ONE OF THE MOST iconic images of the Katrina disaster was an old, graceful New Orleans house being washed from its foundation, dragged into the tempest of brown water, and gradually torn apart—the roof collapsing, walls shearing off, the structure warping and then sinking like a ship.

To be rendered homeless—whether by hurricane, poverty, or choice—is to be deprived of not simply physical shelter but emotional refuge. Home is where we return to, where we stop and rest and think, where we piece together the new pictures in our minds and try to make sense of our planet. Without home, we are unmoored.

And it's a literary lie that you can never go home again. Somehow, like a boomerang, most of us do. It may take a lot of trying and time before we get there. It may be a different home, it may be a home we build or rebuild, but it is home nonetheless: a physical place, a family or friends or both, a community.

Which is not to say that the homecoming will be smooth. Reentry is inevitably bumpy. If you come in at the wrong angle, you can burn up. Contrary to the Hollywood happy ending, homecomings are usually jagged affairs. There's a period of cultural limbo before you regain your sense of place. Meanwhile, your family is struggling to reintegrate you into their lives. Whenever I come home, jet-lagged and weary, Sue and I cautiously circle each other for a couple of days before harmony returns.

Then the whole process starts all over again.

For better or worse, the warmth of the womb of home will eventually start to smother me. I will grow restless and irritable. I will crave, physically and emotionally, another big hit of travel. Sue's used to it. "Time for another trip," she'll say. No sooner said than done.

"I have this terrible sense of regret every time I leave Wyoming," says old friend and fellow Wyomingite Gretel Ehrlich. "It's like some sort of betrayal, as if I'm saying, ‘Things aren't good enough here,' although it's not about that at all. I have this great hunger to see and experience how people and animals and plants survive, even thrive, in other difficult places."

Gretel, author of the 1985 classic The Solace of Open Space and, recently, The Future of Ice, lives half the year in a cabin in northwestern Wyoming.

"I believe home requires developing an intimacy with a place," she says. "Intimacy takes time. Every morning I go for an old-fashioned Thoreauvian walk. I like to note how the antelope divide themselves into bands, the ravens doing tricks in the sky, the weeds, the rocks."

Gretel pauses. "Home isn't my toaster and my toilet; it's the whole community of animals and birds and people and dogs. Home is like a great big tree. It provides shelter, but there are no walls. It doesn't separate you or isolate you from the world. Rather, it's a platform from which to launch."