Harvest of the Sugar Cane-Pahokee, Florida 2005 Hurricane Wilma

I always meant to write this story as soon as I got home from the 2005 disaster season. I had the whole thing in my head, but never found the time. It’s been 3 years since I got home from Hurricane Wilma where I spent a few months in a small town on Lake Okeechobee called Pahokee, Florida.

First, let me say that Pahokee is the crappiest little town I’ve ever worked. The only industry there seemed to be drugs and prostitution. Most of the town is the poorest of the poor…just one Section 8 Housing Complex after another.

Those Section 8 Housing Complexes DO NOT fare well during a Category 3 or 4 hurricane, such as Wilma. The only place I could find to stay was a gorgeous Bed & Breakfast in West Palm Beach.

Oh my! What a contrast between Pahokee and West Palm Beach!!! There are no words to describe how beautiful West Palm Beach is or how ugly Pahokee. The power was out in the entire area…all of south Florida, for about a month, as I recall. And the B & B had a well with an electric pump, so we not only didn’t have electricity, we also didn’t have water.

Imagine working from 7 in the morning till 7 at night and then coming home to a bucket of cold water and a washrag. You’ve just waded through wet sheetrock, climbed over moldy sofas all day and fought off some huge mosquitoes. You deserve a hot shower. But I rarely got one.

Pahokee was full of wretched-looking single-wide mobile homes inhabited by illegal aliens who were only there to harvest the sugar cane crop. Those mobile homes were nasty, roach-infested hellholes to start with. After Wilma moved through, there was nothing left but soggy particle board with yellow insulation strewn around the yards.

You had to look beyond the grimy, mostly-destroyed dwellings. For if you could forget for a moment the wet mattresses and splintered two-by-fours lying in the streets, if you could look past the poverty, you might behold the beauty of the land itself.

Long bayous full of water ran beside those old country roads. Sure they were full of alligators, but at least there were signs to warn you not to get out of your car. Of course, I never listened and got out to take my photos anyway. I couldn’t help myself. The fields of sugar cane were ripe to harvest and oh my gosh! They went on forever….acres and acres of tall, green plants reaching to the sky.

I was grateful when one of my applicants told me to NEVER RUN THRU THE FIELDS OF SUGAR CANE, no matter how inviting it might look. She said the sugar cane plants were sharp as razors and would cut a man all to pieces. She said that’s why they burn the fields before harvesting.

So I pulled the car over one evening alongside one of the alligator infested bayous and watched the men light the fields on fire. It was a breathtaking sight against the blue sky and the orange sunset. Gray swirls of smoke rising to the heavens like ethereal spirits of the dead.

How many centuries had this arduous and often dangerous task been carried out by men like these?  Men who were not even citizens of the land but who needed a paycheck to support their families and so this is what fate had chosen for them.

You had to admire them for their willingness to do every distasteful job that no self-respecting American would do. And they were rewarded. Believe it or not, as long as they had one child born in the USA, they qualified for assistance and those appalling single-wide mobile homes that most of them had only paid a few thousand dollars cash for suddenly became worth around $11,000. That’s the set price FEMA gives for a destroyed mobile home.

I guess in my second year of working for FEMA, I stopped trying to make sense out of how the government does things and just accepted that there are some things that even God could probably not change or fix! And this was one of them.

Nothing to do but fill your days inspecting the waterlogged dwellings and get home before dark to your cold bucket of water, praying that the electricity might somehow be restored.

And, oh yes, one more thing…pull the car over on one of those lonely roads at sundown and watch the men light the fields of sugar cane on fire. Close your eyes as you inhale the rich, sweet aroma of burning cane plants and dream of home, a hot shower, friends. And the end of another hurricane season.

The day I drove into Pahokee I recall saying out loud to God, “Well, there’s no way this crappy town will ever grow on me!” You see, over the years, I’d come to realize that I would often develop a soft spot for all those little towns I worked. After a few weeks or months there, somehow their charm would get under my skin and I’d find myself shedding a tear or two as I’d pull out for the last time and head home.

But the day I drove into Pahokee I told God there was NO WAY I’d ever miss that God-forsaken place. He must have had a good laugh the day I drove out of Pahokee for the last time.

I was standing outside the only café in town, having just had my last meal: the plate lunch special and sweet tea. There were two men sitting in the rocking chairs on the sidewalk out front. They were picking their teeth and talking about their hurricane damage. They knew who I was and why I was there and that this was the day I was heading back to Dallas.

“Well, boys! I’ve really enjoyed my time in your little town,” I told them with a tear leaking from the right eye.

“Well, ma’am,” said one of them, “we’ve enjoyed having you here and we’re sorry the only hotel in town was destroyed and you had no place to stay.”

I chuckled. “Believe it or not, I run into that problem quite a bit in my work.”

They both laughed. “Well, come back again, won’t you. Next year sometime we should have our little town rebuilt,” the man said with a friendly smile.

“I rarely go anywhere that hasn’t just been destroyed, but I’ll sure consider it,” I told them.

They grinned, shook their heads and waved as I drove down Main Street toward the highway that would take me north toward Orlando and finally home to Dallas. I wept as I drove out of town.