Then Willem pointed his truck toward New Orleans. He passed up an opportunity to jump on an interstate, preferring an old two-laner. The landscape was flat by American standards, but not by Dutch. The usual American roadside scene of convenience stores, mobile home parks, and equipment depots interspersed with wooded areas. On the map it looked like a sponge, with water coming practically up to the road, but if you didn’t know that, it would just look like normal dry land, exuberantly green, with a lot of trees. His practiced eye noted that the bed of the road was elevated a couple of feet above the surrounding earth.