The Salt Line, Vol. 103: A Century of Sweet Corn, Entered Into the Record
Minutes of the Standing Committee on Coastal Affairs, convened at a picnic table on Perdido Key. Quorum present: one columnist, one pelican, no objections. The pelican abstained on all matters. It always does.
Item One: A Farm That Declined to Become a Memory
The chair recognized, first, the news that Krupinski Farm has marked 100 years in Foley, a family operation that still draws customers for fresh produce and sweet corn. The committee also noted, in the same week, that Baldwin County is promoting Olde Time Days, an event to celebrate the county’s “rich farming heritage.”
The committee finds these two items in productive tension and asks that it be recorded.
Heritage is the word a place reaches for once something has become rare enough to exhibit. We are very good at it on this coast. We name subdivisions after the groves they replaced and roads after the families who used to own both sides of them. We will hold a festival, with enthusiasm and good parking, for a way of life most of the county now passes at forty-five on the way to a hardware store the size of an aircraft hangar.
Which is why a farm reaching a hundred years in Foley counts as news. It is not a reenactment. Nobody is demonstrating the old ways to schoolchildren. One family has kept deciding, season after season for a century, to grow corn in a county that increasingly grows rooftops, and the customers have kept deciding to show up for it. That is not heritage. That is a going concern, which is harder to get and much harder to keep.
The committee holds no grudge against Olde Time Days. Celebrate the plow. Admire the old tractors. But the most useful thing anyone on the coast can do for Baldwin County’s farming heritage costs a few dollars and a left turn: buy the sweet corn from the people still growing it, while there are still people growing it. A museum wants your admiration. A farm stand wants your money, and only one of the two is planning on another hundred years.
Ruling: Commended, with a standing order for corn. So moved.
Item Two: 🦟 The Sunset Motion
The committee took notice that Escambia County is fogging two districts for mosquitoes, the Mosquito Control Division beginning at sunset.
Beginning at sunset. The committee pauses to admire a public agency that schedules its work around the office hours of its opponent. Most of government waits for the problem to come to the front desk. Mosquito Control drives to where the problem lives, at the exact hour the problem gets up.
Ruling: Adopted unanimously. The committee’s ankles concur.
Item Three: Orange Beach Would Like a Word About Your Gel Beads
Orange Beach police are warning residents against targeting people with Orbeez guns, noting that frozen gel beads can cause serious injuries and lead to criminal charges.
The committee notes the word “frozen.” Somebody on the Alabama side looked at a toy that fires soft water beads and thought: what if it were winter. The Pleistocene arrived in Orange Beach by way of a freezer drawer, and the police department has had to explain, with admirable patience, that ice is a projectile.
Ruling: Warning endorsed. Keep the beads soft and aimed at nobody, and keep the freezer for the Royal Reds.
Item Four: The Keys to the City, Handed to a Man Who Won’t Show His Face
A German soccer fan who went viral during his World Cup trip to the United States has returned to Baldwin County and been gifted a key to his favorite U.S. city. He does not show his face on social media.
Baldwin County has done what every chamber of commerce dreams of: it charmed a stranger so thoroughly that he came back and told the internet about it. He had the whole country to choose from. Marketing departments spend fortunes trying to produce exactly one of him, and here he arrived on his own, asking nothing but anonymity.
Ruling: Key awarded. The committee regrets only that it cannot confirm whether he looked happy about it.
Closing Remarks
The week’s business comes to one idea: the things that last down here are the ones people keep choosing on purpose, whether that is a corn field, a spray truck at dusk, or a tourist who liked the place enough to come back. Nothing on this coast stays by default. There being no further business, the pelican left first.
— Chris
P.S. Know a farm stand, charter, shop, or event we’re missing? Add it — free, Florida side or Alabama side: /submit/
