The old, weird America

A book that explores our backwaters, plus my weekly shareables: new rules in baseball, an old hotel in New York, and the Boston Marathon's favorite dog

The music writer Greil Marcus coined the phrase “the old, weird America” to refer to a compilation of early folk, blues and jazz recordings called ANTHOLOGY OF AMERICAN FOLK MUSIC. It has come to mean any of the people that don’t seem to exist anymore in our smoothed-out and homogenized country—carnies and grifters and ham radio listeners and people working on secret projects in the shed out back.

I am here to tell you that the old, weird America still exists, because I have just finished a book about it and it is one of the most quietly powerful books I’ve read in a very long time.

RIVERMAN, by Ben McGrath of the New Yorker, centers on Dick Conant, who feels more like a fictional character than a real person. Conant is paddling from Canada to Florida in an overstuffed canoe when he happens to come through the little town on the Hudson River where McGrath lives. Conant wears ratty overalls and eats pickled hot dogs for breakfast, but he’s brimming with stories from decades of river trips up and down America. McGrath writes a story about him. A few months later, Conant’s canoe is found washed up in the Albemarle Sound in North Carolina. Conant is nowhere to be found. But McGrath gets ahold of Conant’s detailed journals and sets out to find out if the stories the riverman told were true.

They were.

Conant (and later McGrath) meet a guy in Mississippi who constructed a giant contraption of ladders and levers to show how he thinks the pyramids were built. They run across the barflies in Missouri that include a former Green Beret with a pit bull named Thor. They find the skipper of a solar-powered boat who calls his crew the Pirates of the Sun.

After a while it felt like I would meet some new and amazing human being every time I turned the page. Almost none of them live what most of us would think of as normal lives. But they bring color and texture to this country in a way that ten thousand Targets never could.

For me the book became less about Conant and more about the world he revealed. It’s weird but it’s not old. It’s hard living but (mostly) kind. Time and time again, McGrath finds people who met Conant for just a brief moment but wondered about him for years afterward. He was a resident of the America most of us never see. RIVERMAN ended up being deeply moving in ways that didn’t hit me until I was almost done with it. More than anything, it made me want to grab a map and explore.

10 things I wanted to share this week:

1. My earlier newsletter this week was on Dilbert and the man who made him.

2. This week’s episode of SOUTHBOUND features Josh Dawsey, one of DC’s top reporters but an SC boy at heart. We talk about everything from Donald Trump calling him a “lowlife” to his teenage desire to be a baseball umpire.

3. My weekly for WFAE was on Jimmy Carter, Southern man.

4. I spent a little time this week sprucing up my website, tommytomlinson.com. I switched to a cleaner theme and cleared out some deadwood. If you’re new to my work and want to read some of my older stuff, the Archives page there is a great place to start.

5. DOG NEWS: While I work on my book, I’m devoting this slot to dog stories. This week: RIP Spencer, the Boston Marathon’s official dog.

6. Dan Barry—one of America’s best newspaper writers—marks the last days of the Hotel Pennsylvania, a longtime NYC landmark. (There’s a dog connection, too: For years, the Pennsylvania was one of the official hotels of the Westminster Dog Show.)

7. If you want to catch up on all the rule changes for the upcoming baseball season, my bud Joe Posnanski has you covered.

8. Austin Kleon on Leonard Cohen on the tyranny of perfectionism.

9. The funniest thing I saw this week was Hasan Minhaj and Ronny Chieng roasting each other on THE DAILY SHOW. Go to 6:45 in this clip:
   

   10. The legendary Doc Watson would have turned 100 today. I could pick at least that many brilliant songs he recorded. Here’s my favorite, “Summertime.”

   
   

   
   See y’all next week, everybody.