The Salt Line, Vol. 66: The Correspondence — Nine Runs Before the Rain, a Referendum on Holding Referendums, and a Loggerhead Who Did Three Months for Somebody Else's Hook
The mailbag is open again. Every few weeks the letters pile up until I can’t see the radar over them, so I answer a handful in public and hope the rest of you take the hint. Standard disclaimer: the letters are invented, the news inside them is not, and if your HOA president recognizes himself in one of these, that’s between him and his conscience.
⚾ “Dear Salt Line, my son’s coach-pitch team gave up six runs in the first inning and now he wants to quit baseball forever. What do I tell him?”
Tell him about Tuesday night at the ballpark, where the Knoxville Smokies scored nine runs in the top of the first against the Blue Wahoos, and then the sky stepped in and suspended the game with Knoxville up 9-0 in the top of the second. Nine. Before anybody in the stands had finished the first beer. Before the guy who parks three blocks away to save twelve dollars had found his seat. And then it rained, and the official scorer wrote “suspended” — which is baseball for we’ll finish this later, once everyone’s had time to think about what they’ve done. There was a runner on first, no outs, when they pulled the tarp. He is, as far as I know, still standing there in spirit.
Here’s the lesson for your kid: Tuesday wasn’t a loss. It wasn’t anything. The rain was the only pitcher on the home side with a clean line, and it threw exactly one inning. Some nights the best reliever in the building is the weather. Tell him to check the sky before he checks the score.
🗳️ “Dear Salt Line, my HOA just held a vote on whether we should hold more votes. I feel like I’m in a loop. Is this normal?”
Not only is it normal, your county just did it at scale. On Tuesday, Escambia County voters overwhelmingly approved a referendum to once again elect the school superintendent rather than have one appointed. Read the ballot language out loud if you want the full civic experience: “Shall the superintendent of schools of Escambia County, Florida, be elected by the majority of the qualified electors of Escambia County, Florida?” Twenty-two words to ask “you wanna pick?” — and every one of them wearing a tie. Seven in ten of the qualified electors said yes, which is about as close to a standing ovation as a bubble sheet gets.
The short version: the people who showed up to vote voted, decisively, in favor of being allowed to vote on something else later. I’m not being cute about it — I think it’s kind of beautiful. This is the one form of “more meetings” nobody complains about, because you fill in a bubble and leave. Your HOA could learn something. Mostly about the leaving.
🐢 “Dear Salt Line, I hooked something off the beach this weekend that was absolutely not a fish and I panicked and cut the line. Was that wrong?”
Cutting the line was the wrong move, and Gulf Shores just published the reason why in turtle form. Two sea turtles injured by fishing gear went back into the Gulf this week after months of treatment. One of them is a young loggerhead named Skipper, hooked back in May, found with fishing line and lead weights cinched around his flipper — about ten pounds of somebody else’s tackle, starting to grow into him. May. That’s three months of rehab. That’s a full summer — longer than most of the families renting on Perdido Beach Boulevard stayed, and they didn’t have to learn to swim again.
The straight report, no jokes attached: if you hook a turtle, don’t cut it loose with the hook and fifteen feet of mono trailing behind. Reel it in gently, keep it out of the rocks, and call — the Gulf Shores and Orange Beach folks, the pier staff, whoever’s closest. A turtle can survive a hook in the mouth. It cannot survive being turned into a slow-moving bait rig. Skipper did his time. Don’t make him do it again.
🚤 “Dear Salt Line, I’ve never been to a city council meeting and I’m nervous there won’t be enough chairs. Is it usually crowded?”
Depends entirely on the agenda. “Stormwater utility rate study” gets you a room you could land a seaplane in. “Close the boat launch” gets you Gulf Shores on Monday night, where a standing-room-only crowd showed up to tell the city to keep the Canal Park boat launch open after staff recommended closing it. Standing room. In August. In coastal Alabama. People left the air conditioning, voluntarily, to stand near other people, for a boat ramp.
And look — I get it. On this stretch of the coast a ramp isn’t infrastructure, it’s a relationship. It’s where your trailer knows how to back itself in. Take it away and you’re not inconvenienced, you’re displaced. “I’d hate to see us lose it” was the quote that made the headline — the politest possible way of saying what the room was actually saying. So yes: bring a chair. Better yet, bring your trailer. They’ll know you’re serious.
🎷 “Dear Salt Line, my wife says a tuxedo is ‘too much’ for a museum. Settle this.”
Your wife is right about the Naval Aviation Museum on a Tuesday afternoon, and completely wrong about the October night it’s hosting a symphonic tribute to Frank Sinatra — a 13-piece orchestra set up in the Blue Angels Atrium, under actual Navy jets hanging from the ceiling. There is no outfit too much for that. You could show up in a white dinner jacket with a cigarette you aren’t allowed to light and you’d merely be appropriate. Civilians should note the dress code also includes a SECNAV Form 5512, filed two weeks ahead, which makes this the only lounge act on the coast with a security review. Sinatra would’ve respected that.
This is the kind of thing Pensacola does quietly and well — takes the most serious building in town and throws a lounge act in it, and somehow both get classier. Wear the tux. If your wife objects, remind her the aircraft overhead have been wearing the same outfit since Korea and nobody’s said a word to them.
That’s the correspondence. Keep it coming — but know that most of it gets the same answer: show up early, bring a chair, and check the sky before you check the score. The Smokies still have nine runs parked on a scoreboard somewhere, waiting on a dry night to finish what they started — and the only thing on this coast that’s stopped them so far is the weather, which wasn’t consulted and did it anyway.
— Chris
