KELBY OUCHLEY CUT THE ENGINE ON HIS four-wheel drive. Then he and his brother stepped down onto the massive levee in northeast Louisiana and gazed out at The Hole in the World. That was the term Kelby and Keith Ouchley had been using for the scene that stretched before them—a 25-square-mile expanse of low, flat land dotted with muddy sloughs and lakes. For centuries, a bottomland hardwood forest had sprung from this place, but beginning in 1969, local farmers and businessmen had cleared just about all of it, building a 17-mile'long, C-shaped levee and a system of ditches, pumps and pipes in an effort to keep the Ouachita River and its floodwaters off what became known as Mollicy Farms.
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