The Salt Line, Vol. 71: The Correspondence — Football Delayed 1,400 Years, a $9 Million Handshake, and an Answer to a Letter From 2020
Welcome back to The Salt Line, and welcome to another edition of The Correspondence, in which I answer letters from readers. A reminder of the house policy: the letters are invented, the news inside the answers is real, and I will not be taking questions about which is which beyond that. It’s late August, the tropics section of this week’s news feed was blessedly empty, and the mailbag was full. Let’s open it.
🏺 Dear Salt Line: What’s Under the Pickleball Courts?
Dear Salt Line, our HOA voted to dig up the retention pond and put in pickleball courts. I voted no, not because of the pickleball but because I don’t trust what’s down there. Am I paranoid? — Nervous on a Cul-de-Sac
Nervous, you are not paranoid, you are simply ahead of the curve. The University of West Florida started prepping ground for a new football stadium and students promptly uncovered artifacts dating as far back as 600 A.D. — an actual archaeological study, on campus, running ahead of the bulldozers. Think about that. Somebody was living on this coast in 600 A.D., which means somebody was also complaining about the humidity in 600 A.D., and now their belongings are holding up a football stadium. It is, as far as I can tell, the first time in recorded Gulf Coast history that football has yielded the right of way to people holding tiny brushes. Your retention pond is probably fine. Probably. Six hundred A.D. was a long time ago and this sand keeps what it’s given.
⚾ Dear Salt Line: Is Baseball a Waste of a Sunday?
Dear Salt Line, my wife says spending all Sunday afternoon watching minor league baseball is a waste of a weekend. I need a ruling. — Bleacher Widower
Widower, I have good news and better news. The good news is your wife is right about most Sundays. The better news is this wasn’t one of them, because the Blue Wahoos beat Knoxville 4-3 on a well-timed home run, a big double play, and an honest-to-goodness home run robbery — their fourth straight win. A home run robbery, for the record, is the only category of theft this column will ever cover: a man scales a wall, takes something that briefly belonged to another man, and eleven thousand people cheer. Tell your wife the fish are hot and the crime was legal. That’s my ruling.
🚢 Dear Salt Line: Is My Son Running a Grift?
Dear Salt Line, my nine-year-old asked me for $40 in startup capital for a lemonade stand. He says “it takes money to make money.” Is my child a grifter? — Venture Capital Dad
Dad, your son is not a grifter. He is simply operating at the correct scale for his market, and I can prove it, because the City of Pensacola just landed a $9 million state grant to help a shipbuilding company establish its headquarters here. That is how it’s done at every level: you do not simply build ships, you first secure the money with which the shipbuilding shall be encouraged. Nine million dollars from the Governor’s Job Growth Grant Fund, which is a name that sounds like it was assembled from a bag of words found at a chamber-of-commerce luncheon, and I mean that with admiration. Give the boy his $40. But get equity.
⛽ Dear Salt Line: My Husband Chases Gas Prices
Dear Salt Line, my husband will drive fifteen minutes across town to save six cents a gallon and then describe the trip at dinner like he closed a business deal. Help. — Riding Shotgun to Nowhere
Shotgun, let’s run his numbers against the official ones. Florida’s average is holding at $3.86 a gallon while the national average crept up to $4.07. That’s a 21-cent lead on the rest of the country that your husband did absolutely nothing to earn, and yet I promise you he has internalized it as a personal achievement. Here is the truth you may read to him at dinner: a fifteen-minute drive to save six cents a gallon on a fifteen-gallon tank nets ninety cents, minus the gas spent getting there. He is not saving money. He is collecting a trophy. Let him have it — it’s the cheapest hobby on the Gulf Coast.
📬 Dear Salt Line: Should I Follow Up?
Dear Salt Line, I mailed a form to the county in 2020 and never heard back. At what point is it appropriate to follow up? — Still Waiting on the Fish River
Still Waiting, I have wonderful news about your timeline: you’re early. Baldwin County just opened applications for a homeownership assistance program for residents impacted by Hurricanes Sally and Zeta — storms that made landfall in the fall of 2020. The help is real, the program is genuinely good news for people who spent that autumn learning what a blue tarp costs, and the paperwork simply moved at government speed, which is a unit of time somewhere between “hurricane season” and “600 A.D.” The artifacts under the UWF stadium waited fourteen centuries to be found. Baldwin County got there in six years. By coastal standards, that’s a sprint.
That’s the mailbag, folks. This week the coast beat the nation on gas, robbed Knoxville in broad daylight, funded ships it has not yet built, and discovered it’s been somebody’s favorite piece of real estate since before the calendar had four digits. Whatever you’re waiting on — a permit, a refund, a follow-up from 2020 — take heart: everything on this coast surfaces eventually. Just ask the archaeology students.
— Chris
