In Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, Huck and his friend Jim, a slave, paddle north in search of Jim’s freedom. Their destination? A tiny Illinois town where the Mississippi and Ohio rivers meet. Cairo, Illinois, remains tiny and pretty unnoticeable to outsiders. But one young man from Indiana would like to change that—and he brought some friends with him with high hopes of “saving Cairo.” Journalist Aaron Lake Smith profiles the individual trying to rejuvenate Cairo in TIME magazine’s latest issue and he tells us more.

The song you hear at the end of this segment is “Up the Punks” by Chris Johnston’s band, Ghost Mice.