CANOE DROPOUT

With water on the brain, a recent student chucks his studies and bolts campus via the Connecticut River. Sound familiar?

Another april in new england. Snow had turned to rain and then mud. There was nothing green, anywhere. The Connecticut River flowed swiftly beneath the Ledyard Bridge, and one student surrendered to its pull. His whole life had pointed him toward Hanover: the first-class education it offered, the secure and productive future it promised. He'd had a choice between Dartmouth and Stanford, and since he loved the outdoors, it was a no-brainer.

His name was Carl Strom '05, and he had studied with his class for seven months and 20-odd days. For this privilege his parents had paid well over $20,000 in tuition alone. Even he wasn't sure that he'd gotten their money's worth. "I was bored and restless," Strom says now. "And I was not happy at Dartmouth. The river was right there. I got in the canoe and took off."

He packed the 15-foot craft with supplies, including a tarp, a large water jug and four big metal buckets, two filled with groceries and two with his sleeping bag and clothes. Somehow, the boat still had room for an old bicycle he'd found on campus.

He walked back up the hill, vacuumed out his dorm room, Hinman No.306.Then he returned to the river and paddled out into the current, becoming only the second Dartmouth student known to have dropped out via canoe. On that late April day in 2002, he wrote in his journal: "I was defiance...I decided not to sell my soul for the cheap prestige of a Dartmouth degree."

Strom wasn't sure of his destination, only his direction, which was downstream, toward the sea. He doubted if he'd stop there. He went with a friend, Sean Mann 'O5, who accompanied him as far as Brattleboro, Vermont, about 65 miles away if three days, in river time. From there Mann took a bus back to school and classes and exams and dorms. Strom continued on.

"He told us what he was going to do," says his mother, Jennifer Strom, from the family home in Topanga Canyon, near Los Angeles. "We didn't know how far he was going to go."

Strom reached Hartford, Connecticut, after about a week but, unlike Ledyard, he kept going. Two or three days later the river delivered him into Long Island Sound, and he pulled the canoe up onto the beach in Old Saybrook, Connecticut.

Strom was sitting there on the sand, figuring out what to do next, when he met a local carpenter. The carpenter invited Strom to stay with family while the would-be adventurer modified his craft to make it more seaworthy. He installed leeboards for stability and a mast with a blue, plastic tarp so he could sail on open water. He left after about a week and headed east, along the Connecticut coast.

Long Island Sound led to the Cape Cod Canal; by early June Strom had reached the Gulf of Maine, with its strong winds and Atlantic tides. When he reached Portland, Maine, he turned inland, up the frisky Penobscot River. Strom traveled upstream now, paddling when the current was slow, but it was better to push on the bottom with a 12-foot aluminum pole.

Everywhere he went, people asked the same question: Was he writing a book? No, he was...exploring. For an explorer, the whole world becomes new again. "It's crazy to let your son do something this," says his mother, "but he's always been that kind of guy. For him it made sense."

Of course, Strom met plenty of people: They invited him to their homes, gave him food, wrote reassuring postcards to his parents. In Quebec he convinced a guy in a pickup truck to give him a ride over into the St. Lawrence River watershed, a trip of about 20 miles. In Quebec City he bought a motor to speed his progress. Following the maze of rivers, he made his way into Lake Huron, then Lake Superior, ending up by Labor Day at the Brule River in Wisconsin, which he'd paddled with his family since he was an infant. In a sense, he'd come home.

From there the great Mississippi beckoned. As it bore him slowly south, he felt himself relax, at last. It took him until late October to reach New Orleans, where he got a job working on a tugboat. He stayed there for more than a year.

Up in Hanover (where he remained, technically, on "leave") his classmates still talked about him as they marched toward graduation.

"I don't know too much about John Ledyard," Strom tells me over the phone from California, where he's living with his parents, taking classes at Santa Monica College. "I feel like I'm doing things more on my own initiative," he says.

Of course he'd seen the Ledyard plaque, there beside the Ledyard Canoe Club, in Hanover. And he did happen to leave on almost the exact date when Ledyard dropped out of Dartmouth, exactly 229 years earlier. But Ledyard, Ledyard...Strom draws blanks.

Strom thinks for a minute, and it comes: "Didn't he die in Africa?"

River of Ho Return Strom poles his way up a tributary of the Connecticut on his first day out. More recently, he spent last summer as a river guide in California.