The Salt Line, Vol. 111: The Goodbye Returns to the Gate, Pre-Screened
Pensacola International reintroduces the goodbye
Observed: the concourse side of the checkpoint. Status: returning, under permit.
Conservation biology has a word for returning an animal to ground it once held: reintroduction. The red wolf has had one. The whooping crane has had one. As of Friday, Pensacola has one of its own, and the species is the person who walks you to your gate. Under Gateside by TSA PreCheck, now in place at Pensacola International Airport, approved visitors with an active PreCheck membership can pass through security without a boarding pass. The program is free, WEAR reports, and the airport’s executive director, Matt Coughlin, put the reason plainly: “We hear how much it means to be there for a goodbye or a welcome home.” That may be the most humane sentence anyone has said about an airport this century.
Anyone old enough remembers the species in its prime: the grandmother at the window with a hand-lettered sign, the sailor’s family crowding the gate, the long wave through the glass. After 2001 it retreated to baggage claim, the least romantic room in aviation, where reunions are staged beside a carousel of other people’s luggage.
Every reintroduction comes with terms, and these are worth reading. Wolves go back out wearing radio collars. This population is drawn entirely from people the federal government has already background-checked, fingerprinted and charged an enrollment fee, which makes “free” true in the way a country club’s pool is free. Each visit also needs its own online pass, requested one to three days ahead and good for one calendar day. The goodbye now takes an RSVP. And the people likeliest to hold the card are the ones who fly constantly and are sick of airports; the ones who would most like to stand at a gate again, because they so rarely see one, are the least likely to have it.
Release it anyway. Pensacola is a Navy town, where a great many goodbyes have always wanted to happen at the gate, and October brings grandparents down for the quiet season and renters through on their way to the Key. The airport has given back a small, decent thing, at a price most of its regulars have already paid. I note only that the habitat was redeveloped in the species’ absence. It now sells neck pillows. The brown pelican, it should be said, made its comeback on this coast without a membership card.
ECUA answers a letter the pipe wrote in July
Observed: beneath Monteigne Drive. Behavior: announced itself.
The Emerald Coast Utilities Authority is about to take on a $2 million project to replace a 24-inch sewer main along Monteigne Drive in Pensacola, and the headline gives the reason in two words: July overflow. Infrastructure here is a burrowing species, observed only when it surfaces, and a sewer main has exactly one way of surfacing. “Overflow” is the term of art, the same word we use for a bathtub, which spares the reader and flatters the pipe. ECUA puts the cause down to aging pipe and roots, so the trees found the weak spot before the budget did. Replacing it is the right call. On a coast whose entire economy is the clean water just downhill of everything, it was also the only one.
The fault, dear ratepayer, is not in our summer
Observed: the October power bill. Behavior: blames the weather.
FPL has laid out how to monitor your energy use, and WEAR’s report states the premise plainly: a high bill is easy to blame on the summer heat, but there could be something else going on. That is a hard sell in Escambia County, where blaming August is a civic tradition. FPL’s usual suspects are the A/C and the water heater. The report’s star witness, though, came from inside the newsroom: a WEAR reporter away for two weeks got a bill nearly double what it should have been, and the power on it turned out to be the neighbor’s. Another station employee got about $200 in credits after a similar error. Second-home owners on the Florida side of the Key, whose units sit empty for weeks at a time, are best placed to catch this, because an empty condo with a busy meter has some explaining to do. The fault, it turns out, is sometimes not in ourselves but next door.
Public television returns under a familiar name
Observed: the channel listings. Expected: November 1.
Emerald Coast PBS, a new nonprofit, launches Nov. 1 to restore PBS and PBS KIDS programming to the Florida Panhandle. The gap opened July 1, when Pensacola State College ended its PBS affiliation after losing $1.5 million in federal and state funding. Four months is nothing in the life of a public institution and a geological age in the life of a four-year-old. A naturalist would call the name camouflage: “Emerald Coast” already belongs to a great many condo complexes and to the utility authority replacing that sewer main, so the Panhandle’s preschoolers and its plumbing will now answer to the same brand. That isn’t a complaint. A coast that names its public television after the color of its water is at least clear about what it’s for.
Molino prepares for winter, such as it is
Observed: Molino Branch Library. Behavior: seasonal preparation.
Escambia County Master Gardeners held a workshop on hobby greenhouses at the Molino Branch Library, with practical tips on economical setups and preparation for the upcoming cooler months. “Cooler months” does heavy lifting in this county. Winter here tends to arrive a night or two at a time, with little notice, and leave before the snowbirds realize it was in town. That is exactly why the gardeners are right. Gardens here aren’t lost to a long cold. They’re lost to the one night nobody planned for, and the people with a greenhouse are the people who planned.
Last entry
Read in one sitting, most of this week’s specimens turn out to be about barriers and what they let through: a checkpoint that will now admit the vetted, a pipe that stopped holding in July, a meter that billed one household for another’s power, a wall of plastic between a tomato and January. A coast is mostly a long series of decisions about what gets through. We argue at length about the gates and hardly at all about the pipes, and it’s the pipes that make the news without being invited.
— Chris
P.S. Field reports welcome. Know a restaurant, charter, shop or event we’re missing, Florida side or Alabama side? Add it, free: /submit/
