Go read this L.A. Times report about seven children—mostly toddlers, the eldest, six years old—who were lost and found in New Orleans these last few days.

In the chaos that was Causeway Boulevard, this group of refugees stood out: a 6-year-old boy walking down the road, holding a 5-month-old, surrounded by five toddlers who followed him around as if he were their leader.

They were holding hands. Three of the children were about 2 years old, and one was wearing only diapers. A 3-year-old girl, who wore colorful barrettes on the ends of her braids, had her 14-month-old brother in tow. The 6-year-old spoke for all of them, and he told rescuers his name was Deamonte Love.

The story of how they got there, and what happened next, is just remarkable. There are a lot of lessons you might draw from it—organizational failures and successes, the appalling choices that people sometimes have to make, courage in unexpected places, and how important it can be be for people to pay attention and make an effort. It’s also a reminder of something else, something I can’t quite articulate properly. Events like Katrina breed chaos, and that leads to long chains of contingencies, to accidents piled upon accidents, sometimes lucky sometimes not. We come across people in the middle of such chains of events. In most cases, their situation will not conform to some tidy morality tale. It might look like it does, but that’s because we like to tell stories about how people got what they deserved. What you are really seeing—as in the case of these seven children—may turn out to be another thing altogether, or the accidental byproduct of many things.