Biloxi, Miss. ? James Edward Bates, a photographer for the Sun Herald newspaper, tells me a story as we drive through what’s left of his town.

It seems that earlier in the day he shot pictures of one Carmen Stepanek, a Czech immigrant he found sweeping up hurricane debris in front of her house. In her imperfect English, she asked if he had ever seen “The Karate Kid.” Yes, he said. “How many ‘Karate Kid’ movies there were?” she asked. “One, two, three?” He said there were at least three.

At which Stepanek, a gray-haired woman of a certain age, folded a black bandanna into a headband, tied it on her brow, struck a fighter’s pose and declared, “I ‘Karate Mom Six.”‘

“I fight,” she said. “I fight for my life.”

Bates, a soft-spoken man, tells me this story as we ride through twilight. We are at the end of a long afternoon spent touring a moonscape of destruction.

That word is purposeful. What you encounter on the tourist strip that runs along the beach is not “damage,” but “destruction”: asphalt buckled, sewage standing in reeking pools swarmed by biting flies, debris piled higher than houses, buildings reduced to their wood skeletons, here and there a shred of wall or roof still clinging to the structure.

Bates uses the verb “was” a lot as he pilots his car carefully down the broken highway. As in, “That was a Waffle House … a new condo under construction … a Ruby Tuesday … a Wendy’s … a nightclub … an RV Park.” That’s what a 28-foot storm surge will do to you. It turns “is” into “was.”

I lived through the 1971 Sylmar earthquake that wrecked a freeway interchange and left more than 60 people dead in Los Angeles. I am a veteran of Andrew, the 1992 hurricane that ripped roofs from buildings and killed at least 35 people in South Florida.

This is the worst I have ever seen.

On Highway 90, a casino barge – a floating “building,” you understand – sits in the parking lot of a hotel, having been lifted by an angry ocean and deposited there. A few blocks down, we are walking through mud and debris when the sudden smell of natural gas chokes me.

We find Kenny Vallia Jr., retired Air Force staff sergeant, lugging home provisions a taxi driver friend has taken him to Mobile, Ala., to get. Vallia’s home is a second-story apartment in a doomed building. To get there, you hike up uncertain stairs and walk along a balcony whose supports move if you push them lightly. The apartment is fly-swept and dark. But Vallia sees no cause to bemoan his misfortune. “The Lord brought me through the storm for somethin’,” he says. “And it wasn’t to sit around and wallow in self-pity.”

A few minutes later, a few miles away, Jayne and Maury Davis explain how they had to walk across debris that stood 12 feet high and four blocks deep to reach the concrete slab where their home used to be. On the slab, they found a cast iron cross that used to hang in a downstairs bathroom. It was, Maury says, a message from heaven, “a sign that you’re going to be OK, that you’re not alone in all this, and keep your faith.”

It’s after we have seen and heard all of these things that Bates tells me the Carmen Stepanek story. The sun is sinking to a placid ocean, and we are returning to the Sun Herald building, where RVs are parked in rows and people for whom the loss of homes and loved ones is a fresh wound go about putting out a daily paper.

In other words, his timing is perfect.

An hour later, Bates gives me a picture of Stepanek. I plan to frame it and put it someplace where I will see it every day and be reminded.

That winds will howl and waters rise and our possessions and lives be twisted into pretzel shapes. That rack and ruin are part of the human condition. But stubbornness is, too. Faith is, too. Defiance is, too.

We fight. We fight for our lives.

– Leonard Pitts Jr., winner of the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for commentary, is a columnist for the Miami Herald.