On November 29, 2014, I received a phone call from an officer of the North Carolina Wildlife Resources Commission named John Beardsley. He was investigating a missing boater, he said, and explained that some duck hunters had found a canoe and that my phone number had turned up among the gear in the boat. He wanted to know where it had come from—he hoped, in fact, that I might be the canoeist. It took me a second or two to realize that the boat must have been Dick Conant’s. It had come practically from Canada, I explained—from Plattsburgh, New York, twenty miles south of the border.

Conant had paddled past my house, on the Hudson River a dozen miles above Manhattan, on Labor Day morning. As I was about to take my toddler son kayaking, a neighbor called out that there was a man in his house I might want to meet. A red canoe was tied up at the base of the seawall. It was filthy, and packed as if for the apocalypse, with tarps and trash bags and Army-surplus duffels. My neighbor, an adventurous spirit who once pedalled a bicycle from New York to Cocoa Beach, had spotted the unusual traveller in the water and waved him ashore.

Inside, Conant was sitting at the head of a table, facing down a kingly spread of caviar, sausage, doughnuts, and vodka, and holding forth for several guests. He was headed for Florida, he said, and was two months into a journey that he figured would take six more. He was sixty-three, and spoke in a mellifluous high timbre that seemed almost childlike. He wore denim bib overalls, a T-shirt, and muddy brown boots, and stood six feet one and weighed three hundred pounds. He had a rust-colored beard, with patches of white, and his face was as red as a boiled lobster shell—a riparian Santa. He laughed with great heaves of his gut. His handshake offered the firmest grip I’ve ever felt.

On the phone, I explained to Officer Beardsley that I was a journalist, and that I had written a short article (in this magazine) about Conant’s ambitious voyage. I mentioned that he had e-mailed me a month or so earlier, in late October, and sounded healthy and happy, in spite of the fact that waves had drowned his laptop. He was at a public library in Delaware City, Delaware, “and preparing for the next leg across Chesapeake Bay,” he wrote. I suggested that Beardsley check the local library, or perhaps a dive bar, where Conant might be raising eyebrows with his story about nearly getting run over by a barge one night on the Mississippi. Or was there a V.A. hospital nearby? Conant was a Navy veteran, and he suffered from gout and high blood pressure. He regularly stopped at V.A. hospitals where he could renew his scrips.

The canoe had been spotted floating upside down near the mouth of Big Flatty Creek, by a father who was fishing with his young boy and feared what they might discover if they drew their boat any closer. Big Flatty discharges into the not so flat brackish waters of Albemarle Sound, about twenty miles west of the Outer Banks. The father called his friend Grover Sanders, who had been hunting ducks nearby. Sanders, a stout soybean farmer who hadn’t trimmed his beard in three and a half years, drove his skiff out to have a look. “It was flipped over and hung up in them stumps,” he recalled. He was referring to the cypress knees that perforate the northern shores of the sound, giving it the color of tea. Behind the stumps was a swampy forest and, behind that, miles of tilled fields. Sanders spent fifteen minutes eying the canoe from various angles, trying to get a sense of what might be underneath, before attempting to right it.

Ropes pulsed beneath the boat like the tentacles of a jellyfish. They formed a kind of loose cage, trapping bags—or, as Sanders soon discovered, bags within bags within knotted bags, containing enough air that they amounted to a flotation device. Righting the boat without severing the ropes was impossible. Finding no body, Sanders called 911, loaded what bags he could onto his skiff, and towed the canoe inland, via a narrow canal, passing the rickety docks and large oyster middens of a shellfishing operation called Frog Island. A sheriff’s deputy and Beardsley and Chase Vaughan, another wildlife officer, met him there. A light breeze blew from the northeast, a remnant of a storm that had dumped several inches of rain a few days earlier. The men began combing through the effects, looking for clues.

Among the canoe’s contents were seventeen toothbrushes, three Louis L’Amour Western novels, a frying pan, a digital camera, and some soggy stapled papers, on the back of which I’d written my e-mail address and phone number, more than four hundred miles up the coast. Receipts and other assorted documents bore notes and inscriptions, written in blue and black ink:

If you allow poverty to hold you back, it means you have neither imagination nor will. Idea ~ Sci-Fi: USB port from human nervous system directly into Internet. I have been denied what our men are supposed to do. So I do what I want, which is to navigate. I’m not good @ everything. I’m good @ long-distance canoe.

The nation’s largest Coast Guard facility is in the nearest town, Elizabeth City; it dispatched a boat, a plane, and, eventually, a helicopter to aid in the search. The wildlife division called in a plane of its own, and Beardsley and Vaughan began searching in their boats as well.

“All right, let’s do it again. This time, you’re good at acting.” Facebook

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Beardsley felt that he should alert Conant’s family, and sought my advice. Conant had told me that he was one of nine siblings and mentioned that he had a brother who lived near me. But he hadn’t bothered to call him (or anyone else) when passing by. “That way, they don’t worry,” he said. Conant had mentioned another brother, Joe, as his closest kin. “Down in Peachtree City, Georgia,” he said. “He used to fly for Delta. His wife is one of those fussbudgets that everybody who has a birthday gets a card. So she’s just kind of like the glue that keeps our disparate family together.” I looked up the Conants in Peachtree City and sent their number to Beardsley.

If you asked Conant about his experiences on the country’s waterways, he would grin sheepishly, pause, size up your listening capacity, and then let go with a monologue as unstoppable as a river. In recalling a trip that began in July, 2009, and concluded in September, 2010, for instance, he said, “I took a Greyhound bus, like usual, out to northern Minnesota, place called Bemidji. I went to Gander Mountain, bought a boat, got some supplies at—not Walmarts, but that other big one? Kmarts! Got all my supplies ready to go, put in my boat on a lake next to Bemidji, one of a string of lakes that forms the headwaters of the Mississippi. So I took the Mississippi from Bemidji to New Orleans. I got on the Intracoastal Waterway east, going toward where Lake Borgne empties into Lake Pontchartrain, and vice versa. At Rigolets Pass, I ran into a duck hunter who also happened to be a lawyer for one of the parishes, for the sheriff’s department. I was going looking for ice. We got to talking. He goes, ‘Holy mackerel, you already came all that distance?’ I said, ‘Yeah, I’m not even halfway where I’m going!’ He asked if I need anything. I said, ‘If there’s a hardware store nearby, I’d like to get some fixings so I can make a little cart. I got about a hundred miles portage from here to Mobile, Alabama.’ He says, ‘The heck with that, I’ll give you a ride!’ I became good friends with the guy.”