The Big River is the jugular vein of America’s heart, carrying the blood sweat and tears of “my fellow Americans” through the harbors and swamp-lands of the country’s hardest working and most unsung populations. 10 states are touched by it directly; 32 are drained by it. Drive up and down its winding banks and you’ll see its waters oscillate between home and highway.

The commanding gravity of ancient waterway helped make its valley an early adopter of a globalist view now in vogue — that cities are the true centers of life not states. Ask people from West Memphis AR, Kansas City KS, and East St. Louis, IL if they find the River to be the edge or the center, and you’ll get the same answer.

The River spans north and south, and in doing so has made itself the scenic route for ethnocultural divisions that linger on its well-fed soils; north of the Mason-Dixon line, metal and concrete temper its waters to the delight of breweries and antique economies dotting the borders of Minnesota, Wisconsin, Iowa, and Illinois. Plodding along south, its history as an escape route for American slaves and disenfranchised working class whites has created social oases among the Ozarks and bayous and created refuge for working Americans’ greatest artistic exports in cities like Memphis TN and New Orleans LA. The wealth the river economy helped create has long been squirreled away in distant estates, leaving the flattened river valley to become overgrown with Dollar Generals and veterans’ clubs.