Follow the Money

What do you do if you want to get underneath the skin of a country – to understand its people and feel its heartbeat? You can follow the rest of the tourists, or you can take the advice of Watergate reporter Bob Woodward’s source, Deep Throat, and ‘follow the money’.Steve Boggan did just that by setting free a ten-dollar bill and accompanying it on an epic journey for thirty days and thirty nights across 3,300 miles armed only with a sense of humour and a small, and increasingly grubby, set of clothes. As he cuts crops with farmers in Kansas, pursues a repo woman from Colorado, gets wasted with a blues band in Arkansas and hangs out at a quarterback’s mansion in St Louis, Boggan enters the lives of ordinary (and extraordinary) people as they receive – and pass on – the bill.

Add to that the missionaries from Missouri, the Amish in Michigan, the banker from Chicago and the deer hunters from Detroit, and what emerges is a chaotic, affectionate and funny portrait of a modern-day America that tourists rare.