The Salt Line, Vol. 88: An F-14 Leaves Pensacola at Highway Speed, One Day of $2 Gas If You Brought the Card, and Bent Signposts Reassigned to the Fish
September 10 is, by the calendar, the peak of Atlantic hurricane season — the one day of the year the ocean is statistically most likely to be doing something about us. I read every local headline this morning looking for the word “cone” and did not find it. Not one. The most dramatic thing that happened on this coast Wednesday was a fighter jet going 65. Whatever the Gulf is doing at the moment, it’s doing it live on the cam, and if you see a cone on there, that’s a traffic cone, and it belongs to somebody.
Here’s the day.
✈️ The Fastest Thing Pensacola Ever Owned Just Left in the Slow Lane
An F-14 Tomcat is leaving NAS Pensacola for a museum in Colorado, and it is not flying there. A viewer sent WEAR pictures Wednesday of the thing coming apart. Taken apart. Loaded up. An aircraft built to do better than Mach 2 over open water is now proceeding west at whatever speed a flatbed and a weigh station will allow, wings in one place, everything else in another, headed for a state whose closest saltwater is a rest-stop aquarium. There is no dignity in this and I don’t think the jet minds. It’s retired. It’s being hauled to a nice place with dry air where people will point at it. That’s the plan for most of us. The difference is it got to be a Tomcat first.
⛽ Two Dollars a Gallon, One Day, Card Required
BJ’s Wholesale is opening a gas station in Foley and, to mark the occasion, is selling members gas for $2 a gallon for exactly one day. Members. One day. This is the most Foley sentence ever written: the best deal on the Gulf Coast is available, briefly, to people who brought the right card. Here’s the math nobody at the pump will do out loud. You fill the tank, you save about what lunch costs, you walk inside to say thank you, and you leave with a 40-count of something you did not know came in 40s. The gas was never the product. The gas is the bait. You are the pompano.
🪧 The Signposts Have Been Reassigned to the Bottom
Damaged metal signposts from Santa Rosa and Escambia counties are being sunk to become artificial reef habitat. I’m going to report this straight because it does not need help. A post that spent its working life holding up a sign that told you not to do something, and was then bent in half by a pickup, is now on the Gulf floor being colonized. Barnacles are moving in. Something with fins is calling it home. The county looked at a pile of scrap it would otherwise have to pay somebody to haul off and said: the fish can have it. If a road sign has ever told you to go jump in the Gulf, know that it went first, and it’s doing great down there.
🖥️ Foley Needs Six Months to Think About It
The Foley City Council approved a six-month moratorium on data-center applications. And so the council gathered, as councils do, in the presence of the great hum, and raised a hand, and said: not yet. Six months. Across the line, Escambia County is talking about a year for the same pause. This is the state line in one item. Alabama needs half the time to decide it needs more time. Florida will get there too, but there will be hearings, and the hearings will have hearings. A data center, for the record, is a large building full of computers that needs more water and power than the town it sits in and gives back, in exchange, a low steady sound and a tax bill. Foley would like to look at that for two seasons before saying yes. That’s not a no. That’s Foley remembering it already landed the volleyball.
🗳️ Pensacola Would Like Your Ideas, and Then It Would Like to Rank Them
Buried in this week’s Buzz: the City of Pensacola has partnered with change.org on something called Civic Dialogues, where from Sept. 3 through Oct. 12 any resident can post an idea and respond to a neighbor’s, and the ideas get ranked. The city has built a place where you can write something and a neighbor can reply to it. That exists. It’s called the comment section, and it’s where ideas go to be asked what their HOA thinks. But I’m being unkind, because I know what wins. The number-one idea will be “fix the road I live on,” submitted four thousand times under four thousand different road names, and it will finish first, second, and third. The fourth will be a jet.
🦆 Orange Beach Desk: Wolf Bay Would Like a Word Before You Get In
The health department tested the water at Orange Beach Waterfront Park twice and twice the bacteria were not shy about it, so there’s a swimming advisory on Wolf Bay at the park until it clears. This is the bay side, the pier-and-playground side, not the Gulf. It’s a swim advisory, not a park closure. Take the kids to the pier; keep them out of the water. And note what the bay just told you about itself: the Gulf beach gets a flag, and the bay gets a press release. Check the Florida and Alabama flags for the sand at /beach-today/, and check the bay by reading the news, which is a ridiculous system and also the one we have.
That’s your Wednesday. The fastest thing this town ever owned left at the speed limit, the county’s slowest objects got new jobs on the bottom, and Pensacola built a website to ask what you think so it can put a number next to it. If whoever is driving the Tomcat is reading this: Foley, one day only, $2 a gallon. Bring the card.
— Chris
P.S. Owners on the Key or in Orange Beach: your happy hour, menu link, or a code for our readers goes right on your page, and claiming it costs exactly what those signposts paid to become a reef, which is nothing: /submit/claim/
