MARIAH AND I had been in the Delta for nearly a year, and we still didn’t feel like we understood the place well. It spread out so wide and sank down so deep through the tangled generations and fossilized family trees. It was a feudal relic. It was a showcase for modern industrial agriculture. It was a foretaste of a dystopian social future, when machines free capital from the burden of labor. Sometimes it made us want to weep and scream, and return to the familiar. Sometimes we felt ruined—rurnt, as they say—for anywhere else.
