Lower Mississippi

The current in the Lower Mississippi was growing stronger. There are no more dams and the river can run freely. All the little tourist boats suddenly disappeared. Just the towboats with their clouds of dense smoke and strings of barges remained. There was more and more wilderness dotted with small industrial towns.

Just downstream of Cairo, we took a left turn onto the Ohio River. We removed the paddles from the paddle wheel and took on the 50-mile stretch of upstream sailing with our 6-horse-power Yamaha outboard. Our destination was Rocky Point in West Kentucky where our moonshine still manufacturer lived.

A green and a red floating sign indicate the part of the river where the current is the strongest. This is also where the river is the deepest and therefore safe to navigate. We sailed in shallow waters to avoid the current. We zigzagged up the Ohio River from one shallows to the next, hiding behind the corners of bays and crossing the current.

It was a sunny day, but a strong wind picked up from the south, causing ever higher waves. South wind is usually bad news; I am used to this fact from sailing on the Adriatic Sea, and it was no different here. For some time, we were able to turn the situation to our advantage. We opened up the tarp and used it as a sail. I'm not sure how much this really helped our motor, but at least seeing the tarp tight and full of wind gave us some hope. We were running our outboard at full throttle, but we were still moving at a snail's pace.

It was Max's time to take the helm, so I crawled to the bow, put on my mp3 earphones plus the earmuffs to block out the noise, and tried to relax a bit. I was slowly drifting away to sleep when I heard a scream. For a moment, I caught a glimpse of a huge fish, an Asian carp surely weighing 3 to 5 kilos, that jumped from the water and hit Max in the shoulder. The fish nearly knocked Max down. It bounced off of him, fell on the edge of our steamboat and back in to the water. The stench of fish lingered around Max long after that.

"If you see carps jumpin' out of the water, ya better watch out," Bayoo Bob advised us in a marina near St. Louis. "It means you're about to hit a concrete wing dam that's under water. Those carps like to hide behind them". (Concrete wing dams, or wing dikes, are man-made barriers extending partway into the river to reduce sediment accumulation, but can often be underwater and difficult to see.)

RASP and RRRRRRRRRR, and HRSK again. Our motor jumped up and barely hung on to its bracket. The whole steamboat shuddered. The lower part of the left rudder broke off and we saw it floating with the current. As it turned out, that Asian carp really was a harbinger of hazard. Bayoo Bob was right, we hit an underwater concrete wing dam. We lifted the motor from the water and found that of the three propeller blades, only two were left and one of them was bent. We tried restarting it. It worked, but its sound and the way it was shaking were not good signs. The steamboat and the motor literally shivered. We managed to pick up the part of the rudder that had broken off. Luckily, it broke at the same spot as in Muscatine. We sailed further 20 miles upstream with one half of our motor, until we reached the first public port where we could safely dock our boat.

Of course, we weren't able to buy a spare propeller for a 6-HP motor anywhere in Kentucky. Around here, even the backup motors have at least a hundred horse powers. The propeller arrived three days later from Amazon.

Soldier of Fortune

"Pride is a sin," said our host and pushed the tip of his tongue through the gaping hole where his front teeth used to be.

"I'm not getting new ones," he said. "I cast away my pride."

"I don't cut my hair any more, either."

He wore his long blonde hair in a braid that rested on his back. His hands were full of tattoos, with a chainsaw taking most of his right forearm. He said he felled trees.

Max and I happened upon him a day earlier in the town of Paducah where we stopped after the ordeal with the broken propeller. We were standing at the bar when he suddenly turned to us and said his girlfriend wanted to buy us a whiskey. After a short conversation, he also paid for our dinner and all of our drinks, and invited us over to his place for dinner the next evening.

A flashing GPS point marked the spot in the middle of nowhere. I got the address in a Facebook message by his girlfriend, along with a note: "Bear is expecting you at seven," and "Bear has two wives, I hope this doesn't bother you."

We took our film crew's car and drove up to his house. The house was secluded. There were two large pickup trucks on the parking lot and woods behind it. Children were playing on the porch and two young long-haired women stood at the door, one of them blonde, the other one brunette, in denim hot pants. I recognized the brunette from the bar from the day earlier. She waved to us and invited us in.

"Bear will see you in his office."

From the porch, we went through a large living room, a kitchen, and down the hall to the door to Bear's office. Behind the door, Bear sat at a large desk that split the room in half. On his right was a large black safe; on his left, there were a grenade launcher leaned against the wall and a sniper rifle; on the desk, there were two Glocks and a computer, and a large screen on the wall displayed live reports from the cryptocurrency market. The first thing he asked us when we entered was whether we would like to try out the weapons. There was a shooting range in the woods behind the house. Max and I stayed with him in the office, while faces of guys from the film crew broke out into a big grin. Soon the rhythm of the Black Sabbath was punctuated with gunshots.

He sat us down. On two chairs on the other side of the desk, opposite him. Like we were being interrogated. I don't know how and why he picked us to share his entire life story with, but his tales were like an insane movie script. The information he put out at that desk was borderline fiction, but there was no room for lies in Bear's office.

He was a mercenary. He fought in Iraq as a part of the Blackwater private military company, and later in Ukraine. Iraq was good money; he went to Ukraine because of his friends. He opened the black safe and threw a diplomatic passport on the desk. He has 23 children across the entire United States. Most of them happened while he was cruising North America as a member of the Hells Angels. He rode a large black Harley with waving flames at the front; he showed us a photo on his cell phone. Four of his children live with him, all of them boys. He looked very proud when he talked about his kids, as the youngest of them, still in diapers, crawled around. We drank whiskey and smoked Marlboro Reds. First an 800-dollar bottle, followed by a 1,200-dollar one. Bear again opened the black safe and took out a rare edition of Milton's Paradise Lost with illustrations by Gustave Doré. Latin quotes kept coming out of his mouth, one after the other. He took off his shirt and showed us a tattoo of skeleton hands holding his shoulders. "It's to keep me down to earth," he said. There were scars on both of his arms. "Both of them were torn off, they sewed them back on."

Despite our differing views on the issues of race, machismo, use of weapons ..., there was something about this enfant terrible of the American dream, walking hand in hand with death, that I found attractive.

"Who are you? Why did you say Ursus? How did you know this was my secret name in Ukraine? Who sent you?" he showered me with questions as he grabbed my shirt and pulled me across the desk with one arm. "I didn't, err, say any of that," I somehow mumbled and watched whether his other hand would reach for the Glock. It didn't, he let go of me. "Sorry, sometimes I get carried away. The shit I've seen there has left its wounds."

He filled our glasses for another toast.

He opened the black safe again and now it was time for presents. Bear presented us all with a pack of Cambodian banknotes, a military meal ready to eat, and an old revolver for Max and me – from a general to captains.

The right to keep and bear arms is protected by the Second Amendment to the United States Constitution. The Second Amendment was based partially on the right to keep and bear arms in English common law and was influenced by the English Bill of Rights of 1689. Sir William Blackstone described this right as an auxiliary right, supporting the natural rights of self-defense and resistance to oppression, and the civic duty to act in concert in defense of the state. Fugitives, those convicted of a felony with a sentence exceeding 1 year, past or present, and those who were involuntarily admitted to a mental facility are prohibited from purchasing a firearm; unless rights restored.

(Wikipedia, Second Amendment to the United States Constitution)

Lady in Red

It was already dark when we returned to the driveway in front of the Airbnb where we stayed with our film crew while we waited for the spare propeller delivery.

"Would you like a glass of ice tea, young man?" a voice from the dark spoke to me. It was our landlady. Everyone else had gone into the house. The lady was a retired librarian in her seventies. Widowed, she lived alone on the farm with two white horses. She sat me down on a porch swing and brought me tea. We sat together on the swing, two strangers in a night so dark we could only hear our voices. Sometimes you need a stranger to talk about things you wouldn't share even with the people closest to you.

Her only son is dead. Murdered in a robbery. Killed by muggers he had never met before. "The good guys always win in the end," she kept repeating about her son. "I'm against American policy on guns," she said. "Many of my neighbours disagree with me. When my son was killed, I lay down in my bed thinking about how I could hurt the strangers that murdered him, or whom to hire to do that." She paused briefly. "I wanted them to suffer. And then ..., at the court, I looked in their empty eyes. I'll tell you, I believe there is something good in all of us. A few days after my son's death, my father gave me a hug. He was old, but he was a great man. It wasn't normal for him to show emotions. Through my tears, I heard him say: 'We must do everything we can to forgive these people.'"

We spoke of many things that night on the porch swing. We slowly rocked the swing with our feet, sometimes her, sometimes me. We talked about love, fear, resistance, faith, race and forgiveness. Although the KKK gathering point just around the corner from her house was only a fading memory, racial issues were far from being resolved or forgotten.

She wanted to see our steamboat before Max and I set off. As she asked to see the boat, her eyes were glowing like the eyes of a child. Max and I left very early. She was still asleep and we did not want to wake her up. When we sailed from the Ohio River back onto the

Mississippi, I turned towards Cairo and saw her on the beach. She was sitting on the scenic overlook where the Ohio empties into the Mississippi, and waved to us with her big red hat.