Rolling Down the River

Ever since I was a kid in New Orleans, I've felt the lure of the Mississippi. I played on its levees, fell asleep to the mournful signals of the boats passing Algiers Point, spent summers working on derrick barges and tugboats, and even proposed to my wife on its banks. So I've often mused about taking a boat down this historic main artery of America.

This spring I got that opportunity. Along with a rotating crew of two dozen TIME writers and reporters, I took a two-week trip down the river on the Grampa Woo III, a delightful chartered boat with a very flexible captain, Dana Kollars, who was able to dock or anchor to suit our reporting needs. We made 40 or so stops along the way, some planned and others serendipitous, listening to the issues people were discussing and searching for stories that showed how our nation is coping at the start of a new century. Then we dispatched reporters up and down the river to produce the pieces in this issue.

Our team was led by Nation editor Priscilla Painton, who edited the package, and our aptly named Special Projects editor Barrett Seaman, a former Navy man, who coordinated logistics and kept us in line. Other key crew members included photographer Diana Walker; Nancy Gibbs, who wrote the overview Essay; and our Midwest bureau chief Ron Stodghill and Southern bureau chief Timothy Roche, who coordinated the task of scouting out stories.

This is the second such journey we've made. Three years ago, we took a bus across the center of the country along old Route 50, which resulted in a similar special issue. One reason for these trips is that those of us in the national media spend a lot of time listening to issues being debated at distant summits and congressional hearings but not enough time listening to discussions that occur at local PTA and school board meetings, at Rotary and Kiwanis clubs, at coffee shops where store owners congregate on slow Tuesday mornings.

On our Route 50 trip, we saw how the digital economy was creating a new generation of pioneers, who were setting up enterprises wherever they wanted. But we also noticed, in places where old family-run shops and cafes on Main Street had given way to big-box stores and chain restaurants in megamalls, a yearning for a lost sense of community.

The foremost thing we discovered along the Mississippi was an even stronger yearning for a restored sense of community--perhaps because people who live by a river, just like trees planted by one, tend to be more rooted. Cairo, Ill., was a typical stop. The two-block heart of Main Street there looks like an abandoned movie set. The old brick buildings are crumbling. Only a beauty shop and a soup kitchen show any life. Once a stop on the Underground Railway for slaves (Mark Twain's Jim was hoping to head north from there), it was ripped by racial protests in the 1960s and '70s and has never fully recovered. But Main Street was recently repaved with bricks and fake trolley tracks at a cost of $1.5 million (all from federal and state grants), and the biracial city council hopes to turn Cairo into a tourist destination by renting out stores for $1 a year to businesses that will attract weekend visitors. At a barbecue featuring grilled bologna as well as tasty smoked ribs, civic leaders talked to us about their divergent views on crime, school vouchers, unemployment, race, gambling casinos and their city's history.