Everywhere, strewn across the valleys and plains, there are apples. Red spheres line the roads and stud the drying mud. They are strung like beads on the fences, impaled on the barbed wire. As the flood waters rose, people waded through water up to the waists, then shoulders – and then swam through the torrent, past all the royal gala and braeburn. As the river rose through Max Robertson’s home, he pushed his father and two dogs on to a floating table, and tried to crack a joke: “I said: look Dad, we can go apple bobbing.”
When rivers burst their banks and sent Cyclone Gabrielle’s flood waters sweeping through Hawke’s Bay, they washed over hundreds of hectares of orchards, stripping the fruit from the trees and propelling it across the valleys.
