I would like to say that I faced Katrina as a writer from the beginning. In a small way, it’s true. Two days before the storm hit, a Saturday, I filed a couple of reports on storm preparations to a wire service with which I’ve worked for years. Usually the reports, like the preparations themselves, followed a certain script: a steady stream of evacuations from New Orleans’s southern periphery, floodgates closing, businesses shuttering, belligerent French Quarter bartenders testifying they’ve never left before, and they’re staying now. And so on.

But this time, the danger was all too palpable, too close, too almost-certain. And so I finished some notes on a press conference around noon that Saturday, and that would be the last time I would take the writer’s view for days. When an apocalyptic, Category 4 storm is bearing down on your below-sea-level city and the clock is ticking, the time for diaristic reflection—or even journalistic account, in my case—is decidedly later. Right then, there were cats to crate, mortgage and insurance papers to collect, windows to board, groceries to buy. Fortification and flight trumped the luxury of writing.

Or so it seemed just then—writing was one of the first things I would jettison, but I would later regret doing so. There were many things dear to me that I left behind when I reduced my possessions—temporarily, I hoped—to those that would fit into a car. Later, on higher ground, I would take a silent inventory of what I’d left behind, and I would cringe.

Hurricane Katrina was a cataclysm in increments, and for me, my wife, and the two friends who evacuated with us to my brother-in-law’s cabin an hour north of the city, early accounts of its destruction—heard on a radio we huddled around for hours—washed over us as the bands of the storm itself did. We were passive witnesses to a narrative spun by nature. Inside the cabin, on the radio, we heard a woman calling in from the Ninth Ward, where floodwaters had rushed in and driven her, along with her grandchildren, into the attic. Outside, the storm’s exhalations rose terse and hollow, like the gasps of movie zombies, I thought. And in the midst of it all, that little simile prompted in me another thought: It was all so cinematic.

It might reveal something damning about my writer’s consciousness that my first impulse was to think of New Orleans’s—and my own—circumstances as movie scenes. It could be a necessary psychological abstraction, a byproduct of survivor’s guilt, a shortcoming of my imagination. I still haven’t decided.

Stories about Katrina flooded the national news as water poured relentlessly into the city’s bowl. For days, there was the simple shock of it all, and the immediacy of images told a desperate and damning story with which print could not yet keep up. But journalists proved themselves swifter and more resourceful than FEMA workers, and, in their way, they began to take ownership of the chaos into which the city had descended.

At that point I was in Jackson, Mississippi, at the second stage of an evolving evacuation that we were figuring out as we went along. The possibility of writing anything, for me, was simply impractical. There were three couples with us now—plus a staggering number of pets—all squeezed into a small house belonging to one friend’s mother. The house had one bathroom, one phone line, and one dial-up Internet connection. And once there, we all had urgent priorities: There were family members who needed calling, FEMA applications to be made, meals for seven to be prepared. We were grappling with the sudden reality of our diaspora, and the inevitability that in a few more days we would need to fan out to somewhere even farther away from our homes. And then the New York Times reporter called.

Since I was the writer among us, I was delegated to talk to the reporter, who had gotten wind of our cramped household in exile. But even as I relayed our story, I felt it slipping away from me. I wanted to tell this. It didn’t belong to someone sitting at a desk twelve hundred miles away, jotting down the broad strokes of our predicament as color for a piece on Katrina’s Exiles.

A torrent of impotent anger struck me, directed at multiple targets: at the president, for his glib remarks made immediately after the storm (“I used to have a little too much fun there myself, heh heh”) and for the people who would die because of his lumbering pace and inadequate leadership; at FEMA, for its inexcusable, tangled response; at Congress, for not heeding the warnings that they had heard for years; at the reporter on the phone—my ongoing story should not be mere seasoning for hers.

But this was the cold reality, now that I was ready to say something: The floor and ceiling were suddenly gone from my world, and though I’d managed to brace myself against something, I did not—could not—step outside this tableau fast enough to tell a story about what happened. The nation was enthralled with a disaster that was moving too quickly to accommodate stopping for anyone. The Times reporter had her deadline. The nation had a bottomless news appetite to feed. And I had only begun to formulate the question that would haunt me as both a writer and a participant: What is this all going to mean?

My answer is still incomplete. The first time I had an opportunity to sit and write, more than a week later, words came to me as a list, as an inventory of my jarring and visceral knowledge of Katrina’s early days. It amounted to this: Urban life can descend almost immediately into an elemental game of survival. The membrane shielding us from panic and chaos is gossamer thin. When things fall apart—and they can, they quickly can—no one is really in charge until it is too late. By then, you are on your own, and when that happens, you will take care of your own, whoever they are, first.

I might have had an intellectual grasp of such things, simple as they were, before. But now they had a deep resonance. My thoughts chilled me, and I circled around their primacy for days.

By then, the media talk had jumped ahead, voracious for new questions to propel it and move the story along its arc. That week, questions revolved around accountability. The following week, there were questions of reconstruction and expense. Then, homecomings. What would those poor people find when they went back? Who would even come back?

News cycles pedal quickly, and, in this case, the Katrina stories were on the downslope of a deep hill, powered by their own momentum. My own questions were moving slowly uphill, on the other side. New Orleans was going to tell us something that we need to know about ourselves, I felt. How could a city—or an entire region, for that matter—reassert itself? What would it be like to move back into a city a fraction of its previous size, in both population and geography? Would there be any accounting for the racial inequity unearthed by the storm? What would reckoning look like, and who would demand it? What does the world’s only superpower owe to one of its damaged parts? And where would I buy my groceries from now on?

By then I was on to the third stage of my evacuation, staying on Long Island with family after a thirteen-hundred-mile road trip in our compact car, with my wife, our dog, and five cats. While we were feeling the storm’s psychological aftershocks—the loss of our autonomy, at least for the coming weeks, was chief among them—we were far better off than many. Even at that stage, we were reasonably sure that our house had survived —a belief that was confirmed by friends who had returned to the city shortly after the worst of the crisis had abated. And knowing that my house was still standing, high and dry, made it a lot easier to contemplate the undercurrents of Katrina’s wake, and to begin to write about them.

We were so busy in those weeks. We had mortgage payments to defer, insurance claims to initiate, keys to FedEx to friends who were making clandestine runs into the city. Hours were spent on the phone accounting for friends, mapping out the long and crooked paths of their diaspora. Every conversation was underscored with gravity as we began to accommodate our very uncertain, separate futures.

In the midst of all those nervous conversations and the constant disquiet, writing, for me, became a still center. Let me add nuance to that: I have been a freelance writer and editor since graduate school. In that time, I’ve had many sublime moments and hours absorbed in the pleasures of articulating an idea or finding my way around to one. I’ve also known the pressure of having to work quickly, when every word I typed or edited was directly tied to my income. Unfortunately, the last few years have seen more of the latter dynamic than the former.

But there I was, stealing away each day to spend hours in a crisp, new public library, ensconced at a semiprivate desk with a laptop in front of me and my professional slate wiped clean. In my post-Katrina, limbo world, I was suddenly free to reflect on what had happened and to meander—albeit inconclusively—around its meaning.

The composer Philip Glass once told me that the best part of his career was in the early years, when he would present his compositions to a New York loft audience of five people (“and one of them was my mother”). He said it was the most liberating time of his life: He was free to do absolutely anything because absolutely no one cared what he was doing.

I won’t liken myself to Glass, but I certainly felt the uncluttered pleasures of pure writing in those weeks of working at my little desk in the library. Surrounded by the accumulating entries to the public discourse about Katrina—some coming now from professional acquaintances and friends—I staked my own small, idiosyncratic space there, sorting through questions, images, emerging structures of thought, arguments. I had a fixed, indefatigable sense of purpose, and writing was drawing an essential line through it.

The process of reasserting our lives—mine, my wife’s, our friends’ and neighbors’, the city’s own—will be slow and uncertain. I don’t know how it will all turn out. But in confronting Katrina, resolutely now from the library desk, I had an edge. And something more than that, really. Before Hurricane Katrina destroyed my city, I wrote. Now I was a writer.

Michael Depp is working on a book, The End of Easy, about life in post-Katrina New Orleans.