty beautiful thing to find with somebody that you don't know. We're nowadays more accustomed to going inward and not finding that common thread the way you just described. It is like an amazing experience where it's like holy shit, this is not a normal individual.

Speaker 2: 7:02

This is something different.

Speaker 2: 7:04

Yeah, and sometimes you can get, especially in my line of work, they tend to be drawn to, you know, people who are on the edges of normality, like you said, because they're interesting, right. But you can sometimes, if you get people who are sort of like professionally eccentric, who are like cultivating a sense of their own oddness just to generate attention for themselves. So I also, on the one hand, I'm sort of drawn to people who are a little bit off the standard track. On the other hand, I've learned from experience to be a little bit skeptical of people who are kind of selling their story. You know, like you know, I'm gonna be the first person whoever walks every block backwards, that kind of thing Like are you all right about me, you know, and so what again?

Speaker 2: 7:55

There's something like it was real quick with this guy that I could. I just could tell that it was authentic. Like this guy was doing this for himself, not for attention, right, he was very happy to be received in my neighbor's house and to continue talking to me, as I, you know, I then continued a relationship with him in the days to come, talking to him, and he was grateful for my attention, but he wasn't seeking it out, I mean, and in fact, one of the amazing things was when I, you know, I started interviewing him more properly after that first meeting and I realized that we were gonna have to, like the magazine was gonna have some standards of like making sure that I wasn't making this up. Like it's very unusual story that he'd be like this guy's out in left field, like this is all a lie. And so I started telling him, like you know, we're gonna have to fact check some of these things. You're telling me, like how can we get in touch with you? And he was like well, you can't. I mean, I'm on a, like I'm on a. What are you talking about? Like I'm in a canoe, I'm going down the river, like I don't make time for phone calls, like that's the whole purpose of this, like I'm so, like it's great, if you wanna write about me, that's great. And I, you know, I'll check my email every once in a while at a public library, which you know.

Speaker 2: 9:09

He gave me his Gmail address and so I sent him the article that I wrote after that and, like you know, he responded like three weeks later, being like this is great, thanks, I'm in Delaware, you know. But he was. You know it was. It was so clear that he was just like he was doing this on his own terms, for his own reasons, in his own way, and that was the important thing. And he was open to whatever you know opportunities the world was gonna throw at him on this mission. But he wasn't gonna bend his purposes to anyone else's needs. It was he was doing what he needed to do for himself.

Speaker 1: 9:44

Absolutely. That's the authentic, genuine nature of somebody that's on their own mission that they have this calling. And there's a lot of parallels and people have compared this story to a lot of modern adventures. You know that have gone too far, crossed that edge and, you know, never made it back. When you initially met him, did you get that sense of there might be a little more danger to this. There might be like this person's probably gonna get themselves over their head, or was it more of a? You know this Mark Twain individual who's got it all figured out. It might be doing it on his own accord, but he'll be fine.

Speaker 2: 10:32

Right. So you know, one of the things that I learned immediately when I sort of wandered into that conversation at my neighbor's house, was he was telling stories about some of his previous trips. It turned out this was not the first time he'd done this right. So you know, here he comes through my town, he's on his way to Florida and part of my mind is thinking like how is that even possible? Like how can you do that in a canoe? I'm trying to do that. But then you know he's talking about things he's done on the Mississippi River and on the Missouri River. So there's a sense in my mind there of like okay, this guy's, you know it's an unusual career but he's pretty accomplished at this, it seems. And the way he, you know, he had a great facility for like recalling details of his trips. In a way, like sometimes when you talk to someone who's like a bit of a bullshit artist, like they tell stories that start to get, you know, stretch the boundaries of what's true and you can kind of tell it gets a little more generic and a little less specific because they're actually they're reaching for to impress you. His stories were very, very specific, like incidentally specific right, like random details that, like, you wouldn't think to make up if you were in the process of making up, because, like he was so distracted by like oh, and, by the way, like the guy who was wearing this red shirt, it was kind of cool and like so I believed in his capabilities for sure. That said the. So I can't forget, it was the second or the third time I talked to him.

Speaker 2: 11:59

He started to open up a little bit more about his vulnerabilities and he talked to me about so he was when he wasn't in a canoe, being an adventurer.

Speaker 2: 12:09

He lived in Bozeman, Montana, but as I came to learn, he lived outside. You know, he said people call it homeless, I don't but, and he talked to me, you know, a little bit about some of the struggles he'd had in Bozeman with other people and with employment and things. So, you know, then I start going through a kind of like, okay, well, so you know, obviously there are challenges in his life and now I started to almost get, you know, feeling protective on his behalf, kind of like, well, what, you know, how can I help you? But then I started to feel, like, you know, there's something distorted in my frame of thinking because, on the other hand, like this guy is like much stronger than I, am like very intelligent, highly intelligent and, from all evidence in the stories he's telling, like has done a pretty good job of like making his way around the world, despite the challenges he's faced. And so I just, you know, I had to sort of like check myself in my initial instinct to be like you know, how can I help you?

Speaker 1: 13:13

I'm like, well, actually, you're helping yourself pretty well here.

Speaker 2: 13:15

You're doing fine, yeah, you're doing something I definitely couldn't do and you're making friends everywhere, from what I can tell. And the one way I was able to confirm that pretty quickly is that you know a lot of his stories I mentioned. They were full of specifics but often they'd be like people's first names, Like I met this guy, Dennis, and so it's like it's hard for me to find Dennis in, you know, in St Louis, because there's a lot of Dennis's in St Louis. But he mentioned, he named, a specific dive bar in a town in Missouri, Carothersville, in the boot heel, and he specifically said like you know, when you can look it up, it's like this, it's this great place. Like they don't look down on anybody, they're very welcoming of strangers. And he told so I, as again I was.

Speaker 2: 13:57

You know, there's a part of me that's like well, you know, you never know with people like this.

Speaker 2: 14:01

Like maybe there's some checkered past, Maybe he's, maybe he's a little more shady than he's letting on.

Speaker 2: 14:05

I just want to make sure I don't get that vibe from him, but I just want to make sure. So I called that bar and I was like hey, you know, random, this is a little weird, but like by any chance, do you remember big guy in a canoe and like, instantly it was the daughter of the bar owner who answered the phone and she was like, talk, like, do I remember him? Like we were just talking about him last week, Like, like, and so everything. I was like, wow, okay. So now, like, I'm pretty sure that my first thought instincts about this guy were obviously there's going to be things that I don't really know yet and maybe we'll never come to know but like, my core impression of the guy's genuine decency and authenticity like was validated by the fact that I called this random place where he hadn't been, and I forget nine years or something like that. And they're like, oh yeah, like, that guy spent several weeks here like he was legit.

Speaker 1: 14:58

Yeah, it's funny how it seems like he gets to these points where he's almost vulnerable enough to allow himself to be part of something, to be ingrained in a community, to be somebody that is a local, is a face that's recognizable within the town. And right at the cusp of that, right at the edge of just embracing, like hey, this feels right, it's like magic, it's like Mary Poppins, it's poof gone, yeah, yeah.

Speaker 2: 15:31

Yeah, I mean that's. So the one of the key things that I realized again and again and again and this was the thing that's amazing that his great skill that most of us don't have at least is, like he was never a tourist in any of these places. He was going. That's that. Whatever it is that vulnerability, that kindness in him, somehow when he would land in these towns he would be embraced and like. He would become a regular, like in, like various institutions would welcome him, like you know, like the veterans club in a certain town would be like well, we're having a, you know, a barbecue next week. We want you to come. You'd be like all right, I got no plans, I'll stay a few extra days and like, and he'd be cooking up the pork with them. And he would be embraced in that way and that was really cool. But as I. So one of the things that enabled me to go deeper with this story is as I got his.

Speaker 2: 16:23

I got a lot of his writing and I could see his through his journals. You know the things that he was thinking, that he wasn't necessarily always saying out loud to people, and it would get really poignant in some of these towns where he would describe, like, his happiness at being accepted in these communities and, you know, and he would delight in the various people he'd met and, like he would, he had a great memory for detail. So he would just, you know, just write down all these things about all his new friends and, like you know, going back to like what their grandfather did for a living. But then he would talk about, like the sense of sadness he would get when he realized he had to go, and that was the thing I kept kind of thinking about.

Speaker 2: 17:04

It's like he had to go, why did he have to go? And yet I, you know, there was a sense in which he was right. Part of the magic was that he didn't overstay his welcome and part of the the poency was that he was always afraid of overstaying his welcome. And so there's that, that tension is like it. It's great because he was always moving on right at the moment when you're like I want more of that guy, but it's also he recognized something that was true, which is like if he'd stayed a little longer maybe, you know, people would have been like I want a little less of that guy, just because you know you can only delight in magic for so long before it becomes ordinary.

Speaker 1: 17:46

Absolutely the apps, absolutely, he. He tapped into that feel good and that is something that we crave as veterans, as human beings, you want to be accepted. But to be accepted fully, to be embraced, it's being able to be vulnerable enough to show every aspect of yourself and be open to judgment and be open to you know when things go wrong, when you have to make amends, and that's a hard thing to understand. It can't just be good all the time. You've got to be able to make mistakes and come back and show growth. But man does it feel great to be constantly living in the feel good and those new relationships In the honeymoon stage. Yeah, yeah, and he tapped into that. That that is ah, that's heartbreaking.

Speaker 2: 18:36

Yeah, and so, like a lot of people who are dealing with traumatic experiences of one kind or another, you know he had very complicated relationships, say with his family, with the people, people with whom he went back a long ways, who had seen him go through tougher times than this, and so he felt kind of, like a lot of people I would imagine, felt kind of trapped by the nature of really his relationships, his longer entrenched relationships, because of how complex they'd become because of things that people had said or things that he had done or whatever you know.

Speaker 2: 19:10

And so you know part of this was it was freeing to be to arrive in a new place, because you get to make your own first impression again and you're not, you're not weighted down by that baggage. And I think you know part of the thing that was touching to me about him, the more I learned is, I think, unfortunately, he didn't trust enough in people's ability to forgive. So I think you know the truth is that some of those, some of the older relationships that he was fleeing, in some sense, I think people were probably more open to meeting him with warmth than he trusted. And so you know, I think he, you know, obviously he did what he did and it worked for him to some extent, but I think, certainly some of his family members who were left behind, I think they, you know, I think they loved him more than he realized.

Speaker 1: 20:10

Yeah, and that's that's ultimately. One of the saddest situations is in the book is that there is no resolution, that there is this great healing of whatever trauma or injuries or wounds that have been developed over the years. For the family, it became something that they had to survive, deal with as a loss, and that's. Going through his books, going through his journals, were you able to get a sense of what led to him wanting to constantly run away? Did you get like sort of like an index event that led him to say you know what? I just kind of want to stay on the outside of society.

Speaker 2: 20:59

Well, there were, in a way there were a whole bunch of potential things. That was another thing that I think interested me is it wasn't like there was like the one sort of like the one Rosebud thing of like you know there were. You know his father was another father, was a very accomplished military man but was a kind of an abusive alcoholic and the you know his, the children in that family, all kind of worshiped the dad but were terrified of him. So that was what Elna was, this sort of a traumatic and his parents divorced at a key moment in his upbringing. Dick himself went through a phase as a young adult of kind of leaning real into the kind of drugs and drinking the counterculture stuff and so some people, and then in fact had the experience that several of his friends and siblings told me about of having been dosed against his knowledge with LSD by friends, sort of as a prank. So there was a that would you know, may have helped plant the seed of a kind of paranoia that developed in time, sort of, you know, just sort of like people are trying to fuck with me and you may think I'm overreacting, but actually people have fucked with me, you know, and he's not wrong, right Like that, you know. So there was that. There was a one thing that you know.

Speaker 2: 22:34

He went to a in, briefly, in high school he went to a seminary, to a boarding school. Right around the time his parents were getting divorced and something didn't go right there. His it was a long time ago, is no one really remembered exactly in the family they just all had different pieces of it, like you know. He got expelled or you know something, but they just remembered a sense of shame on the mother's part. Some of them suggested that they thought maybe he had been molested by a priest. I will say that after the book came out a person wrote me with some knowledge of that and encouraged me to look into a little more into that angle. And I did find that the priest who who's named the brothers remembered being the one who recruited him to that seminary, did turn up on a list subsequently of offenders at that time in Connecticut. Other people you know much later in life accused that priest, who's now dead, of abuse. So it is definitely not.

Speaker 2: 23:56

It wouldn't surprise me at all if he had a traumatic incident there, and again, that's a formative time in his life, unusually, I mean, you know he himself was a Navy veteran, as you say, his time in the Navy was in some ways charmed because it was basically peace time and he saw it as a great opportunity for adventure. He sailed all over the world. That said, he did have to fight being discharged on mental health grounds. He succeeded, he was honorably discharged, but there was a time when he was having trouble sleeping on the ship and became convinced that some of his shipmates were, you know, messing with his food and stuff. So that was, and dealing with the strains that that episode put on his relationship with his father was another important thing. His father had been a colonel in the Army and joining the Navy was a big part of Dick trying to impress his father as his life was starting to unravel.

Speaker 2: 25:07

I should say, by the way, that you know he saw. You know people end up on the sort of the margins of society and sometimes you might be tempted to imagine that they've just sort of always been that way. He was actually like a as a teenager he was the kind of person who everyone thought was going to be a star in life. You know he was and that you know that essential core of him. That kind of future star in him remained until, yeah, I mean, like when I met him, that was part of what I was seeing is like he still had this residual self-confidence. That was like I'm an appealing guy, people like me, like you know. And that was true. He remained an appealing guy who people liked, even after things had gone hard.

Speaker 2: 25:47

But as he was failing to achieve conventional success as a young man, there were strains in his relationship with his father and, as I mentioned earlier, his father was at a very imposing, you know, volatile man and the military connection was it was it was hugely important bonding aspect for them, and so the fact that it almost didn't work out for a while was also a bit of tension. So I mean, there were a whole bunch of little things that all could point to like. Well, this could be part of what happened. This could be part of what happened and this, you know, in some ways I took it as like a lot of lives go through difficulties and, to my mind, what became more interesting was the solution he came up with, rather than pinpointing the cause of it. You know, like he faced a lot of trauma in different ways and he had a pretty unique way of navigating through his trauma, which was, you know, on the rivers, and that was how he came into my life.

Speaker 1: 26:53

Yeah, absolutely. It's when you peel back the layers and look at everything he was dealing with, like it makes perfect sense Take on this great task, this great achievement of navigating through all these rivers and constantly, and in the middle of that, having these little moments of connection. Yeah, trying to find that common humanity, trying to find that kindness. But because of trust, because of past hurts. It was always on a timeline, always on a ticking clock. Inevitably Dick disappears and there isn't any contact. When did you know something was wrong?

Speaker 2: 27:40

So, yeah, I initially wrote a short article about him based on my meeting and been talking to him for a few days. I sent him the article in an email. He wrote me back a few weeks later from Delaware. It was about three months after the article was written and I'd sort of almost forgotten about him. Occasionally, what would happen is people would write me who'd read the article and say how can I get in touch with this guy? I'd be like, ha ha ha, good luck, maybe he's around Baltimore. Go get your binoculars.

Speaker 2: 28:15

I got this phone call almost exactly three months after our first meeting from a number I didn't recognize. It was in North Carolina and I answered it. It was sort of before spam had dominated my phone. So I was like I just answered the call from a random number and the person on the other end of the line knew my name and said that they were investigating a missing voter. That was the first line Ben McGrath were investigating a missing voter. And so, like you know, within the first second or two I was like, okay, now I know who that is.

Speaker 2: 28:50

Yeah, as it turned so this was a wildlife ranger in North Carolina came to learn, and I think what he told me that first time was that they'd found an overturned canoe, and so or maybe he didn't tell me that it was overturned at the first point, I think he just said that they'd found a canoe, and so my first thought was actually, initially I was like, oh well, you know, you may think you've, you know this is, you know, this is strange. But actually that guy yeah, he's doing this, like he's just going, he's probably, he's probably at the bar or at the library, like that's what he does. He ties his canoe up and he goes into town, like, and the guy you know, his reaction was kind of like, well, you know, we'd like to get in touch with this family, and so I was able to put them in touch with. I hadn't actually at that point spoken to any of his siblings, but he had told me enough about his siblings that I knew who they were and I was able to put the investigators in touch with his siblings. And you know, he, I later came to understand that the reason that they knew he thought that he probably wasn't at the bar or at the library is that the canoe was upside down when they found it. So he hadn't, he hadn't just tied it up to go into town and then, yeah, and that began this, this process of me being drawn right back into the story.

Speaker 2: 30:14

I spent an hour or two kind of in tears as I thought about it, because I was, you know, I had been worried about them, but then I had overcome my worry by by saying, like you know, don't be silly, this guy is like super accomplished, can he's doing this thing that you can't do? Like, let him be. So now this wave of guilt comes over me three months later. It's like, well, maybe I was supposed to intervene. Maybe, you know, and you know, as time went on and they still hadn't found him, family members started reaching out to me and sharing things with me, and that's how I got sort of drawn back into the, to the project. Both, partly to sort of try and work through the guilt that I felt and whether I should or not feel guilty about my role. And two, it became clear through talking to the siblings and, you know, in the way that they had they there was this sort of unfortunate estrangement in the family and the lack of resolution that the one thing that I could offer them was to give him the legacy of, of his story.

Speaker 2: 31:22

I mean, you know, he had, as it turned out, he'd done a great deal of documentation on these trips, just extensive note taking and photographs. And and not only that, but he had been storing years worth of these journals and photographs in in storage lockers in Utah and Montana, and the Utah one was was especially interesting to me because, as I learned both while going through the materials but also from talking to his brothers, he hadn't lived as far as they knew. He hadn't lived in Utah since the early nineties. So it's been 20 some years and he was still paying a rent from from like river towns. He would, you know, we found receipts in the you know his.

Speaker 2: 32:07

One of his brothers, who lived close to North Carolina, went and like gathered all the belongings that were inside the canoe. It was upside down, but everything was so was packed so well that although it was soaking wet it was preserved. So we dried it all out in his driveway and then started going through it to try and find clues about what might have happened or where he might be. And among the things that were in there were these receipts from like you know, he'd be like upstate, near like Fort Ticonderoga, and he would go to the post office and mail a money order to a storage locker in Hebrew city, utah, where he hadn't lived since 1992.

Speaker 2: 32:40

And so to me that was like, wow, okay, this man cares about the things that are in that locker, like it's. It's been a long time and this is not a guy who's like on a suicide mission, this is a guy he cares about that stuff enough to to be paying money I mean, by the way, he doesn't have a lot of money, right, but he's continuing to pay money on a monthly basis to a place that he hasn't been in a long time because he cares about the stuff that's in there. And that really hit me because I just thought like, wow, that man cared about the stuff in those lockers, so I'm going to treat that stuff with care and I'm going to really go through it. And so that was sort of how I got sucked in.

Speaker 1: 33:16

Yeah, going through and digging through a person postmortem, just going through all of their effects, going through all the things that he cared about, and you're right, when you don't make it, I would imagine he's you know, getting benefit checks and that's not a lot of money and it's all going to these storage and it's having to treat it with kindness and understanding. That, like within the air, is another story. There's a different part of Dick that none of us knew and it's all stored here. What did you find going back through all that and how long did it take you to uncover?

Speaker 2: 33:57

So the first, the first thing that I found just in terms of like the immediate visual impression. So the first, I should say, like I accompanied his older brother, joe, out out west to look through the stuff. Joe went to Utah first and then I met Joe in Montana and he, he did what I wouldn't have been comfortable doing myself, which is that he got a padlock and broke into the locker because he was trying to, you know, see if there was anything that could help us figure out where Dick might be. My first impression inside the locker was that there were all these paintings, oil paintings. So he had gone, he'd gone through a phase before he had been an art, an art, an artist, in college he was a fine arts major and he had continued for quite a while through adulthood trying to, trying to become a working artist on and off. And he again, in the way he cared, like there were hundreds of oil paintings in there. Some of them were were, you know, frames that he'd made you know hand, visibly handmade frames, and a lot of them were just like wrapped up like rugs in the back. But so that was like immediately, like wow, like this isn't just, isn't just trash, like there's, there's. That was an early indicator that there was, you know, valuable in it, in the depending on who's who's doing you the valuation valuable stuff in there. I will say that his brother and I get it because I can think of, you know, people in my own extended family where this would be.

Speaker 2: 35:34

Our reaction to his brother's reaction to the bulk of the stuff in the lockers was like oh boy, like this.

Speaker 2: 35:42

This reminds me of Dickie in a in an unhappy way, kind of like it's, you know, just like the, the, the amassing of the stuff that you know, it, it, it reminded him of his cluttered mind, kind of like it's, like it was. It was sort of too difficult for him to some extent. And that was again where I felt that I had an opportunity that they didn't have, because I cared about Dick, but not in the way that a family member care you know I was. I had a human connection with him, but it was brief and I, and it wasn't tainted by the all, the, the, the family history, that that our actual family relationships are right. There was no baggage to my relationship with Dick, whereas there's baggage to any relationship that you have with anyone in your family, for that goes back decades. So I realized pretty quickly that I I was, I was going to be able to go through all that stuff without it, without it hitting me too hard.

Speaker 2: 36:42

Yeah, it didn't have the emotional impact in toll, yeah, so so I, and so I was like you know, don't throw this out Like I'll, I'll go through it. I totally get why you don't want to go through it all, but I will. And so then, to answer your question about how long it took, I mean months, if not years, I mean to go through it all, because part of what I ended up doing I mean you know months was the process of just like sorting through it all. I mean because, like you know, some of these things were like, were objects, like paintings, and there were, I mean, some of the resourcefulness was kind of cool, you know, homemade crutches with with computer mouse pads for like armpit, you know softening, really, you know, in the way that someone who's living outdoors has to and doesn't have a lot of money, has to be resourceful. He, you could see evidence of that, but a lot of it was just documents, you know like huge, like folders full of his Navy personnel files and and and lots of journals and stuff.

Speaker 2: 37:42

What turned the months into into years was what I came to feel part of my mission was, given how much of his journey was about connecting, making connections with other people, not just, I mean literally connecting rivers, he would say, but connecting people. I kind of felt that part of my mission was to like to, to, to finish out his social network, so to speak. I mean, he wasn't like a Facebook guy, but like by following up, but like he had, he had recorded the names of so many of his friends that he'd made, and then so many of them, there were indications that they you know that, that, like you know they would they would part ways when he would go on down the river with you know, with plans to keep in touch, and so it was sort of like, well, okay, I wonder, if he kept in touch, like I'll, I'll do that for him, I'll be the guy who keeps the touch and I'll I'll write the follow up letter for him. And also, what I would find is that he did initially keep in touch, I mean in the way that lots of us do right he would. He would leave a town. They would exchange mailing address. He had a PO box in Bozeman. They would exchange addresses. You know, eight months later he gets back on a bus after he finishes his trip. He gets back on a bus to Montana, goes, opens his PO box and has letters waiting for him from people he met along the way. He responds to those letters, sends them a note, says you know I made it, I'm safe, you know, don't worry, like I'll see you again sometime, and then that's when it kind of peters out.

Speaker 2: 39:12

What I found out, and what's one of the things that was a little bit sad for me, is that I don't think he realized the extent to which those friends he made actually really did kind of want to keep in more touch.

Speaker 2: 39:25

You know, I think again this is that push and pull between, like overstaying versus moving on. The same thing was true even just in maintaining relationships. There were some people I talked to who had even, like been discussing with their wife or their girlfriend or whatever, going to Montana to try and find, on a vacation, to try and find him again, because they were, you know, sad that that, like that, the correspondence had lapsed and they and you know he told them interesting things. So like there were people there who were and people who were taking steps like looking him up on the internet, trying to find, trying to find another way to get back in touch with them, because they did want to see him again and I don't think he was really ever quite aware of the extent to which people remained interested in him and interested in his welfare.

Speaker 1: 40:11

Yeah, it's that impact when you meet somebody, that's larger than life to that person. They don't really understand how appealing, how magical the interaction is and they just move on their ways. But for us, the ones that had that unique encounter, you remember them for the rest of your life. You have them in the military. Sometimes it's sadly because they pass, but other times you have that brief encounter with somebody that is so uniquely human, in such a way that you're not courageous enough to try to be, you're not courageous enough to be that authentic or that individual, and you're always thinking back to like, wow, wonder what happened to that guy? Are you trying to make that connection?

Speaker 1: 40:59

But they're not on social media. That's one of the greatest things about these people they tend not to be on social media. They tend to be unreachable in those what we now call conventional ways, because they know that it doesn't serve them a purpose. Dick always alluded all right from the book it alludes that he had a romantic relationship and then come to find out. Was that a reality? Was there somebody that Dick was actually in love with and loved and cared for and was alluding to someday being able to rena grate back into that person's life?

Speaker 2: 41:33

Yeah.

Speaker 2: 41:33

So there's. It's a complicated answer to that question. So the woman that he would always talk about was her name, was Tracy, and like, if you take his family's perspective on it, before we went through this process they were like, well, tracy's not real. Come on, like, let's be honest here, my perspective on it is number one. There is a real person named Tracy. I mean, like I have 100% confidence that he met a woman named Tracy. I know where they met. I know when they met. It was in Livingston Montana. It was in July of 1999. She had a dog with her. The dog's name was Haley. It was a Chesapeake Bay Retriever.

Speaker 2: 42:22

I mean, like this, I know this to be true because, like that incidental fact collection was such a part of his life that when he was writing things down, like I fact checked so many, like hundreds of his encounters with people and those kinds of details, like that's what he did he remembered stuff about people and he cared about learning those facts about people. So he 100% had a conversation with a young woman named Tracy and her dog in Livingston Montana. Did he have a relationship with her? I doubt it. I believe what happened is but this is where we shade into speculation, but my understanding came to be what you see in the writing, for instance, in the way he writes about her. You know, the first time it's like I met this woman, like here's a few things about her. As she begins to creep up again in his writing, it's like I'm thinking about Tracy, like I, you know, I think I'm looking forward to going back to Montana. I hope I can see Tracy again. And then it evolves into like you know, tracy won't be happy with me if I. But there's never like a another clear, direct indication of like Tracy said this. It's more like Tracy won't like it if, and so I think my take on it was she was a person who he met at a vulnerable moment in his life, at an early moment in one of his trips.

Speaker 2: 43:49

It was one of his first trips. He was still in his early 40s at this point and things had. He'd been working at a VA hospital in Boise and was fed up. Things weren't going well, you know, things were going so bad, but that he was. You know he was reading. He was a janitor at the hospital but one of the things he started doing was reading the case folders on the PTSD ward to try and like see what troubles other people were going through so he could try and compare them to his own before he was supposed to burn the trash or something like that, but he wanted to read the information first. So he gets, he quits that job and he's like I need a fresh start.

Speaker 2: 44:38

He goes to Montana, to the border, wyoming Montana, to go on this great voyage down to New Orleans to like ring in the new millennium. It was like you know he was gonna take six months to get there by the new year and have a rebirth kind of a new life. So it's early on in that trip where he's like he's reached a point in his life where he's starting to feel like a loser again. He's like he's edging in the middle age. It's like one more thing just didn't work out.

Speaker 2: 45:05

He's early on in this trip that you know most people think is probably nuts. But he meets someone who, in my interpretation, who takes him seriously and seems genuinely enthusiastic about what he's doing, and then does the thing that you know and asks the question of like well, what are you gonna do when you're done? Like you know what's next and seemed to show enough interest in what he would do when he was done and seemed to brighten, even at the you know, in his interpretation, the way you do when interaction with someone you might be attracted to seemed to brighten at the prospect of his maybe returning to Montana to study medicine or something. So he's got at this key moment in his life where he's not sure how things are gonna work. He meets someone who gives him another boost of confidence and convinces him, like you know, you're not done, buddy, you're not a loser like I, like you. And as he's going down the trip and going through that process that we've talked about of like do I stay or do I go and continue to go, she becomes, you know, this kind of almost this device in his mind for thinking about the like, well, there was the path I didn't take. Like, maybe I should have stayed to see what would have happened if I'd stayed longer and gotten to know her better. Well, so maybe when I finish the trip I'll go back and get to know her better. And over time it develops into a couple of things.

Speaker 2: 46:31

One it's a handy, as he wrote in his journal. One Point it's a kind of a useful story. If you're a big man traveling alone around the country, you become aware of the fact that you frighten some people, and one of the easiest ways to put people, especially women, at ease is to indirectly assure them that you're not a predator interested in them. So if you talk about how you, you know there's a woman you're hoping to marry back home. They settled down a little bit and they're like okay, all right, now that's good, I get it so that you know that was a useful. She was useful to him in that way, but also I think she was useful. You know the idea of her.

Speaker 2: 47:12

So this is what I mean like at a certain point she ceases to become a real person. There is a real person named Tracy and then there's the Tracy that evolves in his mind and the Tracy that in his mind is just something to strive for. It's like something to ground him and it could be. It doesn't even have to be a person or a woman. I mean it happens that in like in literature, there's a long history of.

Speaker 2: 47:32

You know Don Quixote has his Dalsinea, or you know Dante has Beatrice. I mean there are. It goes way back. You know, nights going out in the field have a lovely last back home that they'll return to. But it doesn't have to be a woman. It could be you know the book you're gonna write, or something, and that's the way which I feel it was. It deserved to be taken more seriously than some people might at first glance take it, which is that we all, at some point in our lives, need to have a Tracy, we need to have something to point our hopes toward. And it doesn't act, who cares if it's realistic, quote, unquote, like it's, you just have. You have to have something that you're hoping for, right Cause if you give up on hoping, then you're done.

Speaker 1: 48:24

Exactly. Yeah, we all need that North Star.

Speaker 2: 48:27

I mean it doesn't have to be an actual physical North Star, it's just something to get us home and so for him, tracy, this relationship, what she represented was the possibility that his days of wandering might at some point end and that there would be a domestic life waiting for him after he's resolved his demons and worked through this stuff. So that that's what Tracy was. Tracy was the hope of a settled future which he talked explicitly with me about. I mean, he would say, look, I meet so many people on these trips who say, like I envy you, man, I want to be doing what you're doing. And he'd be like, well, you know, hold on, like I'm flattered, but just so you understand, like I look at you. You got a house and you've got a wife and you got a young child. Like don't sneeze at that. Like I want that, but I don't have that. So I'm doing this and this is cool for what it is, but I'm not like going to pretend that this is what everyone should do. This is what I've done because I don't have that, and you know. So Tracy was hugely important for him and I, you know, I would sometimes find people who were almost like mocking the idea that you could have a fake girlfriend and it.

Speaker 2: 49:45

It irritated me a little bit because I don't think that's, it's not fair, like what he, what he he had done again in so many different ways. He had found important survival mechanisms, yes, and she was one of the chief survival mechanisms. You know he struggled with alcohol, right, he drank a lot Sometimes. One of the ways he moderated his alcohol intake and the effects it had on his health was by making notes to himself about how the fact that Tracy wouldn't take him seriously if he got, if he got drunk too much, you know, and Tracy wouldn't want him to be out. You know, chasing flusies in bars, you know, like this it was, it was.

Speaker 2: 50:28

You know the idea of Tracy like helped, it was almost like having a parent who's like keeping you, making sure you don't, you don't, steal the candy from the, from the cabinets, like uh-oh, like I might get in trouble, like and if you set yourself free the way he did, like there's no one monitoring you, so you kind of need to invent a monitor and so, yeah, you need to have someone to answer to, right, and for some people it's religion, right, but you've got to have someone to answer to somehow. You can't just be yourself, you, you, you might think you know, and in a way, like you know there's the you know the model of, like the kind of Christopher McCann list into the wild character who was, you know he was young and therefore, in my opinion, like naive enough to think that he didn't have to answer to anyone but but, but, but, sort of but nature. Dick was old enough and wise enough to know that. You'd know, you do need to answer to someone other than yourself. It can't just be you you need, and so often it was the connections he was making in towns, but sometimes some of those rivers. There's long stretches between those towns, and so if you needed a friend between those towns, and that friend was Tracy- Absolutely, and you're right.

Speaker 1: 51:41

It's ignorant to look at that concept and say that he was out of his mind or this ridiculous he's making up people like no, this is. This is something that people have done for eons. This is something that is still done. This is something that we all, whatever it is. We give that power to something greater to help us stay on our path, and that's what Tracy ended up being for him. And I want to ask you this when you were met with the understanding that Dick wasn't here anymore, how did you handle that loss? How did you handle dealing with that grief? Because people will often think that, oh, this person just wrote a book, he just wrote an article. And it's not that simple. We can be intimately close to somebody and still have to deal with grief and loss, even though they weren't family members, even though they weren't our closest best friends. What was that journey like for you?

Speaker 2: 52:44

So two answers to that. The first is that for a long time afterward it hasn't happened recently, which is to say it hasn't happened within the last year, but for years afterward I would have dreams where he would call me from a pay phone and just like, in other words, and it would in every time it would be like where are you, where have you been? And sometimes, in the dreams, the location, the phone number, probably must have been planted by the fact of the initial getting the unknown phone number from North Carolina, but the dream is sometimes the phone number would be in Florida, because Florida was his destination. Sometimes the phone number would be out in California. I'd be like how did he get out there? But yeah, so he would call me in his dreams, in my dreams, sorry, and so that was part of a kind of not letting go element. The other way I'd dealt with it really, though, is by continuing to make phone calls to other people who he connected with. So there came a point that was, like I mentioned earlier, that, before he'd even disappeared, I made that first phone call to the bar in Missouri to kind of just vet the gist of his story, to be like is this guy way out there and I'm being duped.

Speaker 2: 54:11

And then, after he went missing, I did a certain about amount of just calling to let people know and see what happened. And then I was sort of just doing more and more fact checking to be like, well, let me just make sure that there wasn't an aspect of him that I'm missing. I just want to be sure that it doesn't turn out that he was wanted for theft in Illinois or something like that. But at a certain point I kept on making more and more. It goes from a dozen phone calls to several dozen, to we're getting into the hundreds. And there comes a point where I realized that what I'm doing is like well, a part of it is procrastination. I'm avoiding the challenge of writing by doing more reporting. But also really what I was doing was it was for my own sake.

Speaker 2: 55:06

Whenever I felt that he was going stale, the memory of him was going stale in my mind, I would sort of bring him back to life again in my own mind by connecting with yet another person and being reminded, because part of it these are all cold calls, like I'm just calling total strangers and doing the stick and I'm just like, by the way sorry, don't hang up on me. This is weird, but what was very gratifying and what this project could have died early on if the first 10 of those calls, if seven of the people had hung up on me and been like what's up loser. But actually the vast majority of people I called were immediately like not only do we remember who we were just talking about, and so every time I had that kind of interaction I felt good. It was like the equivalent of the dopamine hit that people get when you're because it's like all right, so I'm doing something that you care about and that makes me feel like this is worth doing.

Speaker 2: 56:15

And so whenever a couple of weeks had gone by, if I was feeling down about the project, I would struggle with this or that. I'd be like you know what I need to do? I need to call another person and talk to them about Dick. And it was amazing how helpful that was in the kind of mental health sense of just like meeting yet another person. And then I took it to the extreme step of like I got on some airplanes and rented cars and went to meet these people in person, not just on phone calls, because even that was cool, like getting to experience them in their own domains, like where he did, and that was a kind of a way of again of living in his wake, basically, but that kind of made him remain alive in my mind and that probably helped contribute to the fact that he appeared in my dreams.

Speaker 1: 57:00

Yeah, absolutely Ben. I could go on for another hour, because there's all these little things that happen afterwards People report seeing him and people and then that spins hope and it gives us idea that like he's still alive, and then come to find out it's not him. Do you still hear any echoes or versions of stories, narratives, saying like hey, we saw Dick a few months back or a couple years after he was reported missing?

Speaker 2: 57:35

So funny. I got an email just like two days ago from someone not saying that they thought they'd seen him, but saying like, hey, can you please tell me that he's reunited with Tracy? Like that's what I want to think. That definitely is one of the reactions that some people have to have. The sightings have sort of died off.

Speaker 2: 58:00

There was a period when, yeah, I would hear from people sporadically saying like I'm pretty sure I met that guy. And there was a doctor in Maryland who was like, oh, yeah, I met him on such and such a time and he came and used a shower in my house and I gave him some water bottles and the timing was like, well, how could that be? That was like a year after he disappeared and a lot of the details actually kind of matched up or matched up pretty closely. But he sent me some photographs of the guy he'd taken and they were like not super, they were kind of like zoomed in real far. To me it was inconclusive. It was like the guy was thinner but I was like, well, maybe he'd lost a lot of weight, you never know. I shared those photographs with his family members. They were like the stuff in on it, and so the clearest case of, I think, unfortunately.

Speaker 2: 59:00

I don't want to disabuse those who for whom it's important to think that he is still with Tracy, they should go on hoping that, from the family's perspective and I think mine as well the most conclusive evidence that he's unfortunately not going to come back is that his bank account has continued receiving automated social security deposits every month and he hasn't accessed it. And it's not like he was a survivalist in the sense that I think it's not like he was killing raccoons and cooking them for food. He didn't have a lot of money, but he was good at making his money work for him and he would shop in stores. So I don't know how he would go on without securing those benefits, both from the military and from social security. It was very important to him, like it was, as it is important to lots of people, to have that kind of network, and he went to great lengths to make sure that he was going to get those benefits, and so the fact that he's not taking advantage of them seems pretty yeah Conclusive to me.

Speaker 1: 1:00:18

And again, like you said, we've lost sight of the importance of having characters that are larger than life, and in my mind it's a beautiful idea to think that could be paddling down any river in the United States and you might come across that and you'll never know it. Keep your spirit alive. It's a beautiful thing that we've lost sight of greatness, and one of his lasting gifts that he's given back to all of us, especially after you read the book, is that Conn is still alive. In a way, he's out there you may meet.

Speaker 2: 1:00:54

There are definitely other things. It turns out from some of the sightings what you realize is there are more of these guys out there doing this than you think, and part of the lesson for me is learning to take them seriously. Like when you meet them, don't dismiss them, like double down and really try and draw them out and hear more of their story, because the great thing about him to me is his stories. They all turned out to be true. They sounded so unlikely, but every element of them it was legit. And then through that process, you then meet other people who turn out to have really interesting stories too, and that's sort of like you realize through this, like people are amazing. They really are. People are amazing and sometimes it takes a larger than life character to remind you that many people are actually pretty amazing and have gone through deep shit and done exotic, cool, impressive things in spite of this and that challenge, and it's actually worth listening to them about it.

Speaker 1: 1:02:02

Yeah, exactly, common humanity connect, engage and be willing to have a cup of coffee with somebody and hear their stories, because we're missing that, this idea that we're so divided these days and the inability to just sit down and experience life through a different frame of reference. That's something we can all strive to do. So, ben, thank you for being here, thank you for writing this amazing book Again, riverman and American Odyssey. Go out there and get it and understand the importance of common humanity. It's an important factor in life and, yeah, you never know where you're going to meet someone larger than life, whether it's on a river or at a Waffle House getting a cup of coffee. That's right, ben. Thank you for joining us today and we'll see you all next time. Take care If you like what we're doing and you enjoying the show, don't forget to share us.

Speaker 1: 1:03:00

Like us, subscribe and head on over to our Patreon, where you can be part of our community and get access to all of our episodes as soon as they drop. And remember we get through this together. Take care, hey, where do we start?