Sugarcane Haulers and Mud on the Highway (and your car)! Old Plantation Days, December 2011

In past issues I have often talked about the flume systems that cross much of the sugarcane lands of the Hamakua Coast.  These flumes were a method of moving harvested cane from the fields down to the Mills near the ocean.  All the cane was hand cut in the fields was bundled and thrown into the flume where it would course down the slopes meandering on grade and slopes until it finally reached the Mill.

With the advent of mechanical harvesting methods in the mid to late 1940’s, fluming of cane was slowly replaced by trucks.  Not just any trucks, but heavy horsepower big rigs with a very unique trailer system.  How many of you remember these trucks on the road?, How many of you never even saw one because you were too young or hadn’t moved here until after the cane companies had shut down?

There was a saying if you lived or travelled on the Hamakua Coast highway, “harvesting, no sense wash my car”.  These cane haul trailers I refer to were large open trailers with a chain nets hanging from side to side within the trailer.  The cane was fairly open to all to see and certainly the dirt, mud and trash had the ability to leave the trailer, get onto the road, and then plant itself firmly and thickly on the outside of your car.  The windshield washer fluid in your vehicle needed to have a capacity of about ten gallons if you were the sorry person to be first in line behind a cane hauler!  There was also an odor, an odor of mud and fermented sugarcane juice.  (I gotta be honest with you guys, I kinda miss the smell of cane on the road). However, the mess was incredible when harvesting was going on in a very wet rainy period, there were cane pieces all over the highway along with the mud.  One of the jobs on the plantation was a Highway Cane Cleaner…yup, union wage job, out on the road with a pitchfork, full yellow rubber rain suit on, and the ability to breathe underwater if need be.  The cane cleaner crew was spaced out at regular mile post intervals and walked their section from one end to the other all day long flinging cane from the middle of the road to the side of the road.   Hauling was going on 24 hours a day and it was too dangerous to have the crew out there in the middle of the night so you can imagine what the roads looked like at day break and the cleaning crew got started!

A hard to fathom image is Cane trucks coming down Waianuenue Avenue.  When the KPUA ford was flooded by high waters of the Wailuku River the trucks from harvest fields in Kaumana would come all the way down to Hilo Union School then turn left onto Kaiulani and Wainaku Streets!!  There was story often told about how one cane truck driver missed the right turn onto Wailuku Drive and drove across the wooden bridge to Reeds Island.  The truck had to back out over the bridge again with large creaking bending beams.  It’s a miracle the “6 ton bridge” didn’t collapse under the weight of a 30 ton cane truck!!

Another thing about chain-net trailers and private vehicles…broken windshields.  I cannot tell you how many windshields the plantations replaced over the course of decades of cane hauling but it must have been in the thousands.