The Salt Line, Vol. 76: The Correspondence — A Fire Department Now Certified in Corn, 4.4 New Miles of Somewhere to Ride Besides the Shoulder of Fort Morgan Road, and a Friday Night Final That Belongs on a Baseball Card

The mailbag is open. The mailbag is always open — it’s a five-gallon bucket by the door, and the questions arrive whether I check it or not, some on paper, most yelled from a golf cart. Last week of August on the coast: the chair caravans are thinner, the snowbirds haven’t landed, the June grass is a memory, and the only thing anybody actually wants to know is what the tropics are doing. I have a rule about that: I don’t guess, and neither should the man at the end of the bar with the app and the confident voice. Everything else, I’ll take. Here’s the mail, in the order it hit the bucket.

🚲 Dear Salt Line, My Husband Bought a Bicycle

My husband bought a bicycle in June. He has ridden it to the mailbox and back, twice, and both times described it afterward as “training.” Where do I send him so he’ll be gone long enough for me to finish a book? — Widowed by Cycling, Ono Island

Send him west. The state cut the ribbon Friday on a 4.4-mile addition to the Fort Morgan Trail at Gulf State Park, which brings the whole thing to about ten and a half miles along Fort Morgan Road. For anyone who hasn’t driven it: Fort Morgan Road is a long, flat, dead-straight shot to a dead end with a fort on it, and until this week the only place to ride a bicycle on it was the shoulder — between the trucks hauling boats and the trucks hauling the people who own the boats. Ten and a half miles out is twenty-one round trip, which at mailbox pace is roughly a novel and a half. Pack him two waters. Tell him it’s training. It is, technically.

🌽 Dear Salt Line, We Have the Hurricane Kit

Water, batteries, the good flashlight, the bad flashlight, a generator my brother-in-law calls “basically new.” What’s the emergency we’re NOT ready for? — Prepared to a Fault, Innerarity Point

Grain. Specifically, being inside of it. Escambia County Fire Rescue spent the week with the Jay Fire Department in a Grain Bin Rescue Class — classroom in the morning, then hands-on with a prop bin, which is a bin you get buried in on purpose. This is legitimate, by the way. Jay is the top of the county, where Escambia stops being sand and starts being peanuts, and a grain bin is a genuinely awful place to get stuck. But sit with the picture for a second: the county whose most famous emergency is water in the wrong place now has crews certified to get a grown man out of corn. I have lived on this coast a long time and have never once been in a grain bin. I have been stuck in a beach-road grocery parking lot on a Saturday in July for forty minutes with no crew en route. That’s not a complaint. That’s a request for a class.

🛣️ Dear Salt Line, My Phone Keeps Routing Me Down a Xylophone

There’s a county road in Baldwin my GPS loves that feels like driving across a xylophone. Is anyone in charge of that? — Fillings Loosened, Elberta

Someone is, and lo, they have acted. Let it be recorded that in the waning days of August, the Baldwin County Commission looked upon its roads and resurfaced the ones most in need of “protection from drainage issues” — which is a very Baldwin County way of saying the water was winning. Every one of them was re-striped, so the lines are back, which for a certain kind of local driver is going to be a real adjustment. And because the county cannot be permitted a full week of asphalt triumph, Gulf Shores is closing East 29th Avenue starting Monday, just south of The Track — the go-kart place — for upgrades. So the roads are smoother right up until the one you need is closed. The ledger balances. On this coast it always balances.

📋 Dear Salt Line, My HOA Board Has Been Deciding for Fourteen Months

Fourteen months deciding whether to form a committee to study the pool hours. Is this normal? — Aging in Place, Orange Beach

It isn’t just normal; it’s municipal. The Foley City Council this week approved a proposal from Goodwyn, Mills and Cawood to develop a municipal campus master plan. Read that slowly. They approved a proposal to develop a plan. The campus does not exist. The plan for the campus does not exist. What exists is a formal agreement that a plan should, at some future point, begin to exist, and a firm whose name sounds like the law office in a Grisham novel to bring it about. Foley — which has appeared in this column more often this month than the actual Gulf — remains the most productive government on the coast, in the sense that a factory making boxes for other boxes is productive. Your HOA is fine. It simply hasn’t reached the stage where it can afford Goodwyn, Mills and Cawood.

🌊 Dear Salt Line, Is the Water Okay?

Driving down from Birmingham for Labor Day next week. Is the water okay? Asking for my kids and, honestly, myself. — Fifteen Hours of “Are We There,” Hoover

Mostly, and here’s the part that isn’t. The Baldwin County Health Department has a swimming advisory up for Florida Point in Gulf State Park — the Orange Beach sand on the east side of Perdido Pass, where the boats come through — after two rounds of water-quality testing came back the wrong way. Straight reporting, no bit: an advisory is not a closure and it is not the whole coast. It’s one stretch, and the health department will lift it when the numbers say so, not when the weekend says so. The rest of Orange Beach and the Key run on the flags, which you can check before you leave Hoover at /beach-today/, and the surf itself you can see with your own eyes on the live cam. What you cannot see on a cam is bacteria, which is the entire reason the health department owns a lab and I own a bar stool. Swim where the flag is green and there’s no advisory sign, and save the Pass for watching the boats come in.

🏈 Dear Salt Line, My In-Laws Laughed

I told my visiting in-laws that Friday night football is a bigger deal here than the beach. They laughed. Ammunition? — Right About This, Lillian

Friday’s scoreboard will do the talking. Tate edged Milton 24–21, which is a football game. Pine Forest beat Escambia 8–0, a final score you’d normally find on the back of a baseball card. West Florida — the high school, not the university; there are two, and they do not share a stadium — lost 41–14 to Niceville on Thursday. And Jay — yes, that Jay, the one whose firefighters spent the week learning to get a man out of the corn — beat Elberta 56–8. If there is a grain-bin rescue joke to be made about Elberta’s evening, I’m leaving it in the bin. Those are sixteen-year-olds. Elberta will have its Friday.

So that’s the mail. Ten and a half miles of trail, one plan to make a plan, a stretch of water the health department would like you to admire from the sand, and a county now fully prepared for the one emergency it has never had. Labor Day is a week out; the flags, the Gulf, and everybody’s cone app will get checked more times than the bucket. Ride carefully. Stay out of the corn.

— Chris

P.S. Know a restaurant, charter, shop, or event we’re missing? Add it — free, Florida side or Alabama side, no bucket required: /submit/