Not that there weren’t pressing stories to tell. We talked about rebuilding plans, followed National Guard troops, reported on the failure of FEMA and the Army Corps of Engineers. But we were out-of-towners talking to each other.

To really capture what was lost in New Orleans required metaphor. This wasn’t like September 11th, where you could profile each and every victim. The bodies were being piled up without identification. The keepers of their stories, their friends and relatives, were scattered. It was far too early to write obituaries.

So we used whatever we could. Some reporters fixated on the animals, the dogs and cats you’d see sitting on empty porches, waiting. In fact, NPR aired so many pet stories that the order came from our top editor: no more dog rescues on the air; no more cats trapped in attics. It was starting to sound like we cared more about the animals than the fate of their owners. But being in New Orleans, it was easier to see the connection. The pets were the only living proof left of these families. And as the dogs wandered in packs around the neighborhoods, they were the perfect symbol of how wild this place had become.

I became obsessed with the trash. Civilization is based on keeping your stuff separate from your garbage, but Katrina had made the two indistinguishable. Houses were rotting from the inside out. Some piles of trash were so big and putrid they became de facto New Orleans landmarks.

I remember riding with the only city garbage truck still working in those early weeks of the disaster. Tyrone Brustie rode on the back bumper, sweat pouring down his face and torn gloves on his hands. He was living in a tent camp, working 13-hour days trying to make a dent in the garbage. Brustie would toss rotting piles of food into the back of his truck with a splat as he kept up a call-and-response sermon to the empty streets.

“One driver, one helper, one truck,” he said. “How hard it is to do a city? Keep up with everything? You never catch up. You think God wanted it to happen this way? He did it to get your head right. It’s all for a reason, man.”

Brustie was one of the few who stayed, and so, for me, he became a stand-in for those who would eventually come back. Single-minded, eccentric, not above taking a bribe or two to pick up an extra load of trash, Brustie’s the man I think about most when I remember New Orleans. I think of the pile of garbage that could fill the rest of his days.

Leaving New Orleans was much easier than getting in. By the end of September the airport was open and flights were cheap. Residents were already moving back into the more affluent neighborhoods and new reporters were ready for them. As I waited for my flight, I kept thinking that I had gotten to the story too late. All the national journalists had. We would never get a chance to recreate what life was like in this place before the flood. Nobody cared back then. At the airport, all the national magazines on the newsstand were from before August 29.

None of them even mentioned New Orleans.