Dispatches from Pluto: Lost and Found in the Mississippi Delta

by Richard Grant

The sky yawned open and the horizons leapt out. The light turned golden and radiant, pouring down on shimmering fields of cotton and corn and soybeans. The land was as flat as the ocean, and as I drove across it, I came across primordial interruptions in the empire of modern agriculture: remnant swamps of cypress and tupelo gum, stretches of thick jungly woods. It was also a landscape of ruins. Abandoned barns and shacks were being swallowed whole by lush and monstrous growths of Virginia creeper and trumpet vines. Weeds fractured the forecourt of an old gas station with the pumps standing there like tombstones and a loose dog trotting past with his ribs showing. I drove past rivers, creeks, and bayous, all brimful with the same muddy brown water, kept back from the croplands by an elaborate system of levees, pumps, sluice gates, and drainage ditches.