Last days in Alabama...heading north

Cinnamon, Lighthouse Bakery backyard cat

Southern lightning.  Not a drop of rain.

Bird Sanctuary....more like Bug Sanctuary

We just kept trying to throw money at anything that would move while visiting the island so we broke the cardinal rule of Hunter family vacations, avoid any learning, and went to the Dauphin Island Sea Lab and Estuarium, a worthy expense that might help the island overall.  Unfortunately, by the time the woman tallied the senior discount and the student discount we had only dropped a scrawny Alexander Hamilton which we thought was kind of pitiful.  Gift shop, there we went.

The estuarium's exhibit explains the interdependence between the four key habitats of coastal Alabama (their words not mine), which I read as fresh and salt water, barrier island and coast and how all of that works together to make this region rich in natural resources that crank many economic wheels.  I couldn't help mentally moving around the furniture in this small museum to accommodate the new exhibit opening in 2011, The Gigantic Oil Spill and How it Forever Wrecked our Island in 2010.   Ironically, Dauphin Island was originally called Massacre Island by the French colonists who found huge piles of human bones on a few spots on the island.  These spots were later determined to be burial mounds made by Indians who had originally settled on the island. Massacre Island indeed.  This time it's the oyster beds.

Critters in and out of the Dauphin Island Estuarium

And so we bid farewell to Tante Amy and Uncle Dave over a still fabulous seafood meal of hot garlic crab claws, fried alligator and shrimp salads.  The truck spraying for mosquitos flicked on its insidious fogger as we kissed and hugged outside the restaurant.  I told Olivia to quick hop in the van and protect her ovaries from whatever the hell was coming off that truck.  The rest of us past our childbearing years continued our goodbyes in the fog.

A visit to Auburn on our way north.  Our last college visit before applications.  It's been a fun year going on campus tours with her as she so enjoys imagining herself at each place we see.  I'm reassured that college doesn't seem to have changed much except for the price... and how much you couldn't pay me to do it again.  I'll let Olivia blog it.

Yesterday, my Nana, my mom, and I all went to Auburn University so I could tour another college. Nana graciously rode the bus with Mom and me (named "Tiger Transit", after Auburn's mascot) from the Jule Art Center to the Quad Center, where our tour started, but opted out of coming on the tour with us. Wise choice, considering the 90-plus degree heat commonplace in the South in June.

Toomer's Drugstore for a limeade, their specialty.  Fresh limes squoze to order

Auburn was AWESOME. Definitely my type of school. Our tour guide was very friendly, and from the way she described everyone else, including professors, I infer that everyone else is as nice as the day is long. Also, according to my Uncle Dave, Auburn students know how to party and have fun! The tour guide backed up this claim by describing one specific tradition: after any win in any sport, students head to a place called Toomer's Corner and toilet-paper a tree (which I assume every parent wants their child to learn at college). Despite my being a little Northern girl, I believe I will have a fantastic time learning and playing here.

In all seriousness, the roof on which we stood was as hot as the sun.

The town is the college, so there are Tiger paws and pictures of Aubie the Tiger in every kind of downtown business, from bookshops to bars. Lots of school pride--love it!

After our tour and a refreshing limeade at Toomer's drug store, it was unfortunately time to head home. I bid a fond farewell to the South and hope that I can come back for more limeade and Tiger pride.
War Eagle!

Chip's text, "Have we lost her to Dixie?"  I think so.  If you can love it at 99F, I think you really love it.

How many hurricanes has this old live oak seen I wonder?

Today, just one stop on our journey north.

I like to picture Jesus as a figure skater. He wears like a white outfit, and He does interpretive ice dances of my life's journey. 

Love that dirty water

I came to an “aha” moment a few months ago as I was doing something mundane at the kitchen sink that if anybody asked me what my greatest luxury is, I would say unfettered access to clean and potable water.  That festival in India where 80 million people show up to the Ganges and bathe…well, that is not for me.  Go ahead and say it Olivia and Allison, “Mom, you’re racist.”

And so I faced my fears a few days ago, had my own Ganges moment, when my brother-in-law and sister took us motoring in their sailboat upriver away from the tainted Gulf water to the brackish shores of the Fowl River, a spring-fed recreational river that does flow out to Mobile Bay.  My brother-in-law insists its one of cleanest rivers in Mobile for its lack of pumped raw sewage.  Great. Cold comfort.

A number of anonymous souls over the years dedicated to the fun of all mankind have maintained sturdy knotted ropes tied to a tree for boaters to use along the shoreline.  There are 2 x 4s nailed to a tree and two boards not unlike water skis nailed to a branch extending out over the water.  It’s a quick scramble up the trunk and then a quite literal walking of the plank to the bow’s edge.  A friend, or an uncle in our case, hands you the rope and coaxes you to resist your very rational fear of what you are about to do and then you swing out into the river and let go. 

I neither scramble nor resist rational fear easily.  As we motored out in the 106F midday heat index with no breeze, all I could think about was the state of the water and what had I gotten myself into.  But it turns out when heat stroke is upon me, I will jump into any water no matter how questionable.  Olivia, always the thrill seeker in our family, climbed the tree despite the hundreds of little crabs moving up and down the trunk like spiders. She declared her fear quite clearly and she jumped.  Once the kid had shown us how it's done, we adults all gave it a try and it was indeed fun, once.  And despite the thorough sinus wash by the sketchy river water, I lived to see another day.

Dauphin Island is the Jersey shore for people from as far north as Birmingham, even for beach weekends and holidays through these ungodly hot summer months.  The outdoor swimming pools are naturally heated to a very unrefreshing 90 degrees and the view from the beach is that of working oil rigs just off shore, still pumping away despite the current disaster.  It’s a scrappy little island unapologetic for its ramshackle tourist services and coarse vista.  Swimming and boating in full view of oil rigs is an acquired taste.

It’s so absurdly hot during the day that the beaches are empty much of the time the sun is up and fill with people at dusk. The Cullens of Twilight would be at home here.

But at last I am able to walk on the beach without burning my feet.  There’s a faint breeze and it’s carrying the smell of oil tonight.   I can only post photos of the very normal and very not normal of the Gulf Coast during these fragile days in its history.

I found this to be questionable parenting but my brother in law said, "it's probably ok."

A dolphin grabbing dinner just 50 feet from where we stood on the beach, rigs in the background

The Gulf Coast

Two days of anticipation as to what we would find here on the Gulf Coast so it seems only right that I start with the destination and work backwards on the trip.

June in Dauphin Island, Alabama.  Could not be sweatier.  We arrived around 5pm just as five or six Jeep loads of clean up crews were leaving the beaches for the day.  A sobering first sight.

The usual car/beach vacation scenario of unloading and running to the beach was not quite our inclination when we arrived.   Air conditioning is gooooood.  Eventually we all followed the smoker out to the porch and after a gin and tonic I started to think it wasn't really too bad outside.  Silly gin.

I was anxious to see the beach and chased down the first Alabaman who looked my way.  She’s a native of Birmingham but has been coming to Dauphin Island for many years, having adult children that played here as kids.  She and her husband have owned a condo on the east side of Dauphin Island since 1995, hosting kids and grandkids to beach vacations and boating trips around the island where she says they lure dolphins routinely to “show out” behind the boat, standing on their tails and nickering for the bait fish that the kids fling from the back of their boat.  

Last week in Birmingham, she told her husband, “I just have to go see it.”  He said, “Why?  It will just make you sad.”  She said, “Well, then it will make me sad but I have to go.”  They’ve been here since Monday and she speculates that because of the wind currently blowing out of the southwest this eastern beach along the Gulf has been spared the gross oil blobs washing ashore.  Not so lucky on the western part of this island where there is oil in abundance washing ashore, devastating the economy here yet again just as it was coming back from Katrina and Rita.  She tells me, “I’ve cried and I’ve prayed and I keep praying.”  Further along the Gulf coast to the east, Florida is getting the worst of it the past few days.  Bon Secour, Gulf Shores, Perdido Key swamped with oil. My brother-in-law tells me that many tourist businesses' bills are coming due about now and with no customers they are in fear of losing everything.  I'm glad I'm here to spend some money because what else can I do but wring my hands.

The skimmer is right there, literally situated off of our beach according to how the water currents are flowing so as to optimize its catch of oil in the water.  But the truth is, the fish are swimming to Texas, BP isn’t returning phone calls and my new friend from Birmingham has oil on the bottoms of her water shoes.  “The oil is out there even though you can’t see it.  This is the most I’ve had on my shoes all week. You should rinse your feet.”  And I do.  As we talked, a mullet jumped high out of the water.  She found that encouraging.  I wondered if he was jumping not because that’s what mullets do but because he was starving for oxygen in this water choked with oil and dispersants.  It’s too much to think about. As my friend wrote recently, so succinct and perfect, “Poor Gulf.”

No tar balls here.  yet.

We traveled Highway 45 for almost the entire day, from Tennessee nearly to Mobile.  It’s a dandy road with a 65 mph speed limit but no trucks due to its limited local access and no brake zones.  A hidden gem of a road with just the right amount of towns to keep it interesting.

Traveling with a smoker provides an alternative look at travel compared to our family’s usual “iron butt” strategy of driving.  My mom will tell you she can go as long as it takes between cigarettes but I’m telling you she can go about 90 minutes before the Life Saver unwrapping, Goldfish cracker eating, ice chewing and finger tapping makes me want to push her ever so gently out the car window.  And since smokers love their cold drinks, I am won over by the gas station fountain drink guzzler with loads of ice.  Sipping Dr. Pepper on a southern highway was befitting of the journey...if only Lynyrd Skynyrd had been on the radio.  However, as a newbie to the 64 oz. slow sip society, my pacing was off and I was in a little bit of a pickle mid afternoon.

I announced to Mom and Olivia that what we needed was some good karma following a perplexing search for food in downtown Meridian, MS.  Apparently they don't eat food there.  So seeing a sign for fresh peaches, I swung a hard left across the highway south of Meridian in need of food and a reststop.  Fontaine's Peaches Farmstand not only had a restroom for customers (whodathunk), but also the most chin-dripping peachiest peaches I've had in a long time.  I bought fifteen peaches more out of gratitude for their being plumbed than anything.