CNN: Wenceslaus Billiot, an 89-year-old with suede-soft eyes and a bayou-French accent, asked me to follow him onto the second-story balcony of his stork-legged house here in the southern Louisiana marshland.
He held up a broom made of dried palmetto leaves and pointed way off into the distance. See that tiny water tower? he asked. The tower was on the horizon -- so distant that it appeared to be only about as tall as my pen was wide. Aside from a few tufts of marsh between us and the tower, there...