They sat there on the gallery and chatted for about half an hour. It wasn’t a life-changing conversation for either of them, just a pleasant enough diversion. Willem dutifully told his cover story: going to check on Dad in the wake of the near miss by the hurricane, wanted to see the sights relevant to climate change. Margaret brought him up to speed. "We have something y’all don’t," she said, where "we" meant the Mississippi Delta and "y’all" meant the Netherlands. "The river is an unstoppable land-building machine, if we just let it do its work. We can’t switch it off, just point it in different directions. When y’all want to build land, y’all have to lug the sand to where it’s needed, and lay it down. Pros and cons: you get nothing for free—"