Now, where Willem came from, a Rhine was sort of a big deal. A third of the Netherlands’ economy passed up and down one single Rhine. They had, in effect, built a whole country around it. Here, though, people were gunning their pickup trucks over a causeway bestriding two and a half Rhines just as a temporary diversion of a seven-Rhine river over yonder . It was one of those insane statistics about the scale of America that had once made the United States seem like an omnipotent hyperpower and now made it seem like a beached whale.