You can pet the stingrays and sharks and fish but not the alligators.
I spent most of the day on my own today. The rest of the family took the ferry to Dauphin Island, but I am nursing a sunburn and wanted to remain as “under cover” as possible, so I drove into town and stayed under roofs and tree canopies as much as I could.
My first stop was at Anytime Fitness to clear my conscience after another couple days’ gluttony. Nothing notable happened there. It’s a gym. I go there, I disenjoy every minute of it, I leave.
I noticed a nice name on the map not too far away, “Magnolia Springs,” so I headed there next. The name sounded pretty, it’s on a river, and it appeared to be a grid of tree covered lanes and boulevards, so I had a hunch it would be a good place to hide from the sun while still moving around and being outside.
In Magnolia Springs I parked Truckzilla near a small restaurant and went on a stroll through the residential area near the river. As is always the case in residential areas, there was a guy with a leaf blower making sure the environment wasn’t quite as tranquil as it could have been, but I remind myself that without leaf blowers we wouldn’t have the pretty lawns that contribute so much charm to places like this. It was a nice, relaxed walk. At least half of the traffic I encountered was in golf carts. It’s that kind of neighborhood.
I walked to Rock Landing to get a sense of the Magnolia River–its flow, water quality, how it integrates with the town. There was a mid-sized pickup truck parked near the entrance to the landing. As I reached the river, a couple guys in kayaks pulled up and dragged their boats up the root snags to the shore. One of them asked me to take a picture and handed me his phone. I snapped three or four and handed it back. They thanked me, wished me a good day, and carried their boats to the pickup truck and drove off.
The exchange with the kayakers made me stop and think for a while. One of them said, jokingly, “title it ‘Best Friends Forever'” or something along those lines. The way he said it along with the nature of the banter between them gave me the impression they knew each other well but didn’t speak often. Much like how people interact at a reunion. Familiar but distant. Separated.
The three of us were the only people at the landing in that moment. Had I not strolled through that place, or had I done so five minutes earlier or five minutes later, there would have been nobody there to take that picture. Was it a picture of the reunion of two childhood friends who hadn’t seen each other in decades? Will it stay with them as a reminder of that reunion decades from now? Was I fated to notice a pretty name on a map and chase it across Alabama for no good reason other than to take a picture for the memory books of two people I’ve never seen before and will never see again?
Probably not, and I’ll never know either way, but it’s fun to wonder.
On the way home from Magnolia Springs I noticed a this way to the airport sign as an Air Tractor passed over Alabama’s Costal Connection in front of me. I took a short detour to check out the local airport.
After a short detour from my short detour–it’s construction season here–I ended up at Foley Municipal Airport. I sat at a picnic table by the runway and ate a sprig of grapes as the final wave of training flights landed for the evening. I opened ForeFlight on my phone and noticed that the airport identifier is “5R4.” That felt familiar to me. After a few seconds I realized it’s the reverse of “4R5”–the identifier for Major Gilbert Field on Madeline Island in Northern Wisconsin. The place to which I used to fly once a month for a Saturday morning bike ride.
Similar airport identifiers don’t mean much, but it was one of those neat little details that weave the loose strands of life into the interconnected fabric of a lifetime.
When I got back to the house, the others had returned from their day on Dauphin Island and were playing beanbags in the driveway. Kinsley told me a long and detailed story about her day, how she had gone to the aquarium and petted a stingray and a shark and a fish and she hadn’t even been scared at all and didn’t get hurt or anything. It was an amazing story that totally warranted the breathless manner in which it was delivered.
We went to dinner at Tacky Jack’s. The crab patty was great. We saw an alligator. We watched the sun set on another lovely day.