When they departed after an hour of intense destruction, there was not a citrus tree standing in my yard, front or back. Gone was the cherished key lime tree that annually yielded thousands of the tiny yellow fruit that allowed me to become addicted to key lime pie. Gone, too, was the grapefruit tree that only last year gave me the first few treasured fruit after more than a decade of nurturing, fertilizing and cajoling. And, no more did I have an orange tree in my back yard. It too had yielded its first juicy product only last year after I nurtured it from a seed, then planted it as a tiny seedling nine years ago.
I first encountered the Florida Gestapo about a month ago when two women in blue jeans and white shirts carrying clipboards rang my doorbell.

"We'd like to check your backyard for citrus canker," one advised me.

I agreed, certain that there was no such vermin in my backyard. After all, hadn't my key lime tree yielded thousands of the tart, juicy little fruit just last summer? My goodness, I had almost grown tired of key lime pie because I had so much fruit.

So, I unlocked my gate and followed them into the backyard. They carefully observed each of my citrus trees, furiously scribbling notes on the paper on their clipboards. At length they advised me that all was well, that I had nothing to worry about and departed. And then the Gestapo showed up to take out my trees.

"Ve haf to do zis," the woman said sternly. "It is for ze gud of ze community. If ve do not eradicate your trees ve vill have terrible consequences. You haf no choice."

And then the men pulled the cords to start their chain saws in a deafening roar. I could not bear to watch as they began felling my trees. First, the grapefruit tree. It went quickly and there was very little sap-shed. Next, they dropped the orange tree. She went with only a rustling sigh of her leaves.

Then they closed in on the key lime tree. I saw her gather her branches in defense and heard one of the sawmen curse as he encountered her first thorny defense. He angled his chain saw toward her base so as to slice her low to the ground. She seemed to bend slightly and arch against the intruder, striving to avoid the screaming blade. Even in defeat she hurled a final barb, twisting as she fell to strike the sawman with a raking thorny branch, drawing blood from the side of his cheek.

"A tough one," I heard him mutter as he wiped the red stain from his face.

And then I watched as the men fed the limbs, branches, leaves and trunk of my cherished citrus trees into the whirring, agonizing sound that is the Asplundh machine, reducing what once produced edible fruit to a pulpy mass of nothing.

"You have helped in the war on citrus canker," the woman told me in her clipped accent, handing me a paper that advised me I would soon receive a $100 store credit at WalMart to replace my three trees with seedlings. I hardly think it was enough.

And so I wonder just what our Department of Agriculture is doing here. Does it really believe that it can stop the spread of an airborne disease like citrus canker by simply cutting down every citrus tree within 100 yards of every tree found infected with the disease? And if that is the thinking, I believe that in the end there will be few, if any, citrus trees left standing in Dade, Broward and Palm Beach counties.

And, they tell me that there is nothing wrong with the fruit, that citrus canker simply causes brown spots that make the fruit difficult to sell on the open market. They are cutting down the trees, they tell me, to prevent the spread of the disease to the large citrus groves in central Florida. This procedure has been so successful that citrus canker has spread from an isolated area of southwest Miami-Dade to virtually the entire county, into Broward and now into Palm Beach.

Is the Florida Department of Agriculture obsessed with a Don Quixote complex? A windmill, no matter how many different angles you look at it from, is still a windmill. Couldn't this money we're spending to cut down all the citrus trees in South Florida have been better spent on research to find a cure for citrus canker? I mean, if we can put a man on the moon we can certainly eradicate something as minuscule as citrus canker.

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