Some stories are made for journalism. We’re good at telling individual dramas, identifying heroes and victims, good guys and bad. At NPR, we pride ourselves on being able to weave policy and history and human voices together. But it became clear to me that first week that aspects of the story were simply impossible to communicate.

It’s not the disaster that confounds journalists. It’s the scale. I heard the same thing from NPR reporters who covered the Asian tsunami: You can describe one wrecked village, one heroic escape, one mother crying. But numbers alone don’t convey what it’s like to see miles of destruction and hundreds of grieving families. At some point you have to move from reporting to experience.

In Houston, the trickle of refugees became busloads. At one point, at 2 a.m., I counted 150 buses lined up in the parking lot, all filled with evacuees. They would pour out of the buses and lay down on the parking lot in front of the Astrodome. Babies asleep on concrete. A mother spraying her children with a can of Lysol to ward off whatever evil was in that floodwater.

I had to turn off my recorder and put my microphone back in my bag. I already had dozens of stories, more than I could ever use on the radio, and people wanted to give me more. Women wanted to tell me the names of their lost children. Men wanted to tell me how long they sat on their roofs, or how far they walked along empty highways. I listened but I didn’t record.

Later, as I wandered through the destroyed neighborhoods they had told me about, I wished I had saved their stories, found out their names and addresses and phone numbers to find them later. We all thought that they would stay in Houston a few days and return home. Once I saw the Lower Ninth Ward and East New Orleans and Gentilly, I knew that we wouldn’t be seeing most of them again for the happy homecoming story. The true scale of the New Orleans migration is left for historians.

When I arrived in the destroyed city a couple weeks later, I could finally see for myself that most of the stories I had heard were probably true: houses with holes in the roofs where people had escaped, deflated air mattresses on porches, motorboats plopped in front of houses like lawn ornaments. Others tales were clearly exaggerated. We could never confirm the stories of dozens of murders and rapes in the Superdome and Convention Center. In Houston, I had heard stories without context. In deserted New Orleans, it was like reporting on a lost civilization. There were fragments of evidence, but no voices.

Once again, the scale was impossible to capture. You could drive for miles in any direction and see no movement. There was block after block of empty houses, a coffee-colored stain around the second story showing how high the water got. Some reporters said it was like a war zone or a Third World country. But it reminded me of the Utah desert near where I grew up. Emptiness stretched out to the horizon. There was nothing but the sound of the wind. I suggested to my editor that we should just play 47 minutes of silence on the air; that was the only way to tell people what New Orleans felt like.