Barge is an portrait of the machinery of American ambitions and the backbone of the national economy. On board, dry land's misfits find purpose twenty-eight days at a time as the steady hands of an industrial ecosystem teeming with boats and a few million tons of cargo moved each year: a deckhand following his father into the family business, a former convict hoping to become First Mate, and a veteran engineer in no hurry to retire, all on the ancient waterway of the Mississippi.