EXPLAINING THE SOUTH to an outsider is difficult. Explaining the South after Katrina was even more difficult. Driving down from my farm outside Oxford, Mississippi, I talked to Larry about Robert Johnson and William Faulkner. I told him about the black-and-white photographs taken by Eudora Welty, and Charley Patton's recording "High Water Everywhere," a song about the 1927 Mississippi River flood. We talked about New South race relations; I'd recently covered the trial of 80-year-old Edgar Ray Killen, found guilty in connection with the 1964 murder of three civil-rights workers.

Near the central-Mississippi city of Brandon, we started seeing toppled church steeples and houses sliced in half by pine trees. We followed SUVs and dualie pickup trucks loaded with scores of gas canisters and water jugs and food. Church vans and cop cars were journeying from other states, people on their way to the rescue.

Larry had never been to the South, but he wasn't a stranger to new cultures; he'd covered the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and war-torn Nicaragua. All you have to know about Larry is that he's devoutly Canadian, mountain-man-bearded, and that he carries a business card that lists his profession as HUMAN BEING.

"Do you know the book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men?" Larry asked. "Walker Evans."

The Depression-era portraits Evans took to accompany James Agee's text exposed the country to the plight of poor white southern sharecroppers. They were taken in Alabama, in the next county over from where my father grew up.

Dodie Vegas, a resident of Grand Isle, Louisiana, helping salvage the remains of her family's marina. (Larry Towell)

"Yeah, I know it."

"Is it still that bad?"

On the outskirts of Gulfport, we met the Jones family sitting on the front porch of their battered house—Walker Evans style—drying clothes they'd cleaned in trash buckets, everything they owned a sodden trash heap by the road.

In the reddish-black light, Larry and I bypassed checkpoints and parked in the center of downtown Gulfport, a major city on the coast. We were alone, not a sound but cicadas, whipped and beaten palm leaves shifting in the wind, and the patrol car of an occasional prowling cop. It was past seven, past curfew. Electrical lines dangled loose, blinds hung in busted-out windows. Bulldozers had scraped boards and Sheetrock and sofa cushions to the side of the road. The trees looked skeletal, like they would in the middle of winter.

A helicopter passed along the coast. Gulfport was dead.