BAY ST. LOUIS, Miss. - We are sitting outside at a picnic table, eating steamed crawfish bought from a roadside market. It is a warm and sunny day along the Gulf Coast, the perfect kind of day that makes you want to call friends back home and gloat.

But then I look around and realize that less than three years ago, the lovely spot where we're sitting was 24 feet under water. Every house, every store, every school, every street and every graveyard in this little town was covered in water. And it was like that in neighboring Pass Christian and Waveland, too. And it was that way for 50 miles in either direction, all the way east to Pascagoula and all the way west to New Orleans.

But it was here, right over this picnic table, that the eye of Hurricane Katrina passed in August 2005. New Orleans got most of the attention after that horrendous storm, because, well, she's New Orleans and everybody knows her. But it is here, along the once gracious Gulf Coast, that your heart breaks for what is gone forever.

We run into a man who tells us that we should have seen the beachfront Victorian homes that once lined this stretch of the Gulf of Mexico. They're gone, he said, all of them, and they won't be coming back.

It isn't until we go look for ourselves that his statement of fact hits us in the gut like a fist.

We drive along the roughly patched beach road that edges the gulf for 10, maybe 15 miles, to see for ourselves. Not a single beach house remains. Not one. The concrete pilings that once supported them are there, reaching for the blue sky like ghostly fingers from a sandy grave. It is like that for mile after mile. Here, steps lead nowhere. There, a fence encloses nothing. At the Episcopal church, only the bell tower remains.

Yes, there are temporary houses, thousands of them, and a lot of real estate signs. A few McMansions have defiantly sprung up, but nothing that recalls the gentle days when families sat on big front porches of old houses and looked for dolphins in the sweet blue Gulf that stretched to the horizon.

How it still looks

You saw the shocking pictures and read the gripping stories about what Katrina did to the soft underbelly of the South. You gave money, or sent clothes or cleaning supplies or water. You've met Katrina refugees who were scattered across the nation in this great American Diaspora.

But until you've been here, you can't fully grasp what it is like even now, nearly three years after Katrina came ashore. You cannot truly appreciate what the tens of thousands of volunteers, many of them church organizations from far away, have accomplished with faith, nails and determination.

And you cannot possibly understand how much more needs to be done.

We drove to New Orleans and back one day. It was a hellish trip through a dead landscape. Storm waters killed an estimated 1 million acres of trees, and U.S. 90, the Old Spanish Trail, is lined with their gray and rotting carcasses. Someday, you just know, a fire is going to start in these dead forests and burn for miles.

The marshes are littered with overturned and sunken boats and refrigerators and roofs and pieces of piers. Driveways have little signs -- "The Hideaway" -- at one end and nothing at the other, just those lonely pilings.

It never seems to end. You reach the outskirts of New Orleans and realize you're in one of the hardest hit areas, Gentilly. Can you imagine 25, 50, 75 apartment complexes with boarded-up windows and chain link fences. Some landlords are making halfhearted attempts to reclaim the wrecked shells where people once lived, but most of those buildings are too far gone. It is just that no one has the time, or the heart, to push them over yet.

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