PROLOGUE

October 18, 2017, somewhere around Three Rivers, Michigan, USA

Max and I are sitting in a rented pickup truck, with the heating on, in the middle of the fields in the outskirts of Three Rivers. It is six in the morning and the sun has come up, but the sky is completely dark. A storm raged across the landscape and flooded the fields of brownish unharvested corn.

Our six-meter steamboat that we were preparing for our trip down the Mississippi was stored in the warehouse along the main road.

Vast fields as far as the eye can see; just the cornfields and woods. Deer are running across the road, pheasants are flapping their wings in the bushes. If it wasn't for the young oxy junkies at the gas stations, this would have been a true American dream. Still on the frontline, but idyllic.

A huge American flag was hung to dry on a porch next to the cornfield. The person who stretched it over the fence was vanishing in the shade of the trees lining the avenue.

Max and I pulled over in front of the flag. I opened the window and pointed my camera when Max suddenly whispered: "Look out, someone's watching!"

"What are you two doing here?" we heard from the shadow.

"Hello! We were just taking a photo."

"What were you taking a photo of?"

"Err, the flag ... and ... the cornfield."

"Um-hum, ok ... well ... yes, there are still a couple of patriots around here.

Let's go, out of the car."

The silhouette stepped out from the shade. Although it was literally freezing, he wore shorts, slides, a long beard, a hoodie with the hood over his head. He must have been around fifty. Just when I opened the door, a gun briefly flashed from underneath his armpit, and it was no pocket pistol, it was a Magnum, the kind Dirty Harry used to kill crooks. The one that makes big holes.

"What do you think about our president?"

Like I was shot with a gun; I went numb. My gaze was desperately pacing between Max and the bearded stranger.

"Well, I don't know him personally," Max said.

"Heh, smart answer," the man with gun said.

"And what do you think about your president?" Max asked.

"I think he's doing a good job for us," he proudly replied.

Born in socialist Yugoslavia in 1981, I had a romanticized image of the USA burnt into my conscience. I got my hands on the stories of Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer, and Dylan, Young, the Stones and the Zeppelin were blasting from the speakers. With Coca-Cola. With the first comic books featuring Zagor, Commander Mark, and later on Mister No, who all fought for higher causes and victoriously vanished in sunsets. With the Marlboro Man as life's driving force, on the edge of wilderness, answering to no one. With my father wearing a woolen sweater with an American flag, explaining to me this was the symbol of free speech, democracy and equality. With my first movies on videotapes: Robocop, Indiana Jones, Dirty Harry, Rocky, Rambo and Death Wish.

Of course, all these images would eventually change, fade away or take on new nuances, forms and meanings. But when Max and I started thinking about sailing the Mississippi, all these characters came back to life in a whirling cocktail of childhood emotions and euphoria. I could easily compare the feeling to an overly excitable dog overwhelmed with pure happiness, running around in circles with his tail tucked between his legs while his eyes glow with ecstatic joy and he drools so profusely he's spraying his saliva all around the place.

Mississippi!

We wanted to experience and investigate modern American society along the mythical river. We wanted to sail the length of the Mississippi River, from Minneapolis to New Orleans, 2,340 miles. To put it simply, we wanted to internalize the roles of Huckleberry Finn and Hunter S. Thompson.

In 2017, we bought a small home-built steamboat from an online ad. The owner had built it to sail the Mississippi; sadly, he was only able to try it out in the local lake, as he died soon after. The boat was six meters long. The steam engine was working, but we still had to build a roof so we could spend the month-and-a half long trip on it, as we planned. It stored at a warehouse in a small town of Three Rivers, Michigan, for two years, and we visited it every once in a while, as money and time permitted.

We intended to finance our Mississippi adventure by selling moonshine that we would distil in New Orleans, our final destination, from the corn obtained from the local farmers along the entire trip. The upper part of the Mississippi River – Minnesota, Iowa, Illinois, and Missouri – are a part of the so-called Corn Belt, a region that dominates corn production in the United States. Of course, the way corn is farmed defines the entire environmental and social picture of the river. For 2,000 liters of moonshine that we decided to make, we needed two tons of corn. The spirit is not very good, but it is authentic and legendary. Fifty or more percent of alcohol by volume – that's 100 proof or more – directly distilled from corn, no additives or barrel-ageing. The recipe was brought to the States by Scottish and Irish immigrants somewhere in the early 18th century. It only became illegal and highly sought-after during the prohibition, from 1920 to 1933, as it could be made cheaply and fast. It was distilled illicitly, in hiding places in the woods, sheltered by the night. Hence the name, moonshine.

Three Rivers is far from the Mississippi. On our visits to the States, we had driven twice along the entire Great River Road – the roads following the Mississippi River through ten states: Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, Illinois, Missouri, Kentucky, Tennessee, Arkansas, Mississippi and Louisiana. But travelling by car, you only watch the river from the banks. You feel its presence, how wide and long it is, but you do not feel the currents, you do not know what is hiding underneath the muddy surface, what a storm can bring along, how deep it is, how fast those big logs and tree trunks are carried, how the huge cargo ships sail, and what life with the river is like. So, the entire time, we were building our steam boat with a phantasmal idea of the Mississippi, and hoped for the best.