"Basically, you never come home. You will never come home."
Eugene Tiny Junior, inmate at the Angola

Angola, the largest maximum-security prison in the United States, was built in 1901 on the site of a former cotton plantation in the State of Louisiana. It is named after the African country from which most of the slaves working on the plantation were brought. Through time, it has been nicknamed Alcatraz of the South, The Angola Plantation, and The Farm. Through a century of operation, Angola has built a reputation of the most dangerous and bloodiest prison in the USA. Its inmates were mostly convicted of murder, rape, and armed robbery, and it has the most inmates serving life sentences. Death penalty is legal in Louisiana, and the method of execution is lethal injection.

Max and I visited the Angola to see the Prison Rodeo. People we met along the Atchafalaya described and advertised the event as modern gladiator games, with blood and presence of death drawing large crowds of visitors. Six seconds of freedom – this is the time an individual is allotted to ride a wild bull or horse – is a privilege that any prisoner can earn with good behaviour. To keep the inmates focused, the Rodeo takes place twice a year, in April and in October. The inmates do not practice; their first and only contact with the animal is at the stadium. They say they only train with weights. Most of them apply just to experience the six seconds of freedom. For someone serving a life sentence, this is a rare moment that affords a sense of humanity, unpredictability, responsibility and control over one's life. Needless to say, the rodeo is also a source of income, as it pays better than the usual hourly rate of 0.04 to 1 dollar for prisoner's labour. The new rodeo stadium has a capacity of 8 to 12 thousand.

There is only one entrance and one exit. Visitors are allowed to carry a cell phone; everything else is forbidden. The area accessible to the visitors includes three parts: the stadium, the food court, and the hobbycraft fair where inmates can sell their works. The prisoners are behind fences, watching the fair from cages. The voyeurism works both ways, but both the visitors and the prisoners are so intensely apathetic that at least the part in front of the stadium feels like you are at a Walmart.

When the audience, stocked with hot and cold snacks, pop-corn and drinks, is seated, the venue is flooded by the screeching voice of the official announcer donning a wide-brimmed cowboy hat, a content oval face, and a southern accent: »Goooood afternoooon laaadies and gentlemeeen! Weeeeelcome to Angoooola Prison Rodeooooo!"

In terms of structure, the Prison Rodeo is similar to the regular rodeo. Its 11 events, including Grand Entry, Bust Out, Bareback Riding, Wild Horse Race, Barrel Racing, Bull-Dogging, Chariot Race (or Buddy Pick-Up), Wild Cow Milking, Bull Riding, Convict Poker, and Guts & Glory, make for a blend of entertainment and bloody spectacle.

The difference between this and the regular rodeo is the time a rider is required to spend in the arena: it is six seconds here, and eight seconds in the real rodeo. The animals are the same: broncos and specially bred bucking bulls. Since the prisoners do not have an opportunity to train for the rodeo and are only in contact with the animals at the arena, their lack of skill and poor riding form often evoke gales of laughter. They try to stay mounted or to subdue the animals using nothing but their own brute force. An ambulance and medical staff are on standby the entire time near the area with the inmates, and every once in a while they cart off a more or less bloody, broken and damaged body wearing a shirt with broad white and black stripes, designed specially for the event.

A black man in the striped shirt clung to the top of the iron bucking chute and stared down at the wild bronc kept still only by the confines of the chute and the rope that pressed its head to its body. Suddenly, there was a loud whistle. The gate of the chute opened, the horse jumped particularly fiercely as it felt the rider's weight on its back. Its strong neck extended, the rope was gone, the mane swung around, and foam sprayed from its mouth. It leaped forward, bucked high, the rider swayed, but did not fall. The crowd cheered them on loudly. The animal bucked to the left, forward and then back. The tight muscles of both intertwined bodies revealed the effort and the desire for submission and freedom. In a cloud of dry sand, the rider's body hit the ground. His foot was caught in the rope that hung form the horse. The bronco, liberated of the weight on its back, set off on a wild victory lap around the arena, dragging behind the body of the rider whose head kept banging against the iron fence posts, leaving behind a bloody trail.

We returned to the shelter of the river. We hid in the swamps, deep in the shade of the soft swamp willows, chugged down a bottle of Bulleit, and pretended that reality did not exist. We still had several dozen miles to go, and as much as we wanted to reach New Orleans as soon as possible, we also wanted to stay on the river. After all our encounters, the good memories only started to surface at that moment. We toasted to Alexandria and the merry company that opened the door to their home for us; the smile of the lady in Hamburg, Illinois, who woke us up with fragrant coffee and ham and eggs; Cowboy Jim, Tammy, Poor Boy Bear, Scooter, Mark Bidelman, married couple Sandra and Jim, Bayou Bob, Shannon, Wayne, Nicholas, Maria, Real Bob, Chloe and all with whom we shared our adventures along the way. Regardless of any differences in our religious or political beliefs, we were welcome almost everywhere on the river. The Atchafalaya slowly carried us south and floated our memories to the surface.

"If you are headed towards Nola, go all the way down the Atchafalaya, then turn left at Morgan City to the Intracoastal," was the advice we got from Jim who had sailed the Mississippi with his wife on a small yacht several times.

We spent another night in Morgan City. We went to the only place that was open and shared the bar with locals – two elderly women who relentlessly wanted to lure us to their camp and kept paying our drinks and lustfully winked at us, and their companion. Whispering in my ear, he asked me when was the last time I'd seen "the big one". He put his foot on a chair and started to slowly raise the leg of his shorts – to reveal a huge tattoo stretching from his groin to his knee: BIG ONE.

Then, he shouted: "I want to smell some ass!" He fell to his knees and stuck his nose between the butt cheeks of a shorts-wearing toothless local crack addict who had just entered the bar, and followed her to the toilet like that.

The Intracoastal Waterway consists of natural inlets, saltwater rivers, bays, sounds and artificial canals. This inland waterway was built over the 19^th and the first half of the 20^th century to allow vessels to sail along the Atlantic and Gulf of Mexico coasts of the United States while avoiding the hazards of the open sea. It runs in straight lines with a few sharp bends, directly to New Orleans.

We were still sailing, now silent, with all the noise outside, both absorbed in our thoughts. We had sailed the Mississippi, and it was only in this moment that I realized it.

We entered New Orleans through Harvey Canal Number One.