Oh, to be young again, with your whole future in front of you.

Youth has become a sentimental memory from Naples north along the Gulf Coast. Lee County, for example, with a population close to 600,000, suddenly resembles an ex-jock at middle age, with a glory-days attitude, a hefty paunch and a health problem. Lee drivers might diagnose the problem as clogged arteries, the result of too much good living and too little thinking ahead.

But to get a taste of once-upon-a-time, drive east on the gleaming new S.R. 80, now four smooth-as-silk lanes of asphalt laid down from I-75 to LaBelle in Hendry County. (Only 22 miles of the coast-to-coast highway remain two lanes east of LaBelle, and that's scheduled to change within a few short years.) The highway slips out of Lee County, with its herd of upscale developments crowding both sides of the road, to enter a land still young, at least in terms of urbanization.

Water, like the highway, ties Lee and Hendry counties together, affecting the economies of each county. Hendry County is threaded by the Caloosahatchee River flowing westward from Lake Okeechobee, parallel to S.R. 80, bearing massive quantities of water into Lee County and the Gulf of Mexico.

"We share the same watershed and the same east-west connection [S.R. 80]. As far as influence, Lee tends to depend on Hendry's water flow, and Lee has a tendency to expect from Hendry water quality of a certain type," says Wayne Daltry, executive director of Lee County Smart Growth.

"The other influence is that we're sharing more and more markets, transportation needs and whatnot," Daltry adds. "Lee has technical expertise it can offer so Hendry doesn't have to make the same mistakes Lee did, like not worrying about the impacts of development because we think we can fix them later."

But sharing is easier said than done, as Daltry is the first to admit.

"I know that [water] releases from Okeechobee have been a real issue both for Hendry and Lee," says Janice Groves, executive director of the Hendry County Economic Development Council. "The Army Corps of Engineers [is] working hard to resolve those issues so the west coast counties don't get the dirty water. On the other hand, Lee provides their own little contribution to how dirty that water is, with so many septic tanks and developments-so it's not just Hendry."

The Two Sides of Hendry

At first glance, Hendry appears to be two personalities, distinguished by the west county and the east county.

LaBelle, the county seat, anchors the west with its surrounding 80,000 acres of citrus. That domain was more than 100,000 acres only about five years ago, according to Mongi Zekri, the five-county citrus agricultural extension agent, but citrus canker, hurricanes and development have shrunk the groves. (Hendry still has the most citrus trees in the state, with 12 million, but not the largest crop.)

Clewiston, dominated by the U.S. Sugar Corp., anchors the east county, which presses its nose into the flank of the Herbert Hoover dike surrounding Lake Okeechobee. U.S. Sugar taps into about 45,000 acres of Hendry County cane fields, second only to Palm Beach County, reports sugarcane extension agent Les Baucum.

Hendry's population today is about 40,000. That falls almost 15,000 people short of Lee's population in 1960, when mosquito control, air conditioning and Yankee money first united to alter its future. Hendry County itself had been formed only 37 years earlier, in 1923, after state officials lopped off the eastern half of Lee and named it for Francis Asbury Hendry, known as "the cattle king of South Florida."

The county is an anomaly-still undeveloped but with huge potential, its many new investors agree. Hendry is under siege not only from developers and the swelling population both east and west of its borders, but from its own statistics, suggests Groves.

"Hendry's been poor, with unskilled workers and uneducated people; less than 15 percent have college degrees, and we probably have as many or more mobile homes in our county per acre than any other in the state," she notes, adding that the unemployment rate, at about 10.6 percent, is the highest in Florida.

"We need to address our labor force because our county is slowly changing from an agricultural county to a farming industry county, but with a strong agricultural character to it. We have to train the farm workers so they can [move] into more technical jobs, like repairing machinery or jobs manufacturing a product from the byproduct of the citrus."

Prime Property

But other forces are at work in Hendry, which is part of the reason property values increased 45 percent in 2005, says Kristina Kulpa, Hendry County property appraiser.

"We've seen an influx of investors from Collier who sold million-plus-dollar properties there and built a beautiful million-dollar home on the river in LaBelle," Kulpa says.

But the biggest reason values are soaring lies beyond Hendry's border-but not very far beyond.

"When I tell people that halfway between LaBelle and Clewiston they're within a 90-minute drive of more than 7 million people, the lights begin to go on," explains Mitch Hutchcraft, vice president of regional development for The Bonita Bay Group, which now owns about 6,000 acres of mostly untouched land in Hendry County. "You're at the crossroads of S.R. 29 north and south, S.R. 27 north and south, and S.R. 80 running coast to coast. From Clewiston you can be at a shopping mall in West Palm Beach in an hour, and from LaBelle you're 25 or 30 minutes from I-75."

Even here, halfway between LaBelle and Clewiston, Hendry isn't what it once was. It is closer to what it's about to become.

In their small Pioneer Market with out-front gas pumps, displayed in front of the pork rinds and the fried chicken-obscuring even the beer, chips and soda-owners Raida Farah and her sister-in-law, Ellhan Farah, sell Piper Sonoma champagne, $20 cigars and Godiva chocolates.

"You need to teach people that they can find what they want here," says Raida, a transplanted New Yorker. "If they want a gift, they don't have to go to Fort Myers or Naples to get it. They love that."

Customers include commuters to the east and west coasts, locals with increasingly sophisticated tastes and travelers exploring the highway, she says.

Seven miles south of the Pioneer Market on S.R. 80, at the dead end of Hendry Isles Road, Teresa and Pat Foligno are feeling the future already.

They're pulling up stakes. The problem, they say, is the crowd pressing in from Dade County.

"We originally found our property by looking in the Miami Herald, and that's where we're going to advertise, because those people are all moving here," says Teresa, herself a Dade County native.

The Folignos, whose daughter will graduate from Clewiston High School this spring, are headed to Glades County. "My husband just has to live on the lake [Okeechobee]," Teresa explains.

Their two-year-old custom home on stilts, with two bedrooms and one bath, sits on two-and-a-half acres of trees and pasture, completely fenced, with a bass pond. Price: $235,000, which seems enormous to the couple.

"Four or five years ago, two-and-a-half acres out here was $5,000," Teresa recalls. "If you had a well, septic and a power pole, it was more. That's without a house. Now that would be like $100,000 or more without a house. So we can sell this for enough to get to Glades, and that's all we're really trying to do. It's just too crowded here now."

Budding Development

Although little sign of it appears to passersby except a landscaped berm and billboards that advertise the 187-acre Murphy's Landing just east of the Lee-Hendry line, The Bonita Bay Group has become the first new major economic force in this county since the U.S. Sugar Corp. moved in decades ago.

In LaBelle, the company owns 5,200 acres, including a mile of frontage on S.R. 80 and four miles on S.R. 29, which it intends to develop in a few short years. In Clewiston, it owns another 508 acres flanking S.R. 27, all of it planned to support upscale buyers of primary or secondary homes-similar to its Lee County market-many of them baby-boomer retirees, whose arrival the company, like so many other Southwest Florida companies, is awaiting.

"You have to be a little more patient in Hendry because it takes a little longer for things to develop, whereas in Lee you can go right to it," says Don Turner, a realtor with Gates, D'Alessandro and Woodyard, who grew up in LaBelle.

"As a developer you can't look at one to two years here; you have to have more vision, you have to see it as three to five years. I think that takes a more savvy developer."

Savvy and patient, agrees Hutchcraft.

"We've been out here for three years and not turned a shovel of dirt, because we've needed the community to understand we're here for their benefit as well as our own," he says.

"When we started at Bonita Springs years ago, people didn't believe us, either; they laughed at us. But back then, what were the demographics? A high percentage of mobile homes, a sleepy little river, and Naples was not wealthy then. That started happening only after I-75 and Alligator Alley were widened."

Just as S.R. 80 is being widened now all the way across the Florida peninsula.

"When you change a thoroughfare like that, it changes everything around it," says Turner. "Naples was like that before Alligator Alley was widened-not as affluent. A stock car race was the popular thing then. But when people started getting across the alley in 45 minutes after Fort Lauderdale and Miami got too full, it changed Naples forever. That's the same thing you'll see happening with LaBelle and Clewiston."

And it will happen not only with developers like The Bonita Bay Group or Lennar, which also has a foothold in the county, he says, but with lesser-known names.

Last year, for example, Turner sold more than 100 acres on the river along with the Port LaBelle Inn and Marina to Michael Lafferty, an Arizona-based developer, for about $7.4 million, or $40,000 per acre.

Lafferty recalls looking all over South Florida for opportunities before settling on the site where his company, Lafferty Development, could prepare finished lots for homebuilders.

"LaBelle stuck out with overwhelming charms compared to other locations," he says. "Lehigh Acres was one of my stops, and a lot of other little places inland are sort of bastardized with metal buildings, car lots and cheap developments. But this was a diamond in the rough. And it had great infrastructure, great planners-planning used to just mean a road and an intersection but it's much better than that now-and the oxbow in the river. In Florida, if there's water, it can be a resort destination."

He's restored the restaurant and lounge, bringing in Lee County-based Maine's Best Seafood, and he's moving through the planning process for a mixed-use community he envisions as similar to Bonita Bay's nearby Murphy's Landing, with its mile of frontage on the river.

In only about five years, figures Hutchcraft, all of this will mean massive visible change in Hendry's west county.

"LaBelle is a bedroom community now," he explains, "and those people have to work and shop and come into Lee, but the service base has to grow in Hendry. Those places will become more self-sufficient, and the trips down [S.R.] 80 won't be required, I'd say by 2012.

"All that means jobs immediately; we're going to need people with education and skills, engineers and recreation-services people and maintenance people."

Over in Hendry's east county, meanwhile, residential development isn't the only force that will help it bloom. Groves and other county officials acknowledge that a major corporation, Federal Express or a similar one they won't identify, has approached the county to talk about hugely expanding the airfield in a commercial zone on the west side of U.S. 27-a spot where the county owns four square miles of land.

And then there's the huge new power plant soon to be built in Glades County, which has little or no rental housing or motel rooms to put up workers during the multiyear project, and not even, for example, a single pharmacy, points out Turner. "There's a lot of opportunity for us in that," he says.

Opportunity can only be a good thing, Hendry officials say.

"I moved here about 22 years ago," recalls Groves. "When we first moved here, you could almost see this wall about halfway to Clewiston, and you couldn't get across. Fort Myers was a long ways away. But I've seen that wall crumble, and those distances shrink. That's probably good for everybody."