The Salt Line, Vol. 81: 107,640 Pounds of August, a Mullet Festival Turning 40 Without a Midlife Crisis, and a Playground That Earned Its Own Ribbon
It’s the third of the month and the feed showed up carrying more numbers than sentences, so around here that means the Index: the coast’s actual figures from the week, stacked next to each other so they can’t get away. The linked numbers are real. The unlinked ones are estimates from a man on a porch, and I stand by those too.
Seasonal housekeeping first, because it’s September and you were going to ask.
Tropical systems in today’s news feed aimed at this coast: 0 Times I refreshed the feed anyway before typing that zero: 3 Waves off Africa currently being explained at the Flora-Bama by a man who “has a buddy at the Weather Service”: at least one, continuously, since 1964
🗑️ The City Weighed Its Feelings
Tons of waste hauled off in August by the Mayor’s Neighborhood Cleanup in Pensacola: 53.82 Same figure, in pounds, because the city’s news release wanted you to feel it: 107,640 Pickup trucks that would weigh roughly that much if you stacked the trucks themselves: about 25 Share of those pounds that had been sitting behind a shed “until we figure out what to do with it”: a figure the city was too polite to publish
I respect a government that converts its own tonnage into pounds for effect. That isn’t accounting. That’s showmanship. Somewhere a city employee typed 53.82, thought “nobody feels a decimal,” and multiplied by 2,000 with the confidence of a man who has finally found his gift. Whoever that was should be running the tourism budget by Christmas.
🐟 Forty Years of the One Fish That Jumps for No Reason
Labor Day Mullet Festivals the Optimist Club of Perdido Bay has now thrown, counting Monday’s: 40 Consecutive years it has landed on a Monday, a streak available only to a festival chained to a federal holiday: 40 Explanations for why a mullet jumps out of the water: several, none agreed on, all delivered from a dock
Forty years is a long time to keep a party going for a fish most of the country has never eaten on purpose. Forty is also the age when most things on this coast buy a boat and start a podcast. The festival stuck with the fish. The Perdido Bay side of our beat, over on the Alabama shore, has been smoking and frying mullet for this thing since before a lot of the people working the fryer were born. And a club that names itself the Optimists and then commits four decades to the fish you eat smoked because you have to is either the most or the least optimistic organization on the Gulf Coast. Monday will not settle it. Monday will just have coleslaw.
🎀 A Ribbon-Cutting at the Only Venue With Its Own Slide
Kids parks in Perdido getting a grand reopening and ribbon-cutting from Escambia County after improvements: 1 Ribbons, per standard county procedure: 1 Pairs of giant ceremonial scissors to be handed to an official standing directly in front of children who have been told not to run with scissors since birth: 1 Seconds after the ribbon falls before the improvements are stress-tested to their engineering limit by someone under four feet tall: single digits
The Perdido Kids Park is ours, and I’m not going to make fun of a playground getting fixed up. I’m going to point out that the county is throwing a ceremony for it, which is the most Escambia sentence available: build a thing children will use, then hold an event children have to stand still through first. Somebody will give a speech. A four-year-old will look at the slide the entire time like it owes him money.
🥜 The Dust Is Beginning to Rise
What WKRG reports is rising over Silverhill as peanut digging season gets underway: the dust Where the crop spent the entire summer while you were at the beach: underground, quietly, which is also where I keep my fall plans Odds a boiled-peanut stand and a mullet festival occupy the same Alabama county on the same Monday: I’ll leave that one to the Optimists
Baldwin County is the part of our beat that still has a harvest. Ours is chairs. Theirs is peanuts, dug up, flipped over, and left in rows to dry in the sun, which is also exactly what happens to the people on the Orange Beach sand by two in the afternoon. The difference is the peanuts don’t pay a resort fee for it.
🏈 Three Phases, One Senior
Final, Gulf Shores over St. Paul’s: 34–10 Phases of the game in which Gulf Shores senior Elijah Malone made plays on his way to FOX10’s Big Friday Kickoff Player of the Week: offense, defense, special teams Phases of a football game that exist: 3 Phases I personally cover at a tailgate: 1, and it’s the cooler
A kid who works all three phases in a 24-point win is the football version of the guy at the fish fry who caught it, cleaned it, and fried it while you were parking. Orange Beach, your neighbor to the west is having a season, and it’s the first week of September. Plan your Friday nights accordingly.
🅰️ The Report Card Came Home
Letter grade Escambia County Public Schools earned for the first time in the district’s history: A Schools in the district rated A: 19 Times the district would have heard “has the ability, just doesn’t apply himself” over the years, if school districts got report-card comments: I’d guess all of them
A first-ever A, right as the school year opens. As a man whose own academic peak was the phrase “shows improvement,” I am proud of them and mildly threatened.
One last figure, for the weekend:
Chairs lined up on the sand this Saturday at 10 a.m., first morning of Labor Day weekend: not a number I’ll guess. The cam’s live. Count them yourself.
That’s the Index. Monday the peanuts get dug over in Silverhill, the mullet get smoked over on the bay, and the chair caravans roll out from Johnson Beach to Alabama Point, flag color pending, so check /beach-today/ before you commit to a spot. And sometime Tuesday, somebody at the city is going to weigh what the holiday left behind and, for once in a government career, know exactly how to phrase it. In pounds.
— Chris
P.S. Know a festival, charter, restaurant, or shop we’re missing? A fortieth-annual anything counts. Add it, free, Florida side or Alabama side: /submit/
