VOYAGING ON THE LEVEE, I'm learning, is a good way to announce to the locals that you're either up to something or a kind of despicable idiot. Outside a Shell refinery, a large, unamused woman with shoulders that would unnerve a longshoreman steps from a little steel booth camouflaged amid an intestine of ductwork, whips out a stout-handled broom, and begins violently whisking her threshold in an attitude of surveillant hostility, her knuckles standing out like walnuts. As I pedal briskly away from her, a guy astride a stalled four-wheeler, drinking beer next to a dumpster on the river road, watches my progress through a bend in the river with a look of squinting disbelief. A couple of miles past the refinery, I take a water break within sight of a trailer park, where two truant teenagers are watching a third turn lazy donuts on his bike. Their heads pan toward me for an appraising moment, so I raise a friendly hand to the fellow cyclist. He ponders the gesture for a moment, then flips me the bird.

Though today marks my return to the levee, I saw New Orleans a few days ago, on August 29, when I succumbed, along with a bristling horde of national media, to the arbitrary pretext that 365 days had passed since Hurricane Katrina blew through.

I had telephoned Mayor Ray Nagin's office to see if there were any important press gaggles I ought to go stand on the periphery of, but in the usual New Orleans style, the woman I'd talked to had neglected to return my calls. So I went down to St. Bernard Parish and the Lower Ninth Ward to stare dumbly at the American Pompeii. In St. Bernard, I drove past numbing acres of ranch homes with lines of lake silt up to their gables and chest-high jungles of weeds in their yards, bare lots where the homes had been scraped off, and the gutted shells of mold-splotched cottages with hopeless FOR SALE signs out front. I passed a burger joint that looked like a giant hand had crumpled it; the ghosts of drugstores, payday-loan places, and big-box husks; and a sad billboard ad for cheap wine that read REVIVE, RENEW, RIUNITE. The scene got me thinking about what comparatively cheerful, handsome places the local cemeteries are.

I drove back to town through the Lower Ninth, where the tsunami surging through the breach in the Industrial Canal had torn houses from their foundations with such force as to leave the sewer and water pipes beneath pretty much destroyed. I didn't see anybody down there except for a solitary teenage boy, who stood on a street corner with his jeans unzipped, one hand browsing around his underpants in distracted self-solace, while he gazed at cars passing under a dead traffic light.

I headed out to the neighborhoods of Lakeview and Gentilly and saw mullet and bream leaping happily in the London Avenue Canal, where temporary walls of iron sheet piling stood in front of the still-unrepaired gaps in the canal wall. A few hundred yards up from the breach, hard-hatted Army Corps of Engineers employees were at work on a set of floodgates. The walls themselves were nearly complete, though I was surprised to learn, in a later conversation with an anonymous ACE representative, that Congress has appropriated funds to restore the canal walls only to their pre-Katrina height, despite the outcry of the 1.4 million people these walls are supposed to protect. Washington, as it turns out, drove an awfully shrewd bargain when it came to rebuilding the flood-protection system. For the repair of 220 miles of levee and floodwalls around New Orleans, Congress has allocated only $6 billion. Which is considerably less than what we spend in a month in Iraq.