The Salt Line, Vol. 72: Pensacola Joins the Hunt for Amelia Earhart, a Sausage Festival Changes Hands, and a Wawa Closes an Acceleration Lane

Welcome back to The Salt Line, the local-news column that reads the whole story so you can skim the jokes. It’s the last Tuesday of August on the state line: school is back on both sides, the Gulf is lying flat and pretending it doesn’t have a season named after it, and the tropics page is blank in a way none of us are going to say out loud. Enjoy the quiet. Read the news. Somebody has to.

✈️ Pensacola Has Decided 89 Years Is Long Enough

Amelia Earhart went missing in 1937. Every generation since has produced someone who was sure they knew where she went, and this fall that someone is two of ours: two Pensacola maritime archaeologists are joining the Taraia Object Expedition, a search for her plane led by Dr. Richard Pettigrew of the Archaeological Legacy Institute, who came to town to meet them in person. The expedition is named for the Taraia Object, which is what you call a shape in a lagoon photo once it has launched enough boats to deserve a proper noun. I love this for us. Pensacola is a city that will send its best people across the Pacific to find something that vanished before the ballpoint pen, and I’d like everyone to hold that thought until later in this column, when we get to a project that hasn’t left the driveway.

🌭 The Sausage Festival Has Undergone a Leadership Transition

There are phrases you never expect to type, and “under new leadership” attached to a sausage festival is one of them, but here we are: Elberta’s German Sausage Festival returns in October with the town and its volunteer fire department taking it over. For generations the fire department ran it alone, which made it the only festival on the coast where the people selling you the sausage were also the people who’d put you out. Now the town is a co-host, an arrangement I assume was negotiated over a folding table with a mustard stain on it. The fire department stays in the room, which is the part that matters when that many grills are lit. Bring cash. Bring an appetite. Bring a designated person to hold the plate while you park.

⛽ An Acceleration Lane Is Being Closed So a Gas Station Can Exist

Santa Rosa County has scheduled lane closures on Edgewood Drive and the Highway 98 acceleration lane in Navarre for work at a new Wawa site, and the county’s release refers to the project as “a new gas station,” the way you might refer to the Blue Angels as “some planes.” Locals who have driven north of the Mason-Dixon understand what is happening here. A Wawa is not a gas station; a Wawa is a place people describe to you with their hands. To make room for it, the road that helps you speed up will be temporarily removed, which is the transportation equivalent of taking the kitchen offline to install a bigger refrigerator. You’ll be fine. Merge early. Practice saying “hoagie” without flinching.

🏈 Seventy Yards, Which Is Walkover-to-Water in August

Straight reporting, because the fact is silly enough on its own: Escambia County Blue Devils senior Yadarius McNeal won the Wind Creek Play of the Week for a 70-yard touchdown run — the Blue Devils’ first score, on the road, against the Elberta Warriors. Seventy yards. In Perdido Key terms that is the distance from the walkover to the water this month, which most of us cover in two rest stops and a shoe-related grievance. He did it in cleats, in August, with eleven people trying to prevent it. The whole region spent last week worried the season would be rained out, and the first highlight of the year is a kid in a straight line outrunning the weather. Good start.

🎆 Labor Day Weekend Will Have a Soundtrack, Four to Ten, Nightly

OWA is kicking off “Stars, Stripes & Summer Nights” on September 4 — a full weekend of free entertainment across the property, with live music every evening from 4 to 10 p.m. Six hours of live music a night is either a festival or a very committed neighbor, and OWA has chosen festival, which is the correct choice when you have a parking lot. For those keeping a local calendar: Labor Day is the weekend the coast quietly hands itself back to the people who live here — the last big changeover, the last chair caravan of consequence, and after that the Gulf goes slick calm and the snowbirds start circling. If you’d rather spend it in Foley under a stage light, the price is right, and nobody in Foley will make you carry a chair.

🏗️ The Cleanup Decades in the Making Would Like a Few More Weeks

Back in April, the city said work on the American Creosote Superfund site cleanup would start soon; it has now been pushed to September. The station describes it as “a cleanup decades in the making,” which is the most polite way I’ve ever seen anyone say “we’ve been meaning to.” I told you to hold the Earhart thought, and here’s why: this city is currently sending archaeologists across the Pacific Ocean to find an airplane that has been missing since 1937, and that search has a firmer departure date than the shovels on Barrancas. A plane lost in the Roosevelt administration is officially ahead of a construction start in Pensacola. I’m not saying the archaeologists should swing by the creosote site on the way to the airport. I’m saying they’re clearly the people who know how to find things.

That’s the state of the coast: we are looking for a plane in a lagoon, a start date in Pensacola, and a parking spot near the future Wawa, and I’d put money on the lagoon. Watch the acceleration lane, fill up before Navarre, and if the fire department asks you to hold a sausage, you hold the sausage.

— Chris