You could walk across Lake Okeechobee and not get your hair wet, if you picked your path carefully. Pocked with holes ten to twenty feet deep, the greater part of the lake has an average depth of less than four feet. The fresh water grass flats are filled with catfish, bass and shell crackers. In the spring and fall, flocks of migratory birds join the year round residents to darken the sky with their numbers. From the mundane duck and mud hen, to the flamingos and roseatta spoonbills, to herons stalking small prey in the shallows. The spectacular sight of a flock of spoonbills, startled into flight, silhouetted against the orange and blue of a tropical sunrise, the choreographed swing of their wings, rhythmically lifting them all. Gators float, like automated logs, never straying far from their nests, tick birds following close behind, eating the bugs stirred by their passing. Over and through it all, the buzzing of mosquitoes, the low hum creating a soundtrack for the idyllic scene.
Small low islands dot the south edge of the lake, each with a copse of stunted live oak. For years, hunters have used their hog-dogs to catch piglets in the woods to the west and brought them out to these islands by boat, coming back on the weekend with slops and grain, using the isolation of the lake islands as pigpens.
Surrounded by sawgrass and cattails, hidden from view, more goes on there than raising pigs. Telltale wisps of smoke from the occasional still could be seen, the light breeze carrying the sour smell of corn squeezings. In later years, that same breeze has blown the acrid stench of ether from meth labs across the lake, dissipating the fumes and disguising their origins. More than one officer had disappeared, especially game and fish agents, after stumbling onto cat-fisherman supplementing their income with speed or moonshine and determined to never spend a day in jail. The body disposed of in gator holes, their boats found floating, deserted in the middle of the empty lake.
In the thirties, as part of the WPA, a channel was cut from Moorehaven to Pahokee, right through the middle of the open area of the Lake. Dug to allow large boat traffic traveling from the gulf to the Atlantic to avoid the Florida Straight with its reefs and unpredictable weather, it crossed the peninsula from Ft. Myers to West Palm Beach. A channel was dug around the rim and the fill piled high to create a levee along the south shore of the lake. The immediate reason for this massive realignment of nature was the Bean City Disaster of 1923.
In September of that year, a large storm formed off the coast of Africa and gathered strength as it crossed the Atlantic. A force four hurricane when it arrived in the neighborhood of south Florida, it glanced off the east coast, near Miami, and headed out to sea, towards the Bahamas, but never got there. Turning without warning, it made landfall near Jupiter Inlet and bore due west across the state.
Bean City was a town of 6000 people; most of them migrants working on the many truck farms laid out on the rich flood plain south of the lake. Setting seven miles south of Clewiston, it had a small downtown of stores and big houses surrounded by groups of shanties and lean-to's, extended family encampments, and the farms. A railhead on the north side of town provided transportation for winter vegetables grown in the dark soil.
Fresh zucchini, tomatoes and lettuce brought a good price in New York in February, and had made a few fortunes. Planting in the soft dirt was started in September and done mostly by hand, requiring many hands, so the foreman had been hiring and the Okies were crowded into the shanties, hoping for work.
The skies before a hurricane are deceptively calm. Squall lines had passed through all night and the day before that but nothing too unusual for Florida in September. The men had left for the fields, the women, and children just waking when the fringes of the storm came roaring down on them. They had become accustomed to powerful thunderstorms, a common enough occurrence, with wind gusting to seventy miles per hour, a half-hour of fear. Then the sun would emerge, lighting a freshly washed world, scrubbed clean by the wind and rain, so no one thought much as the dark clouds bore down from the east. Another storm, like the one last week and the one the week before.
This turned out to be quite different.
A major hurricane, this storm packed sustained winds of one hundred and seventy miles an hour, was dropping ten inches of rain an hour and was moving very fast. As it hit the slick, warm surface of Lake Okeechobee, it lurched, drunk with heat energy, and dove across the lake, dead on at Bean City.
The eye passed north of the town, bringing the most violent part of the eye wall to bear on the unsuspecting residents. The hurricane force winds pushed the entire contents of the lake out of its confines and threw a ten-foot wall of water, topped by the blasting winds, through Bean City.
The shantytown yielded without any noticeable slowing of the wave, sticks, canvas and human bodies mixed with all the accessories of life. Small tornadoes, spawned by the larger storm, randomly plucked articles, cars, horses, and people, from the mess, lifting them high into the air, to be caught by the gusts and thrown for miles.
The stores and houses of the city center afforded no more shelter than the shanties; all were swept before the storm. The frame buildings had not been built to withstand this onslaught, pine clapboard structures with tin roofs that were designed to provide comfort in the sub-tropical heat. The tin sheeting went first, sucked off by the wind. Once one section tore loose, the others quickly followed. The water poured into the streets, slamming against the buildings, pushing them off their foundations, collapsing the walls. The wind then yanked the siding off and ripped the exposed frames apart, with the rapidly rising currents tilting the remains so the gusts could reach underneath and start the houses rolling. As shards broke loose, the storm grabbed them, creating deadly missiles that cut through anything in their path.
The freight yard, along with all the packinghouses, switch engines and rail cars were smashed, pieces left tumbling in the wind whipped surf. A Steam locomotive, washed from its tracks, slowly sank into the softened earth, the hissing of the water dousing the firebox unheard in the gales.
There were no trees to stop the flow or break the wind, nothing to find shelter behind, no high ground to retreat to, only churning muck and roiling water with the wind snatching the screams out of the throats of the drowning, all sound swallowed by the roaring wind.
The lucky died quickly, smashed or severed by flying debris. Some were crushed in collapsing homes. Most were pulled under and drowned by the undertow, struggling in the black, muddy water, the sky so dark there was no light to swim towards.
It was all over in only six hours, from onset to aftermath. The few survivors came crawling from what little remained of the city and staggered about numbly, too shocked to do more than sob. The winds dropped to a tropical breeze and the clouds parted, allowing the late afternoon sun to peek through. The standing water rapidly receded from the streets, back into the swamps and lake, leaving a scene of total devastation.
Everything that hadn't been shattered, had sunk into the soft loam, leaving tell-tale lumps and humps, here and there, hints of what was buried beneath. Any exposed anchor had gathered a snag of flotsam, a jumbled tangle of remains, both inanimate and formerly animate. Battered human bodies, twisted into strange shapes, lifeless eyes staring at the calm sky, limbs all akimbo.
The spokes in the drive wheels of the locomotive had strained a logjam of corpses from the flood. The roadbed had washed out beside the derailed engine, forming a funnel in the current carrying the bodies, pouring them through the trap. The remains were pressed so tightly against the undercarriage of the over turned train, they did not appear human.
Exact numbers of dead were never compiled, so many complete families disappeared that there was no one to identify the bodies or report someone missing. Complicating the matter, coffins had floated out of the graves at the cemetery, the waves breaking them open, those bodies mixed with the fresh dead. The corpses were gathered and loaded onto flatbed trucks, taken north to higher ground near Sebring and buried in mass graves.
The loss of life was not the disaster that got the project approved. No, it was the loss of revenue the storm caused. Washington politicos didn't get their vegetables that winter and decided that would not be allowed to happen again. There were plenty of Okies, so no one much missed them, but the bankers and farm owners had lost an unsecured investment.
All that remains of Bean City is a gas station, the orange of its old Gulf Oil sign faded in the tropical sun, and a country store selling chewing tobacco and Nehi. Sugar cane fields have replaced the tracks and freight yard, featureless expanses of ten-foot grass cut every mile by dykes. The mass graves remain unmarked and forgotten, over grown meadows that will never be developed, only remembered when a prospective buyer has a them surveyed and rediscovers their history. The official memorial lies south of the Miami River Locks. In the median of US 27 stands a single signpost, alone in the middle of the divided highway, with two city limit signs hanging on it. One sign faces north, the other south.
Bean City
Population
4