Mississippi pioneered the use of tax breaks and incentives to lure Northern industry south. Most of the South followed suit, trading tax breaks, land and cash for jobs. North Carolina was a holdout until the late 1990s.

The headlines on two consecutive days said it all: Dell Computer closing shop and laying off over 900 workers and Cree Inc. adding almost 600 jobs. The difference: Dell - headquartered in Texas - was lured to North Carolina with the promise of over $300 million in incentives, while Cree - a homegrown business spun out of N.C. State University technology - requested no state incentives (although in fairness Cree did get an incentive a few years back to build an expansion plant).

When are we going to halt public expenditures on the "buffalo hunt" for footloose industry and instead focus our resources and efforts on the sector that produces by far most of the jobs - existing industry and homegrown business?

Historic Kentucky Lake Water sluicing through Kentucky Dam c. 1944, "like beer froth through a harmonica," the only beerlike substance to be found in the vicinity.

It’s early fall and I’m on the banks of the Laramie River for the annual rubber duck race down a short stretch of the river through town. Hundreds of rubber ducks are set loose to float a course down the stream. Quaking yellow aspen leaves dot the slow moving, glacier-cold water. Laramie locals turn out to see which duck will bust out of the pack, avoid the eddies and snags, and be netted out by a Rotarian and declared the winner. The winning duck wasn’t mine. But watching that flotilla got me considering the Laramie River, and how little chance a rubber duck or anything else has of floating from headwaters to mouth without getting trapped by a dam.

The Laramie eventually flows into the Platte, which flows into the Missouri then in to the Mississippi, one of the most heavily controlled rivers in the country.

I wanted to understand more clearly how dams work and to gain insight on whether hydroelectric power was worth the environmental drawbacks of damage to fish and drowning of canyons. That’s why I set out for Kentucky Lake, formed by the last dam on the TVA system before the Tennessee joins the Ohio and they flow on in to the Big River. But as the travel writer Pico Iyer reminds us, we travel not to get answers, but to ask better questions.