The Belle Glade Waterways – Lake Okeechobee Basin
She did not forget them, the circles drawn in the dirt, the channels that turned her flood into harvest, her breath into prayer. Lake Okeechobee watched as the Belle Glade people shaped the land not in conquest, but in communion. Their hands moved with the water, not against it.
From the clouds came the deluge, from the rim came the rise. Each rainy season, the lake swelled beyond her belly, spilling into the flatlands. Where others would fear, the Belle Glade people adapted. They read the water’s rhythm like a story. Around her edges, they carved crescents, circles, and mounds that cradled the flood, guiding it not away but through. These were not defenses. These were invitations.
The great circular ditches they dug did not encircle with walls, they encircled with understanding. Canals radiated from their centers like spokes, not to escape the water but to share it. The lake sent her gift, and the people sent it onward, to fields of maize and calabash, to wetlands humming with frogs and herons.
They lived within the flow. Their villages rested on mounds raised from shell and earth, high enough to kiss the wind but near enough to feel the lake’s pulse. During dry seasons, fish gathered in shrinking pools, and the people gave thanks. In wet seasons, water spilled into their carved rings, and the people rejoiced. Their canals did not only carry fish and trade, they carried meaning, from one mound to another, from ceremony to sustenance.
At the center of it all, always, was water.
The lake remembers the crescent-shaped mounds. She remembers the ash from fires long gone, mixed with the bones of garfish and deer. She remembers songs offered in rhythm with paddle strokes, and footsteps on packed shell trails, rising from circle to circle like ripples moving inward. She remembers the people who looked at her not as a barrier, but as a mirror.
And when the strangers came, with machines that did not sing and maps that did not listen, the lake recoiled. The strangers saw swamps to be drained, not patterns to be honored. They cut through the old circles with straight lines. They drained too deep, too fast. The circles broke.
But the lake still remembers their shape.
When rain falls heavy and ancient water seeks its path, it sometimes pools in the places where canals once curved. Birds return to the circles they never knew were carved. Seeds awaken in ditches long thought erased. The memory stirs beneath sugar and sod.
The Belle Glade canals were not monuments to dominance, they were expressions of trust. Trust in the lake, in the sky, in the rhythm between flood and root. Theirs was a society sculpted by season, not by sword.
And though their names are whispered only by wind and archaeologists now, their roads remain beneath the surface. Not gone, only sleeping.
The lake remembers the circle that drains the sky.