The Salt Line, Vol. 141: A Parade Gets a Memorandum, and a River Gets Its Pines Back
The city that takes its parades in writing
This week the Gulf Shores City Council is scheduled to discuss Fat Tuesday parades, and the agenda item, per FOX10’s report, is approval of a memorandum of understanding between the city and the Krewes & Commerce Parade Alliance. That is the whole of what we know. It is also, I think, enough.
Consider the genre. Carnival is the one civic institution whose entire premise is that nobody has understood anything since noon. The costumes are an argument against identification. The throws arrive from above, unrequested. The route is a rumor that becomes a street. And into this, the city proposes to introduce a memorandum, the document form whose purpose is to ensure that two parties understand each other perfectly while committing to as little as possible.
I do not say this to mock the effort. The opposite. A parade on this coast is a negotiation among krewes, merchants, traffic, sound, trash, and the delicate matter of who is responsible when a float meets a curb. Somebody has to write down who closes which street. If the alliance of krewes and commerce is willing to sit at one table and sign one page, that is more cooperation than most of our zoning disputes have managed in a decade, and I would take it.
My only complaint is with the register. A memorandum of understanding is a document you write when you intend to keep the relationship vague and the exits open. Parades are the one event where we should do the reverse: be precise about the boring parts so that everything else may be gloriously imprecise. Who sweeps. Who pays for the sweeping. What time the street is a street again. Put those in ink, and the rest of Fat Tuesday can go on being a rumor.
Orange Beach, a few miles east, will be watching with the particular interest of a neighbor who has also owned a folding chair on the shoulder of a road at dusk. If Gulf Shores pulls this off, expect imitation. If it does not, expect a second memorandum.
Forty acres, and a patient kind of tree
Baldwin County officials gave an update on the Magnolia River Restoration Project, and the post FOX10 summarized says the habitat improvements include planting of up to 40 acres of longleaf pine.
Notice the verb. Planting. Most public announcements are about what will be built; this one is about what will be put in the ground and left alone. The longleaf is not a tree for the impatient; it spends its early years looking like a clump of grass with aspirations. Its payoff arrives long after any election, which is the quiet virtue of the thing: a project that cannot be ribbon-cut on schedule. We should have more of those, and fewer that finish just in time for a photo.
Two hundred rescues and a quiet ledger
Navarre Beach lifeguards say they conducted more than 200 rescues this season, and the post also says there were no drownings. Read the second half twice.
Good public safety is invisible by design; the best outcome is the one where nothing is written about you. This is the rare season-ending report in which the absence of a story is the story. Every Gulf town should read it as a reminder that flags are not decoration, and that the people in the tower are why the vacation photos still have everyone in them. We keep a running read on both sides of the state line at /beach-today/, and it is worth checking before the car is unloaded, not after.
Look up, it is November
WUWF has Dr. Wayne Wooten’s astronomy tips for November, which is the most civic-minded thing on the news feed today. The sky is the one public amenity with no permit office, no memorandum, and no council vote. The off-season’s real gift is the dark that comes early and the crowds that don’t.
The closer
Between a parade that wants a signature, a forest that wants decades, and a lifeguard stand that wants to be forgotten, there is a decent theory of how a coast ought to be run: write down the dull parts, plant the slow things, and measure success by what does not happen.
— Chris
P.S. Know a restaurant, charter, shop, or event we’re missing? Add it — free, Florida side or Alabama side: /submit/
