IN 1851, A CONGRESS-DISPATCHED civil engineer paid a visit to New Orleans and came away so dismayed, he remarked to his mother that the public good might best be served if the Mississippi were to sweep the city away entirely. In the aftermath of Katrina, former House Speaker Dennis Hastert, a Republican from Illinois, told the press it was his belief that rebuilding the city didn't make sense and that it should be, in large part, put under the bulldozer's blade. Evangelicals brayed from all quarters that Katrina was God's way of punishing a sinful city, some citing as proof the likeness between satellite images of the storm and snapshots of a human fetus in utero.

Though it's my position that these people might benefit from being flung on the nearest flaming debris heap, it's true that a vengeful god might find ample reasons to wipe New Orleans off the map (none of which have to do with the French Quarter's neon daiquiri stands or the swaybacked Bourbon Street strippers who perch on tourists' crotches for a fee). Indeed, to find America at its most dismal, you need look no further than New Orleans. Before the storm-induced diaspora, a quarter of the city's residents lived below the poverty level; literacy among its residents hovered around 40 percent; the murder rate was the highest per capita in the country, with housing projects turning out corpses with a grim, Baghdad-like efficiency; and the brutality of the police force was an institution as firmly entrenched as the Rex parade on Mardi Gras morning.

But among New Orleans's catalog of ailments, the vacant despondency that overwhelmed it on the morning of the 29th seemed a sort of woe the city had never known before.

From the French Quarter, I trekked over to the Superdome, where a jazz funeral for Katrina was supposed to be winding up. No brass bands were in evidence, but the scene was funereal all the same. The place was deserted except for two plastic grocery bags slowly circling each other in the asphyxiating heat. A news van passed by, a video camera angled out the sliding side door. I set off over vacant sidewalks cracked and sprung with hip-high weeds, traveling past remembrance ceremonies devoid of citizens but thronged with TV correspondents fumbling on camera for the proper chord of ponderousness and hope while their pancake makeup eroded in the heat. I ventured on, uptown, to my old neighborhood, not far from Audubon Park.

By noon, New Orleans already sweltered beneath a dizzying heat that made you feel like you had a car battery balanced on your head. How the late-summer sun, magnified by tin or asphalt shingles, must have felt to people stranded on their roofs for three days last year, I preferred not to imagine.

The streets in the Garden District, which for the most part had stayed dry during the storm, were silent. Every now and again, the gasp and wallop of a nail gun would pierce the stillness—or I'd hear the roar of 13-year cicadas, which, in grub form, had somehow slumbered safely in the ground with the floodwaters overhead.

I cut over from Prytania to my old block of Camp Street. The house I used to live in was still standing, if mangily, with a couple of clapboards missing and a few shingles absent from the roof. The view from the porch had changed, however. The duplex where a geriatric lady drug dealer once lived had burned to the ground, along with the house next door. In their place was a scalped lot. A disembodied stop sign lay where some front steps used to be; dangling from a pole at the intersection was a downed power line that somebody had gratuitously knotted into a crude black noose.