Istokpoga Flooding

By

Adora Mitchell Bayles

November, 1953

J.D. Mitchell stood in the middle of the road while the storm surge of Lake Istokpoga sluiced over his legs. Standing in a knee-deep river of muck, lake water and his entire crop of beautiful uprooted caladiums, he was the epitome of a defeated man.

Wholesale florists grow caladiums in Lake Placid, Florida, a little town in south Central Florida. Lake Istokpoga is a large body of water in the same area, named by Seminole Indians “Dead Man In Water.”

The soil in that area is of the ideal chemical content for growing the Brazilian Natives – caladiums and elephant ears.

My father had built an empire as a florist, selling thousands of the tropical tubers all over the world. To see him standing there right after the winds had died down from the nameless hurricane was the most profoundly unhappy picture I will remember in my lifetime. In his old trench coat, rain-drenched Stetson, head down, he looked like an old man. He was only 46.

Seventeen-year-old J.D. Junior and I tried to help by rescuing as many of the tubers as we could as they floated into the swamps across the road. But alligators, snakes, quicksand and many other dangers discouraged any serious rescue attempts.

Somehow, Daddy pulled out of the crisis for a while. He managed to have some planting stock to put in the ground the following spring. But with a lost crop, he could not supply the many customers. So there would be no money that year. There would be no work crew that year with the exception of a few faithful resident workers who lived in cabins on the farms.

Sitting in my upstairs bedroom in our big house in Sebring, I heard my father’s voice outside. “Adora!”

I stepped over to the window. There stood Daddy, head down, eyes rolled upward, posture not as erect as usual. “Sis, I need you and Jimmy to work on the farm this spring and summer. I can’t pay you but when the crop is in and we ship, you’ll be paid when the money starts to come next February.”

J.D. Jr. and I spent the summer following the tractor-pulled dolly, dropping bulbs into the neat holes the spoke-wheeled dolly had poked into the muck. We hoed weeds in the broiling sun and swam in the lake to cool off. We would jump off the rebuilt dike and land on the beach, one leg jarred by the concrete-like wet sand while the other leg sank knee-deep in black muck.