Hancock County, Miss. ? This isn’t what a beach looks like in the summer.

There are supposed to be kids constructing castles and women in bikinis playing volleyball. The restaurants and bars are supposed to be filled with people drinking colorful cocktails with little umbrellas in them. There should be a sailboat on the bay, or maybe a surfer.

None of that is here. The buildings are gone, there’s junk on the beach and the place is deserted.

This is what the largest natural disaster in U.S. history looks like.

It also looks like smashed houses, stripped-out rooms filled with black mold, blue tarps on roofs and see-through buildings that no longer have walls.

I’ll admit that my motivation for going to the Gulf Coast, which I did with a mission team from First United Methodist Church, was as much about understanding the scope of the storm as it was to do a minuscule portion of the work that remains there.

Even now, nine months after the storm, I’ve found no photo, word or article can explain how it looks. I find myself, as others do, using cliches to describe it.

The power and volume of the water is difficult to comprehend, now that the roads are dry. Photos show vehicles tossed around like toy cars in dirty dishwater, even miles inland. We were in one house that had 5 feet of water in it – even though it was stilted 12 feet off the ground.

They say 94 percent of the debris in Hancock County has been cleared, but piles of debris still line the streets, waiting to be picked up.

There are some 8,000 FEMA trailers sitting in yards and parking lots in this county, and there are some pretty poor folks and some pretty rich folks living in them. Katrina didn’t care whose homes she destroyed.

For five days, our mission team slept in a church and accepted work assignments. We insulated houses, roofed a shower facility, pulled nails from studs and doused the insides of houses with Clorox water to keep mold from growing.

It’s sticky starting at sunrise in Mississippi, so the work was sometimes difficult. But I never heard anyone from our group complain, not even once.

“I felt good about what we did accomplish,” said Al Amon, a 52-year-old Hallmark employee who went along. “I guess what I didn’t feel good about, driving away, is that I could spend a year down there doing stuff and not even scratch the surface.”

Other groups from Lawrence, including the LEO Center, First Southern Baptist Church, campus ministry groups and Christ Community Church, have had similar experiences on mission trips to the South.

“I saw there would be need down there for years into the future,” says Byron Edmondson, director of the LEO Center, who last went to New Orleans in March. “It’s one thing to see it in the newspaper or in clips on TV. But when you drive and see block after block and mile after mile, it stays with you.”

Locals in Mississippi, who assume you want your tea sweetened and still consider Kansans to be Yankees, say it’ll be five to 10 years before the Gulf Coast is back to where it was before, as far as structures go.

But certain impacts, like having your friends move away or spending a night in a tree so you don’t drown, can’t be measured.

Then there’s this: Hancock County emergency management workers wrote numbers on their arms in indelible ink, then kept a corresponding list on a piece of paper tucked high in their headquarters. It would be easier to identify their bodies that way, if they didn’t make it through the storm.

Those sorts of things stick with you, no matter if your house is standing.

I wanted to drive away from Mississippi with a sense of hope, a proverbial lesson in the resiliency of the human spirit. I wasn’t overwhelmed by that feeling.

But I suppose, in a newly opened coffee shop or freshly painted living room, that hope still glimmers. There’s just a lot of hard work standing in the way.