is the April pick for the şÚÁĎłÔąĎÍř Book Club. You can learn more about the book club here, or to discuss it.

I met him 15 years later. In my day job as a journalist, I’ve seen more than enough stunts, and had Dick Conant’s peculiar voyages come to my attention by way of a press release, touting yet another attempt at some kind of arbitrary “record” in a postmodern world lacking authentic frontiers, I might have dismissed or ignored it. But he found me, as he did countless others, purely by accident—at the foot of my street, in a small town on the west bank of the Hudson River, 20 miles north of Midtown Manhattan. His current mission, or so my neighbor told me, was paddling a canoe “from Canada to Florida.” I glanced at the vessel parked near the seawall: it was red, made of plastic, and packed as if for the apocalypse, with army surplus duffels and tarps and trash bags. And then there was the skipper himself: dressed in bib overalls, muddy brown boots, sporting a patchy, rust-colored beard, and laughing with great heaves of an ample gut. He called himself a snowbird—a retiree traveling south at the pace (more or less) of driftwood—and offered a handshake firmer than any I can recall.

It was Labor Day 2014, and I had my two-year-old son with me; I was off the clock. We soon said goodbye and good luck to the traveler, with a million or more questions unanswered, and it wasn’t until the next day, thinking again of my son and of the bedtime story that I’d let slip away, that I determined to chase Conant down. The Hudson where we live is two and a half miles wide—the Tappan Zee, a Dutch word for sea. On foggy mornings and during snowstorms, the distant eastern shore vanishes, and it’s possible, if you have a yearning cast of mind, to imagine that you’ve been marooned. What better illustration of the imaginative possibilities of life alongside a big river than the sudden arrival of a bearded giant from a distant land with a grip that could kill and a laugh as disarming as St. Nick’s?

I drove south to a marina near the George Washington Bridge, beyond which, I felt sure, I’d never find him. He’d be lost—ostensibly forever—in an urban mess of ferries and barges and bulkheads. Inside an office on the dock, I found a clerk and asked if she’d seen a hillbilly in a canoe. Blank stare. I tried elaborating on the nature and scope of Conant’s journey, such as I (barely) understood it, and she finally cut me off: “Some people have too much time on their hands.”

I was actually in a bit of a hurry—on the hook for daycare pickup duty in less than two hours. But I felt reasonably sure, from the clerk’s reaction, that Conant was still en route, so I began hiking quickly upriver, along a rocky trail. Raising a pair of binoculars after a couple of minutes, I spotted something colorful just beyond the nearest jetty, a few hundred yards ahead. It turned out to be a deflated Mylar balloon.

A computer printout in my bag proved that I wasn’t alone in my curiosity. It was from a six-year-old thread on a Texas kayak fishermen’s forum. “I thought your membership would be interested in the adventures of Dick Conant,” one post read. “Mr. Conant is paddling a dark green heavily loaded 16′ canoe along our stretch of the intercoastal waterway. He left Buffalo New York in early July, paddling alone.” Looking at the printout again, as I dithered, I was beset by a feeling of inadequacy. Conant had evidently made it all the way to Texas once before, from considerably north of where I now stood, sweating uncomfortably in 90-degree heat. If nothing else, he wasn’t the kind of person who gives up on a crazy idea.

So I trudged on, and after a mile, looking through the binoculars again, I spied the flash of a yellow paddle blade and a sliver of red bobbing in the ebb tide.

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