"You have no idea how bad it is in New Orleans," my brother said as we gazed up at the star-filled Mississippi sky with 3-year-old Anna between us.

"Tell me," I said, "But choose words carefully as to not frighten little ears."

"Well," he said, "They've been herding people onto the freeways because they're still dry. It's so hot. And ..." He trailed off, realizing how quickly words become nightmares.

Our boat was winding slowly up the Mississippi, through forested areas thick with quiet broken only by the cry of crickets and cicadas. Our thoughts followed the snaking river back toward the Gulf, to the devastated city we left just days before, in a grind of traffic as the evacuations began.

We'd spent three days exploring New Orleans, dipping beignets into coffee with chicory, eating oysters fried in jalapeño butter, rumbling through the Garden District in rickety streetcars and listening to curbside Blues while Anna danced. I awed at the French and Spanish architecture and complained about the air quality — swampy and smelling of diesel fuel — in that stinking, sinking, glorious city.

To walk in New Orleans was to wilt. We stayed a block from Bourbon street, where people sipped "Hurricanes" from plastic cups, peeking into bars and strip joints. New Orleans is also the Voodoo capitol of the United States. Perhaps not coincidentally, on our first day there, we watched a police officer pull a stiff dead rooster out of his trunk.

"You have a chicken," my husband said.

"It is a weird story," the officer replied.

Saturday morning, I woke before Anna and John and snuck out for coffee. The shuttered shops were beginning to open and the air was faded and yellow, like sheets crumpled from sleep. A woman leaned into a car. I heard the word "evacuate," but I didn't make the connection.

We were scheduled to leave that evening for a seven-day riverboat cruise. As we lugged our bags through the front doors of our hotel, a woman stopped me. "How did you get a flight out of here?"

* * *

We were grateful to escape New Orleans, but steamboats certainly aren't the fastest way to go. Our boat traveled away from Katrina at 8 MPH. The numerous curves in the Mississippi and the heavy barge traffic made the journey even slower, although the crew was confident that we would make it far enough north to be spared the brunt of the storm.

Our rooms did not have televisions, but we did have access to CNN. On Saturday night my parents' radio stopped working. Early Sunday morning they were startled awake with these words: "Do not panic, but you must evacuate immediately." They bolted out of bed, thinking the message had come over the boat's PA system, only to realize that they were listening to a clip of Louisiana Governor Kathleen Blanco speaking to the residents of New Orleans.

On Katrina's eve, John tucked Anna in, and I sat in a rocker on the front deck with a Walker Percy book that I could not open, beside a blind man named Bob, his wife Niki and his guide dog.

As the sun set over the Mississippi, a balmy breeze teased the surface of the river.

As the sky grew darker the wind picked up, causing the flags onboard to swat and stutter, flinging insects into our faces.

"Those are big, dead bugs," I told him.

"Hmmm," he said. "Well at least they're dead."

When the wind pushed a piece of wrought iron furniture across the deck, the dog crawled between my rocker and Bob's. It was time to turn in.

As I reached for the door handle, I saw a royal blue moth under it, each wing as large as my daughter's outstretched palm, dotted with four caramel tears. We are also fragile and exquisite — sometimes blind — especially on the eve of a storm.

Early Monday morning, our boat wedged itself into the bank at Natchez, Miss. Although we'd been traveling since Saturday night, we were not as far away from New Orleans as I had imagined we'd be — by car our two-day journey would have taken only three hours and 13 minutes.

That morning the wind yanked the trees and water poured onto the decks, seeping into our cabin. The boat's satellite had been damaged, knocking out the three televisions on board and cutting off our Internet connection. Our cell phones stopped working and we hadn't seen a newspaper for days.

John and I decided to go into town to search out a television. As we climbed the bank, I struggled to steady myself. I didn't realize the winds were moving at 75 MPH. I told the shuttle driver I was scared.

"How ‘bout this?" he said. "If I pull over and start running, you start running too."

* * *

Eighty percent of the boat's crew was from New Orleans. Somehow, they managed to keep pouring drinks, clearing tables and turning down beds even when they couldn't reach family members after the levees broke. As more news leaked onto the boat, grief was palpable.

Wednesday afternoon, John took Anna to the boat's bar for popcorn, but the bartender was crying, trying to jot down a phone number. Anna came back empty-handed and in tears. I'd like to think she was upset because the bartender was sad, but more likely she was just crying over popcorn.

* * *

On the taxi ride back from O'Hare I was a little surprised to see that Chicago's trees and buildings were still standing. It seemed inappropriate for them to show off like that. When we arrived at our curb, my husband told the taxi driver that we'd come out of New Orleans just before Katrina.

"It breaks my heart," he said, "I can't watch the news anymore." My husband handed him some money. He looked at the bills in his hand. "Whatever you can pay is fine," he said.

We came home hungry, and John went for a pizza. He passed a woman conversing with a row of newspaper boxes. "I just can't help," she yelled back at the photos from Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida.

Meanwhile, Anna and I started to unpack. The New York Times was waiting for me. I set down my bags to stare at a photo from the Louis Armstrong International Airport, which had been turned into a hospital and morgue. Sick people lay prone on the conveyor belt where I'd retrieved my luggage just 10 days before.

It's tempting to feel helpless in the wake of Katrina. But yesterday I saw a sign written in a child's wobbly handwriting: "Lemonade 50 cents — for Hurricane relief." A neighbor tells me that there were three humanitarian lemonade stands in our neighborhood.

These children know the secret that might just pull us through, in the months (and years) to come: concrete acts of kindness are survival, for all of us. Just as floodwaters can push through a levee, empathy, action and prayer can carve a way through Impossible.

Still, we have no vocabulary to express what we've seen, only grief and rage, only hearts that can break open and expand and then break open again. I hope they can expand as much as they can break.