Imagine seeing one of these monsters coming towards you while on a leisurely Sunday afternoon ride. I used to take my car(s) on some Cane Haul roads which were mainly dirt roads that ran through sugar cane fields. I'm talking miles and miles of these dirt roads, intersecting here and there.. starting from the middle of nowhere and ending at a paved highway.
There were many sugar companies that had haul cane roads that kept off the highway and those are the roads I tried to stay off of. I didn't want to end up at the plant with all those monsters.
It was sort of interesting, take a sugar cane field.. maybe 50 acres or so, surround it with a big deep ditch and have water flowing through it all the time. That would raise the water table in the field and feed the sugarcane. Ingenious how that was done.
One of my objectives was to keep my Island Cruiser out of the ditch.. ha ha.
Little did people know, unless you lived on the island, that some of the best views of the most beautiful scenery of the island was only found on these cane haul roads. One got a view that was unobstructed.. no hotels, no houses, no movie theaters.. etc. Just cane fields and the majestic backdrop of the island. No wonder I spent so much time on these roads.
And then came the burning of the fields. I took lots and lots of photographs while I lived on Kauai but throughout my stay there I sent them off to friends and relatives. Some of them featured the workers going into the fields and starting fires, bulldozers at hand to push the burnt cane into heaps and cranes loading it into these enormous trucks. Smoke would fill the air and could be seen for miles. It was something to see, I tell ya.
Sugar was an important crop back in the 1980's but I understand it's fallen way to coffee, tea, macadamia nuts, etc. Nothing like going to a sugar mill and getting some nice fresh raw Hawaii sugar.
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