Editor's note: This essay was adapted from a speech delivered to the International Council of Community Churches that met in New Orleans in June 2006.

Photo by Kenny Irby/Poynter

Keith Woods: Coming Back In this essay, adapted from a speech delivered to the International Council of Community Churches, Keith Woods talks about coming back to New Orleans after Katrina. 10 minutes, 39 seconds

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On the morning of Aug. 27, 2005, my father and stepmother climbed into my oldest sister's tiny Volkswagen for the protracted drive across Lake Pontchartrain and away from an approaching disaster. Each packed a small suitcase with a few clothes, medicine, makeup, toothpaste. The drill when a hurricane took aim at New Orleans was that if you left, you took enough of your life to last two, maybe three days. Because no matter what, you were coming back.

New Orleanians always come back.

That boast strikes me today as symbolic and naively sentimental against the monumental tragedy that has unfolded in the year since Katrina. At least that's how it sounds to my ears, which listen today as a scarred native son and skeptical journalist who knows that such slogans are to our lives as rugs are so often to our homes: beautiful decorations that cover up messier truths.

It's a long, long road back, and for the people scattered across the country with nothing to return to and nothing to ride in to get there, it is impossibly long. And yet they do come back, and the pulse of the place, weak and anemic though it is, beats still. 

When I left my hometown for good nearly 12 years ago, my last column for The Times-Picayune was about how you can never really leave a place when your blood runs through it; when the bones and ashes of your ancestors rest in the raised graves of its cemeteries; when its streets and alleyways and ancient oaks and shotgun houses harbor the echoes of your childhood.

When I left 12 years ago, I thought I knew what I was talking about. As time stretched long arms between my new life and my memories, I started wondering if that ancient pull toward home was more than mythology. Each time I’ve come back the past 12 months, I’ve understood anew the hold the place has on its offspring.

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HURRICANE KATRINA: ONE YEAR LATER

This week marked the one-year anniversary of the day Hurricane Katrina made landfall on the Gulf Coast. Poynter Online has remembered the event with a weeklong series of articles, resources and personal essays. Scroll to the bottom of this article to see the other stories we've published this week.  Today's Stories: Personal Narratives "Katrina: The Power of the Press and the Wrath of Nature," by James O'Byrne "The Eyes of the Storm: Reflections from Gulf Coast Photojournalists," by Kenny Irby Katrina One Year Later: Essays & Epilogues -- personal essays by Gulf Coast journalists on the year that has passed since Katrina made landfall by Matt Stamey, Arthur Lauck, Ronnie Crocker, Ron Franscell and more. For more Poynter Online coverage of Katrina's one-year anniversary, click here. To see how Poynter Online covered hurricane season 2005 as it happened, click here. Other Katrina-related articles by Keith Woods:  * "As New Storms Approach, Five Lessons from Katrina," by Keith Woods (Aug. 29, 2006) * "The Katrina Beat: Covering the Intersection of Once Was and Will Be" (Dec. 23, 2005)  * "Going Home" (Oct. 10, 2005)

If you're trying to understand the profundity of the city's devastation by counting the corpses or the cars or refrigerators or homes that have been lost, you're missing the point. I understood that finally in February, when my family got together for the second time in four months for a funeral.

Mine is a huge family, and gatherings, be they festive or funereal, always summon the spirits of our forebears. We savor the holiday or salve the grief by dusting off memories of running up and down the porch at Papa Woods' house on Havana Street while our parents inside talked baseball or politics or horse racing. For years before that, we'd cram into Uncle Fabian's little brick house in the Ninth Ward, and ole Tarz -- short for Tarzan -- would sit majestically in his favorite chair and reign with wry wit and a hearty laugh. When Uncle Ralph and Aunt Mildred moved back from New York and bought a place near the Lakefront, theirs was the house you went to if it was New Year's Eve or the Fourth of July or if you’d left home and you just needed a place to sleep when you came back.

Papa Woods died and the house on Havana Street got sold. Uncle Fabian and Auntie Adrienne moved away. Uncle Ralph got sick and had to cut down on the parties. But all it took in my family to carry on this legacy was the blood in your veins and a little libation in the fridge. It wasn't the house that mattered. It was the home.

So when a killer storm took aim at the city, my family's tree took up its roots and went west to relatives. My father was sick then. Dementia had seized his brain and was choking away his personality and his life. As Katrina pushed Lake Pontchartrain through the city's levees and flooded his Ninth Ward home, he sat in an Opelousas hospital 150 miles away.

He never saw what the storm did to his home. I did. The water swallowed up the whole of his life, every piece of furniture, every videotape of his children and grandchildren, all but a few pictures, every stitch of clothing they owned, every plate and pillow. In the toxic stew of Katrina's floodwaters, his present and my past were dissolved. He died two months after the storm hit, and his bones now mingle with those of his mother in one of the city's famous above-ground crypts.

Our family -- scattered to Boston, Washington, San Antonio, Houston, Atlanta and anywhere else they could find refuge -- got together again after the funeral. The repast was at Uncle Fabian's home in Baton Rouge, where he and Auntie Adrienne retired years ago to be near their children. Their home had been the staging area for my retreating family.

The uncles and aunts, sons and daughters and cousins and grandbabies roamed his house and patio, sharing in a tradition and overhearing the stories born in gatherings just like this. Ole Tarz sat majestically in his kitchen chair, leaning on a cane, nursing a Heineken and spicing the conversation with an occasional one-liner.

Uncle Fabian died in February, three months after my father. As we sat out on my uncle's patio this time, young and old laughing, singing, telling stories, crying, I looked through a prism of tears, and when the light hit a certain way, I glimpsed an end to this legacy. It was a frightening future I saw, a gaping nothingness where there is no place to land, no tethers to ground you or connect you or reassure you that no matter how far away you go, you can always come home.

I understood fully then what my friends and relatives here had tried to explain to me. I guess you never really know the measure of a thing until you face the prospect of truly losing it.

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Keith Woods/Poynter This photo of the home of the late Verdun Woods, father of Keith Woods, was taken earlier this summer.

Old people die. Traditions fade. Houses come and go. People all over the world leave their hometowns behind. Those are universal truths. Here is what is different about New Orleans: From the richest to the most bedraggled, her people have been sustained by the laughter of a family picnic at City Park as surely as by a dripping roast-beef Po-boy from the corner grocery. They love a Mardi Gras parade or a festival, but only if they can pick up their mama or a niece or a li'l cousin and share it with them. They face their hard times and mark the good times by spreading out old newspapers, dumping a bag of crawfish out, calling friends and family over, and catching up on life across the kitchen table.

Not only did Katrina take the kitchen table and the house around it and the great oaks in City Park, but she wiped out even the possibility of those things. She took the old people and their memories and all their pictures and even the small mementoes that were trailheads to their history. She has taken people once separated by a few doors or a quick ride in the car or on the city bus and flung them as far away as Utah and Arkansas and Maine. She destroyed their homes, scattered their neighbors and defied them to come back.

And yet ...

My stepmother is back, crammed against all common sense and the sternest warnings into a house chopped into rentable pieces; sharing the space in the Seventh Ward with her sister and brother-in-law and untold numbers of nephews and great-nieces. She gave up an expensive, yes, but impossible-to-find apartment in an assisted-living facility in Baton Rouge, where her meals were prepared, she'd made good friends, and she'd probably never have to run from a hurricane again.

She is supervising from afar as workers piece together her little two-bedroom shotgun in the Ninth Ward, unsure that she'll go back there to live without my father even if the contractors manage to finish before the turn of the next century. But her family can get together now for gumbo on Sundays or red beans and rice on Mondays, and she's a bus ride away from the cemeteries where her mother and husband are buried.

My older brother is back, living in a tiny FEMA trailer on the University of New Orleans campus. He and his family gave up a roomier home on a wide expanse of quiet, bucolic Louisiana road in a town we'd never heard of before Katrina to live in a space smaller than my garage. He had never lived more than a few miles from the hospital of his birth, and he missed his congregation and even the in-laws. He will have to run if so much as a tropical breeze blows across the Gulf of Mexico.

Theirs is the life of homesteaders from the Wild West. They're staking a claim on the bet that if they rebuild, the city around them will return. They talk only by cell phone. They celebrate when another traffic light comes back online or a dollar store opens its doors.

To understand what it means to be home, you need to understand what people are willing to tolerate just to be there. For that, you have to break beyond the borders of Uptown, downtown and the French Quarter. And you have to see it for yourself. Then you'll understand that what we're trying to save here is not a historic district; not architecture or art; not political power bases. Those things only have meaning if there are people to appreciate and exploit them. We're trying to save a bloodline and lifeline that connects people to one another and sustains not life, but the reason for living.

There is nothing a photograph or television image or radio story can do to help make this real. You have to stand on the levee along the Industrial Canal and look out at the blocks and blocks of shredded houses and overturned cars. You have to walk along the 17th Street Canal and see the holes in homes that suggest not Katrina, but Beirut. You have to smell the mold in the air, feel the uninterrupted breeze where trees once bent; imagine the force of the water, nothing short of Biblical in its power. Only then can you grasp what this storm wrought and how painful it must be to look upon this apocalypse every day.

And when you've seen it all, and you find yourself asking the obvious question -- why in the world would people come back to this? -- and you look around and see the lights flickering on from the lake to the Mississippi River, then you will understand the inexorable draw of home.