As an outsider, it’s easy to see the Delta as a mess. Once a paradise of wildlife, it’s now an ecological disaster and the nexus of the fierce water wars between the state’s wet north and dry south. But there’s much more to the Delta, which was settled beginning with the Gold Rush. The 33 miles between Rio Vista and Sacramento on highway 160 feel like another world. The sky is big and the land stretches out in all directions, bounded only by a 360-degree horizon.