It was by chance that Ben McGrath met Richard Perry Conant, a wandering canoer, “with the complexion of a boiled lobster, to go with the build of a manatee,” who had lashed his boat near the author’s house on the Hudson River one weekend in 2014. Everything Conant told McGrath mesmerized him: his traversing hundreds of miles of river, his planning of trips so he could always check into a nearby V.A. hospital, his vivid encounter with a heron, his writing of a screenplay starring Bette Midler driving off a cliff (tentatively entitled “Drowning Mona”). McGrath wrote a short item about Conant for The New Yorker, and that was that.
Except three months later he got a call from a wildlife ranger in North Carolina who said they had found an abandoned red plastic canoe stuffed with possessions, including a piece of paper with his phone number on it. Conant had disappeared, and the ranger wondered if McGrath knew anything about him.
