The Salt Line, Vol. 45: A Fat Tuesday Rescheduled to Saturday, Six Jets for One Mail Plane, and $74 Million in Geothermal Whatevers
Welcome back to The Salt Line, written this week from inside a truck cab with the AC pointed directly at my face, because it is late July on the Gulf Coast and the air outside has the texture of soup. Volume 45. The mailbag is full, the ice in the cooler is theoretical, and every one of the stories below is real no matter how much I wish some of them weren’t. Let’s open the letters.
💌 “Dear Salt Line, does Fat Tuesday have to be on a Tuesday?”
Apparently not! A reader writes in worried that their king cake is going to spend the best years of its life sitting in a July parking lot, and I have news that will thrill exactly half of them: Gulf Shores just backed a Saturday night parade for 2027, while some folks are fighting to keep the actual Fat Tuesday tradition alive. So we have arrived at the one debate I did not have on my card: whether Fat Tuesday should, in fact, occur on Tuesday. The pro-Saturday case is that more people can come. The pro-Tuesday case is that it is named after the day. I don’t have a horse in this, but I will note that renaming a holiday for scheduling convenience is a bold move, and I look forward to Independence Weekend and Thanksgiving-Adjacent Thursday.
✈️ “Dear Salt Line, why did six fighter jets escort a mail plane?”
Because some things deserve a saga, that’s why. This week the very last Navy C-2 Greyhound made its final flight into NAS Pensacola with all six Blue Angels flying escort, closing out nearly sixty years of service. And what noble duty did this workhorse perform across six decades? The Navy’s own farewell singled out one thing above all: this plane is well known for the mail. Read that again. A plane that has served the fleet since the 1960s, ridden home on its final voyage by the most famous flight demonstration squadron on Earth — six blue jets in perfect diamond formation — to honor a lifetime of, and I want to be precise here, delivering the mail. It is the most dignified send-off any postal worker has ever received. Somewhere a mailman in a pith helmet is weeping into his satchel. Fair winds, old friend. The packages were always on time.
🏭 “Dear Salt Line, what is a ‘geothermal power parts manufacturing facility’?”
I genuinely do not know, and I read the sentence four times. What I can tell you is that Baldwin County approved a local tax incentive to help build a $74 million one over in Loxley. Seventy-four million dollars. For the parts. Not the power, not the plant that makes the power — the parts of the thing that makes the power. There is a whole factory now devoted to the components of an industry most of us couldn’t diagram at gunpoint, and it’s landing between a boiled-peanut stand and a Dollar General. I love it. I have no idea what it does. That’s the correct amount of information to have about geothermal power parts, and I encourage you to hold your understanding right there with me.
🍎 “Dear Salt Line, is lunch free or not? My kid keeps giving me two different answers.”
Your kid is technically both right, which is the worst kind of right. Here’s the real deal: breakfast and lunch are free for every student, regardless of income, at 44 Escambia schools this year — but families at 11 other schools have to apply or pay. So the answer to “is school lunch free” is now a geography question. Forty-four buildings: eat freely, ask no questions. Eleven buildings: paperwork. It’s the Community Eligibility Provision, and it means the single most important thing about your child’s cafeteria this fall may be the ZIP code the cafeteria is standing in. Somewhere there’s a kid transferring schools who has no idea he’s negotiating a lunch contract.
🎖️ “Dear Salt Line, who’s in charge of the sheriffs, and can I speak to him?”
You and me both, friend. This week Escambia County Sheriff Chip Simmons was appointed to the Florida Sheriffs Association Board of Directors — which is to say there is a board, of sheriffs, with directors, and now our sheriff is one of the directors of the sheriffs. I find this deeply reassuring in a way I can’t fully articulate. Every profession you’ve ever met quietly has a board somewhere, running meetings, approving minutes, arguing about the coffee budget. The sheriffs have one too. I don’t know what’s on the agenda. I just like knowing that if the sheriffs ever get out of line, there is a room where other sheriffs will have a stern word about it.
That’s the mailbag. Five real stories, and not one of them is the reason I’m still in this truck with the engine running — that would be the heat, the same heat that would’ve finished off a Fat Tuesday king cake in a Gulf Shores parking lot in about ninety seconds flat. We rescheduled a whole holiday to Saturday, gave a mail plane a jet escort, and spent $74 million on parts nobody at the picnic table can name, and the biggest force on the coast this week is still just the sun, doing its one job, for free, no board of directors required.
— Chris
