39th of a series

“Most places don’t ever see people like this. Alaska gets a lot of them, I think. And we in the river towns get them, too.”

- McCullum (in Riverman: An American Odyssey)

Perhaps the two most memorable characters (other than Huck and Jim) – and certainly the most grotesque – in Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn are the Duke and the Dauphin, two grifters who travel up and down the Mississippi swindling the residents of the small river towns, often leaving one step ahead of the sheriff or tarred and feathered on a rail. Both Ernest Hemingway and H.L. Mencken considered Twain’s novel a tour de force of American letters. “All modern American literature,” wrote Hemingway, “comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.” It is, said Mencken, “one of the great masterpieces of the world.

It's also one of the most consistently banned. A month after its publication in February 1885 librarians in Concord, Mass., deemed it “trash . . . suitable only for the slums.” It has been condemned ever since, from the left as racist, from the right for its intimate portrait of a while boy and a black slave, and from all sides for its language.

It is also the story of a river and the people who live on its banks – reminiscent, really, of John Kirkpatrick’s reflection in Southeast Asia that “all aspects of life revolve around the Mekong.”

So too do all kinds of people wash up in river towns.

Dick Conant spent more than 20 years paddling alone in his overstuffed red canoe, covering thousands of miles of America’s rivers. An eccentric, a loner, a pack rat, Conant affected the lives of thousands of people in river towns, large and small. He was open to everyone and to everything, awed equally by the wonders of nature and those of his fellow man. He had no agenda. He just paddled and stopped and talked. For a loner, he was the most outgoing man you will ever meet. He remembered, it seems, everyone he met, and he chronicled them in his copious journals. And everyone – everyone – remembered him.

He met a New Yorker writer named Ben McGrath in a chance encounter in a small town on the Hudson River, and when Conant’s red canoe was discovered upended in North Carolina and its occupant missing, McGrath set out to recapture Conant’s life, by tracing his journeys and contacting as many as possible of the people whose paths he had crossed and whose lives he had affected.

The result is Riverman: an American Odyssey, a book that offers us an America quite different from Twain’s or Mencken’s. In town after small town we encounter, not Twain’s swindlers nor Mencken’s “booboisie,” but people as open, generous, and curious as Conant himself. And while they do not travel America’s byways in a canoe, each is an individual and, yes, an eccentric in his or her own way. It’s an America, much of it downstream and backwater, that we don’t hear much about these days, a country where people welcome strangers and celebrate differences.

I like to think of rivers as making those places possible, of rivers as connectors not dividers, of rivers as waterways that transport people and goods and ideas to distant shores, of rivers as taking us on journeys, not into the heart of darkness, but into the light.