The Superdome may have been the most hellacious of the staging areas where evacuees languished prior to their migration out of the region, but my experience with the aftermath's chaos came at an entirely separate location. I spent parts of three days and nights at Camp Cloverleaf, that spot on the side of Interstate 10 a few miles from downtown where the east and west bound lanes run under the Causeway Bridge.

One day, years from now, I imagine that I'll stop there on the roadside with my family. Maybe New Orleans will once again be what it was; maybe we'll be on vacation heading into the city to meet relatives who live in nearby Jena. If and when I'm ever there again, I know I'll have to get out and walk the site with my wife and children.

I'll tell them that this is where I saw the worst, and in a few instances the best, that Man can be.

This is where I and my photographer stopped on the second night after Katrina hit to do live shots for WGN-TV. We parked our live truck and set the camera up right behind a Salvation Army mobile food cart. A large sweaty man was stirring a pot of boiling hot chili over a propane burner. The sun had just set but the blacktop and humidity conspired to make it feel like we were stuck in a steam bath.

A long line of clearly impoverished almost exclusively black evacuees stood waiting, somewhat impatiently, to be fed. As evidenced by the muddy mix of dirt, Fritos, chili and urine at our feet, many had already gotten what they came for and had walked off. The hot food ran out after an hour. The line disintegrated then just as quickly reformed after someone in the trailer opened a large box of MREs (military 'meals ready to eat'). It didn't take long to distribute the few available packets. The line dissolved again.

I won't be able to forget the three Asian women who approached as I stood near that same spot the following night. Our news car was close by and one of the younger women (clearly the daughter of the oldest lady) asked if she could use the bathroom by one of the rear tires. Fine, I said. She motioned for me to follow her which of course struck me as strange, but then she asked me to open the front passenger-side door so it would block the view of strangers. One of the other women stood by the back bumper blocking the view from the rear. I knew there'd been no port-o-johns when I drove up that night but I began to burn with anger as I realized that 48 hours into this mess, no one had been able -- or had made it a priority -- to leave even a dozen or so portable bathrooms on the site.

I'll remember the medical teams who worked thru the following day to help the sick who were coming off the choppers; they were landing opposite the crowds on the other side of the interstate. Glancing up in the rain at one point I saw six choppers hovering in the distance waiting for their turn to land at one of the three grassy spots which were now occupied. One empty helicopter had just cleared the makeshift pad and could be heard buzzing back toward downtown. (A few hours later I asked an army air traffic controller who'd set his radio up on the bridge, 'How many flights today?' 'I don't know. Hundreds. Can't keep track. Too many.')

The medical teams began to have their hands full trying to take care of young children. When Gregg & I approached there were six youngsters sitting or sleeping on cots. One older kid was bouncing around holding the hand of a volunteer. He was smiling like my daughter on the way to a Chuck E. Cheese birthday party. All you could make out was dark skin and white teeth. He wasn't happy so much as wild, his manic state likely brought on by the chaos, the loud noise and the absence of his parents. We were told that no adults were found on the rooftop from which these kids were pulled.

Gregg and I are both parents of young children. We left our news gear in our car and went back to sit for a moment with these beautiful kids. We walked into the middle of the pack and instinctively reached to pick one up. My little girl fell so fast asleep that even the jostling and commotion didn't wake her. I went to place her on a cot beneath a firefighter's coat. This limp young thing fell out of my arms into a fetal position. The sight of her right thumb effortlessly popping into her mouth prompted my first bout with tears. More bouts followed in quick succession.

We realized that if these nameless kids were ever going to get reconnected with their families, their faces had to be seen on local television. Suddenly we found ourselves asking: Where's a TV crew when you need one? State social service workers arrived a short time later and took the kids to who knows where. Gregg wishes he'd asked for the social worker's card. We would have been able to visit the kids later or, at the very least, find out where they'd ended up.

Those medical crews who'd piled so much hardware into the median under the bridge stayed busy for two full days. Then just after dusk on the third night there I turned my back for what felt like an hour -- and they were gone. An irate Louisiana State Trooper grabbed me and complained that they'd pulled out with no explanation given. More than two thousand evacuees, dozens of them elderly, spent that night sweltering in the heat with no hope of being able to receive medical attention had a health crisis arisen. Couldn't one crew have stayed behind?

Back among the mass of evacuees we saw no mayhem or violence aside from a few fistfights among teenagers. Everyone I spoke to was seething with resentment over the way they were being treated. "Why weren't the buses waiting for us when we arrived? We heard they're down the highway with the drivers sleeping behind the wheel. Why don't they come get us now?" The people were furious, but the crowd kept its cool.

On the long list of indignities these folks were forced to suffer this next one probably doesn't rank very high: A line of five Greyhound-style buses pulled up quite unexpectedly after 1am on our last night there. The people pushed to the edge of the barricades and waited for the doors to open. As they did, I looked up through the front glass at the rows of empty seats. They were all covered with black garbage bags. It was as if the interior of the bus had been turned into a massive latex glove. You can almost hear a voice from inside that might have said, "Grab a seat, ladies and gentleman; just don't get anything on the upholstery, ok? We want to be able to use this rig again after you're gone."

Amid the muck and mire, there were moments of peace and sanity. Gregg and I met two volunteers from a Baton Rouge church who were helping hold babies. There's no other way to put it: they radiated the love of God.

I'll always remember the night I looked down from the bridge: There among the ragged evacuees strode a single prim, proper, regal older black lady. She walked in between small groups of people as if she was strolling thru a park. Her banana yellow sweater was spotless, held together just under neck by a braided silver chain. Her blouse was white, her skirt a dark blue. She was like the child who pops up halfway thru "Schindler's List": a beautiful little girl in a bright red coat surrounded by gray people in a black-and-white countryside. This old lady, and she was a Lady, looked like a human mirage.

I could go on. Three days. Days that have left me with so many memories. They keep flooding into my mind. My fingers type out these words with little thought from my conscious brain. It's only part of the awful story of what went on in those first painful days, the story of how United States citizens were forsaken and abused in the own backyard by the very people who should have been ready in an instant to care for them.