The first story I co-wrote after we evacuated our offices was about the frenzied mass-looting of a Wal-Mart—by criminal cops as well as opportunistic citizens. The scene was unnerving, at times truly scary, and in the middle of it all we managed to become fringe participants in our own story.

Alongside people wheeling out flat-screen TVs and grabbing fistfuls of jewelry, there were others who were careful only to take what they needed to survive: water, food, diapers, medicine. We quickly drew a distinction. Looting for profit was stealing. Looting for survival was foraging. Like the foragers, we didn’t know how we were going to eat and drink in the coming days, so we debated whether to grab a cart of supplies. We finally decided to take some necessities, but only after cataloguing the items so we could pay for them later. We actually had the cart out the door when Doug MacCash, the Times-Picayune’s art critic, reopened the debate: Sure, we could justify our actions, he said. But why put ourselves in a position of having to justify anything? We voted unanimously to leave the merchandise behind and worry about feeding ourselves later.

And the story kept skirting the line. I joined tense boat rescues, putting down my notepad to hold crying babies as they were handed to me. I pieced together the chaotic evacuation of the city’s 6,400-inmate prison, and the 14 escapees the sheriff tried to cover up. And I accompanied state troopers following up on days-old 911 calls to search for bodies in muck-encrusted houses.

Of course, there were moments when our energy flagged, especially in that first week. But with each trip to the Superdome or Convention Center, we were re-energized by the desperation of mostly poor, mostly African American citizens begging us to tell the outside world of their plight. Police officers begged us to tell the same story. So did firefighters and doctors and elected officials. Many of them still are.

The woeful response to the catastrophe reminded me of a running debate I had during my freshman year at Reed with Ali Raza (’84) in the game room of the since-bulldozed Coleman dormitory: Does “government” exist during Armageddon? I argued that it did, that survivors would look to the remnants of officialdom for direction. Ali maintained that the notion of a governing body would not survive such a societal deconstruction.

I still don’t know the answer, but I met untold Katrina victims who openly questioned the existence of authorities as they languished for days without food or water. For those who perished, their bodies unclaimed on rubbish-strewn streets, we can only assume that, at some point in their final hours, all concept of man-made authority ceased to exist.

In many ways, the fact that hurricane victims were needlessly suffering helped me and my colleagues to forget our own hardships. At the end of each day, when we regrouped in the borrowed house we turned into a makeshift newsroom, we shared details of death. One body, that of an elderly woman, was covered with a sheet on a porch a few blocks away, where it remained untouched for a week. The day that two local cops committed suicide, including a public information officer many of us knew well, was especially ominous.

In between tragedies and stories about tragedies, we attended to personal matters. We checked on colleagues’ houses, embarked on pet rescues in kayaks and canoes, tracked down family members and friends. We realized there were some people we would never see again: a favorite waiter, perhaps, or a grade-school reading buddy. The contours of our lives were stripped away and now, months later, it is obvious that some of those touchstones will never return, not even to say goodbye.

That’s not to say that covering the story of a lifetime hasn’t been exhilarating at times. Contributing to the first draft on such a historic tragedy is a powerful thing. To be personally invested in the story only made it more so.