W. Hodding Carter

Rockport, Maine, with his wife and three daughters to meet the newest member of the Carter family, their adopted manatee Brutus. (It's a little hard to explain; you'll understand when you read the story.) Unfortunately, at first Brutus refused to show his corpulent face, and Carter had to contend with a near mutiny from the rest of the frustrated family. But then Carter's no stranger to fools' errands. You might even say he's made a career of them.

"The more outlandish the idea, the happier I am imagining doing it," says the Mississippi native. "I guess I crave getting in over my head, diving into something I know nothing about, only to come up smelling like, well, nothing too sweet."

Eight years ago, Carter quit his job as a staff writer for M magazine to retrace Lewis and Clark's journey from St. Louis to the mouth of the Columbia River by motorized raft and rental car, an adventure that became the subject of his 1994 travelogue, Westward Whoa. This month, Ballantine will publish A Viking Voyage, an account of his semi-successful 1,900-mile odyssey in a Viking ship along Leif Eriksson's 11th-century route from Greenland to Newfoundland. But no expedition he'd undertaken was quite as ridiculous as desperately seeking Brutus.

"Other marine mammals get enough attention because they are sleek or beautiful or powerful,"says Carter. "I like the idea of championing manatees because they're slow and dumb. Like humans, right?"

While in Florida, however, Carter witnessed the myriad ways that manatees are threatened, and discovered that even ardent affection can prove deadly. These loveable oafs, he says, are often chased into potentially fatal cold water by tourists eager to swim with them. "In 20 years, if Florida has its way, manatees will be lip-synching The Little Mermaid and not a single wild manatee will be left," Carter says. "Except maybe for Brutus."