The Salt Line, Vol. 140: The Blue Angels Come Home, and the Coast Is Asked to Look Up
Minutes of the Gulf Coast Committee on Public Matters, Sunday session. Quorum was assumed, as it usually is. All rulings are the clerk’s own opinions and are binding on no one.
Item One: The Matter of the Homecoming
The facts before the committee. Naval Air Station Pensacola has set its Homecoming Airshow with the Blue Angels for Friday, Nov. 6, and Saturday, Nov. 7. WKRG reports the same dates, and local coverage calls it the team’s first homecoming show in two years.
The committee’s ruling: this is the best-run institution on the coast, and we should say so out loud.
Consider what most public bodies in this region offer. A plan is updated. A study is commissioned. A meeting is held about the meeting. The result, years later, is a roundabout. The Blue Angels offer a squadron of jets, a schedule, and a result that arrives on time and is visible from the parking lot. No one has ever stood on a beach, craned their neck, and asked for the public comment period to be extended.
It is also, one notes, the only government function that is improved by being deafening. Elsewhere, noise is a complaint, filed in triplicate and answered in spring. Here it is the product. A whole population that spends the year writing letters about leaf blowers will, for a weekend, tilt their heads back and welcome the sound.
The committee does see a real question underneath the affection. The airshow is a homecoming, which implies the team has been away, and a coast that depends on visitors ought to ask what it does when the visitors it loves most are scheduled to leave again by Sunday night. Roads that handle an ordinary Saturday will be asked to handle an unusual one. Anyone driving in from the Key would be wise to treat the Friday and Saturday dates the way one treats a weather watch: not a catastrophe, but a reason to leave early and bring something to eat.
On the Key, the show will likely sound like a distant argument with the sky, and that is as good a reason as any to find a patch of sand, a chair and a free afternoon. The committee approves of this, as it approves of anything that requires no vote.
Disposition: Motion carried. The clerk will bring a hat and no complaints.
Item Two: The Matter of the Registration Table
The facts. Temporary FEMA registration points open in Escambia County starting today, Sunday, Nov. 1, to help residents apply for federal disaster assistance after Hurricane Isaias. State Emergency Response Team staff will be at each site to answer questions, and Fox10 lists the first day’s hours as 1 p.m. to 5 p.m.
Ruling: a declaration is a sentence; a registration point is a verb.
Much has been said in recent weeks about help being declared. It is a pleasant word, and it costs nothing to say. What a person with a damaged roof actually needs is a place with a name, an address and a person who can answer a question. That is what opens today, and four hours on a Sunday afternoon is a short window for a long form. The committee recommends that anyone who needs one go early and bring their paperwork, and that everyone else check on a neighbor who does.
Item Three: The Matter of the Dial
The facts. WUWF spoke with the founders of WPNX, a community radio station that gives Pensacola a place for voices to be heard.
Ruling: the committee has long suspected that the coast has more to say than its billboards do.
Most of what greets a visitor here has been written by a marketing department and approved by a second one. Community radio is the opposite arrangement: local people, a microphone, and no one to tell them how they sound. It will be uneven, and the committee means that as praise. A town that can still hear itself think out loud is a town that has not yet been fully rendered into a brochure.
Item Four: The Matter of the Walk
The facts. An estimated 10,000 people took part in Saturday’s Making Strides Against Breast Cancer walk in downtown Pensacola, many of them walking for loved ones fighting the disease or lost to it.
Ruling: noted with respect, and no joke is offered.
Ten thousand people picked an ordinary morning to show up for strangers and family alike. The committee has very little to add, and means to keep it that way.
Closing Remarks
A coast tends to describe itself through the things it sells: sand, sunsets, a discount in the off-season. The week’s real evidence points elsewhere. People gather to look up at a few jets, to stand in line for help, to listen to each other on the radio and to walk a few miles for someone else. None of it is on the brochure, and all of it is the reason anyone comes back.
The committee stands adjourned.
— Chris
P.S. Know a restaurant, charter, shop, or event we’re missing? Add it — free, Florida side or Alabama side: /submit/
