AFTER DAYS on the Gulf Coast, we finally made our way to New Orleans. New Orleans was everywhere. We had a radio, and New Orleans—with its people dying from dehydration and neglect—had dominated the airwaves. George Bush was in New Orleans. So was Oprah. Sean Penn was in there somewhere, on a boat.

I love New Orleans. I've been going there all my life. I hated what it had become, a fishbowl for TV journalists who wanted to pontificate about the unknown poor in the city. You'd have to have been pretty unobservant not to know there was poverty in New Orleans. Unlike in New York, it's woven into every block. Million-dollar homes sit in plain sight of housing projects like Magnolia and Calliope, famous for the rap stars they've spawned.

When we arrived, Canal Street was lined with TV trucks and reporters. The city I love had been flooded and gutted and looted and raped. It smelled of fetid water and decaying food; the French Quarter was quiet for the first time in hundreds of years. The refugees were gone. Now New Orleans was Dodge City. The day before we arrived, police officers had been shot at. People were setting fire to shotgun houses. New Orleans was wide open.

Troops camped out in Audubon Park. The train station was now a jail run by some gun bulls from Angola State Prison. It was powered by an electrical line hooked up to a diesel locomotive.

We met a corrections officer named Troy Poret, lean-jawed and tough-talking as he described the cages they'd installed on the train platforms in about a day. But he confided that he'd nearly broken down on the Interstate 10 overpass while lending a hand after the storm. He'd been working as an armed guard, watching prisoners, when a young child grabbed his pant leg and begged him for water, and an old woman asked, "Are y'all gonna fix our city?"