For the past few weeks, I've been on vacation, and away from stories about murders, car crashes, war and scandals.

I'm an advocate of news consumption, naturally, but it's good for the soul to get away from heavy doses of depressing stories at least once a year.

We drove across Washington, Idaho, Montana and a bit of Wyoming, then back to Seattle again before flying off to New Mexico to visit family. We didn't take a computer along and rarely did more than glance at the headlines in the local paper of whatever town we were passing through, for the first couple of weeks.

We'd read about the weather, of course, because we wanted to know whether we'd get rained on in the next place we stopped. There kept being stories about a storm in the Atlantic, then in the Gulf. There are always storms in that part of the world in late summer.

I kept thinking about weather, but for a different reason. The country we drove across was as beautiful as we'd heard it would be. Great expanses of carved geography that make you call a view a vista.

There was a whole lot of space, but not so many people. I suppose there are many reasons for that, but the big one is weather.

Summer may make a person want to settle in, but winter in that part of the country is not a friendly thing, and it sticks around for quite awhile.

Winter weeds people out. Bad as it can be, though, it's a regular thing. You know it's coming and what it's going to be like, and you can either hunker down or get out. If it weren't for winter, there might be big cities in Montana and Wyoming, full of people drawn to the natural beauty.

New Orleans has a different relationship with Mother Nature. It sits in a spot that encouraged growth — mostly flat land with access to the Mississippi River and to the Gulf of Mexico. Its storms can be sudden and furious, but mostly it is sunny and warm.

It's a port city, like Seattle, but it is the opposite of Seattle in disposition and composition. New Orleans is a party town, for one thing. For another, its people are mostly black and a large portion of the population is poor.

A lot of people in Seattle have roots along the Gulf Coast, especially black folks who came to the Northwest in large numbers to work in shipbuilding or at Boeing during and just after WWII.

I thought about them when the headlines about that gulf storm started getting larger. By then, we were in New Mexico and we started watching TV news to see what was happening.

For a while after the storm hit, reports seemed to gloss over the impact on New Orleans and concentrate on the rest of the coast and on gas prices.

Our first day in New Mexico brought an evening thunderstorm that became a hail storm. Golf-ball-size hailstones knocked out the window of our rental car. I went to bed thinking how unfortunate we were.

The next day's news changed my perspective. The levees were failing. Flood waters rushed further into New Orleans, and every day after, the situation got worse.

We watched pictures of people wading in rising water, huddling in shelters, being lifted by helicopters, crying. We saw people dragging a relative's body through the streets, and we saw people running from stores with full arms.

Most of the people we saw were black.

Days ahead, people were told to get out because that ordinary storm had grown into a category 5 hurricane. It took a while before the reports I was seeing began to answer the obvious question: Why were these people left behind?

There were some stubborn people, of course, but that wasn't the only answer. Most people who had access to transportation and money did flee, but a lot of poor people didn't have a way out. Some of them were suspicious of authorities anyway.

At some point, I read that a study had already told officials evacuation would be a problem. Other experts had long said the levees were inadequate.

There was real news about this storm long before it happened, but it was the slow kind that passes without catching most people's attention.

That kind of news is in the paper every day, but most of us aren't especially tuned into it. Who is glued to the TV watching reports on global warming?

There is another kind of story, too, about class and race in New Orleans and in America. The flood washed away the top layer of soil that kept mostly hidden away the differences money, race and history make in America.

Disaster planners took it for granted that everyone would be plugged into the social system and that people would have the means to save themselves. There is a lot to sort out about the slow response to those who were left behind ... and more fundamentally about the existence of invisible people living on the margins across the country.

Jerry Large: 206-464-3346 or jlarge@seattletimes.com.