This got to me:

Across the rutted street from the warehouse, the workers can gaze at the railroad tracks and see an endless stretch of unspoiled white government trailers, sitting on flatcars like a broken string of oversize, colorless Mardi Gras beads. A different kind of grotesquerie on wheels, these trailers will be homes for the fortunate, reminding all who see them that six months after Hurricane Katrina, hard times, not good times, continue to roll in the great city of New Orleans.

Lyrical references rarely work, but this one sent me off into a tizzy of sentimentality. About driving around in high school with my Stand By Me soundtrack blaring. And having reached back in time, I counted back and realized it was 11 years ago this month that I decided not to go along with some friends from my Tennessee college who were going down.

I had two papers to do, the very height of academic crisis. Probably one on Shakespeare and one some trade paperback American history book. Great stuff for a growing brain, but good God, life does not offer more than one chance to be 18 years old Mardi Gras.

When my classmates crossed the Louisiana border, they read aloud a statement proclaiming me the dumbest m---------er alive. I was probably playing solitaire on my Mac at the same moment.

Anyhell: If you like your tragedies nonfictional and your heroes to put their pants on one leg at a time, read on:

The heart-pounding tales of survival, and the heartbreaking stories of loss, have lost their dramatic drive somehow. "Let's get on with it," people here say.

One who exemplifies this attitude stands outside that warehouse jammed with Mardi Gras giddiness: Louis Massett, president of Massett & Company, float maker. The hurricane destroyed about 35,000 square feet of his work space, after which looters paid a visit, taking tractors, generators and just about every hand tool.

When he saw the devastation - including an oversize jester's head, crushed, and an oversize hand, mangled - Mr. Massett announced that he would not produce floats for the 2006 Mardi Gras. But he gradually changed his mind, he said, and now has to get out some 70 floats - fewer than the 200 he usually produces, but he is still in business.

Still doesn't sound like America, does it?