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.

It gets worse

New Orleans has never been anyone's idea of a well-run city. Even before the storm, it was a corrupt and dirty city with bad streets, high crime, a lot of rundown houses and crushing poverty. New Orleans sleaze has been the stuff of thick books and numerous movies.

Now it is worse. And it is real. Oh, the tourists are still coming -- thank God -- and the food is still magnificent. The oysters at the Acme Oyster House eat so good you laugh out loud after one bite. The Carousel Bar at the lovely Monteleone Hotel still rotates as it always did, and the crowds on Bourbon Street are still rowdy, loud and prone to flashing their attributes for cheap beads. The Garden District, as it always has, rules in regal and genteel splendor, all but untouched by the decay. Even Canal Street, where the water was waist deep after Katrina, bustles with tourists, conventioneers and taxis.

But if you love the city and all it has meant over the years, it is best not to look too closely or venture too far from the bright lights. Don't, whatever you do, wander into the urban hell that is Clairborne Avenue. Here, crouching under elevated Interstate 10, are hundreds of U.S. citizens forced to live like feral dogs. Their tent city stretches for blocks because the people who run this city are too incompetent or uncaring to help them. Just across Clairborne Avenue is a housing project that covers 10 square blocks. It is boarded up and enclosed by tall fences while people across the street are living on cold and wet concrete. The sun never shines on their shadowy world.

What killed this city

As you drive through shattered New Orleans, try not to look at the wrecked houses with fluorescent paint sprayed on the doors, especially the ones that say things like "1 dead upstairs." They are the grim monuments to the unknown number of people who died when the waters came.

It wasn't Katrina that killed the heart of New Orleans. It was the failure of government levees. And it is not Katrina that has left hundreds of the city's poorest citizens huddling under a bridge like forgotten gnomes. It is the shameful failure of a government sworn to protect citizens who still cry for help.

The people of faith who brought their hammers and their hearts to help the people of the Gulf Coast are truly angels.

Sadly for the poor of New Orleans, there just weren't enough of them to go around.

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