Wherever You Go, There They Are

by Annabelle Gurwitch

  Neal is amused by my excitement, but not so much that he wants to stay a single minute longer. We kiss good-bye, and I tell him, “I’m going to try and meet the neighbors. If you never hear from me again, bury me next to one of the other Annes in the family, and you better put Mardi Gras beads on my tombstone when you come to visit me.”

  Our neighbors aren’t running a meth lab, but they did clear the path to the house on the next block, which is occupied by a reclusive, retired scientist. The neighbors are also responsible for the path to the beach. Sandy,* the woman who answered the door, is a retired teacher from Minnesota. “We like how quiet it is here,” she tells me, not opening the door more than an inch. Is it because she’s in a bathrobe that she doesn’t open the door or is it that they really, really appreciate a quiet existence, the kind that doesn’t include welcoming a potential neighbor? Maybe she’s pegged me as one of the island’s many absentee landowners and can’t be bothered. Or she thinks I’m serious about coming down and is imagining easy access to the beach disappearing. I sense I’ve overstayed my welcome on her porch and make a mental note that when I build the Grove I shouldn’t expect to be borrowing a cup of sugar from Sandy.

  I head toward Bienville, where the Mardi Gras will take place, and spot another neighbor. He’s a lanky guy, maybe late fifties, in jeans and a cowboy hat, and he’s staked out a prime viewing spot on his front lawn. He’s a bit early—it isn’t scheduled to start for another two hours—but he’s already sitting, day-drinking under a Confederate flag. I’m not sure what he and the other folks down there are going to think of my I’m the liberal, pro-choice feminist you were warned about T-shirt. I will need to wear a Crimson Tide jersey and keep a stockpile to issue to the artists staying at Gurwitch Grove to don when they go off campus. In the meantime, I cover my T-shirt with a vest.*

  I make my way toward a white clapboard building with a wide front porch and a miniature red-and-white-striped lighthouse that is oozing with old-timey Gulf Coast charm. It turns out to be a small complex composed of a gift shop and an art gallery in which most of the paintings are of ibises—one of the birds that make this the birdiest patch of sand in the USA—and the lighthouse is a coffee joint. I amble up the few steps and peer into the coffeehouse. A piece of paper has been taped to the inside of the window, and a single word is printed on the sign: CLOSED in all caps. PERMANENTLY has been scrawled in pencil and underlined several times, in case the absence of furnishings and the fact that the lights are off doesn’t fully communicate the finality implied in CLOSED. I stop in the gift shop, purchase a leather necklace with a shark’s tooth, and tell the owner that I’m looking for a great cup of coffee. She is the mother of the barista who had the shop next door. “He has abandoned ship,” she tells me, “but you can get a good cup of drip coffee at the Quik Mart, the convenience store next to the gas station.” This does not bode well for me. I am on a strict regimen of espresso that must be administered twice daily. Her son, who was born and raised on the island, has moved to Los Angeles to become an actor and producer and find people he has more in common with.*

  As the Mardi Gras revelers park their cars, I realize I have made numerous mistakes. First: never, ever, ever go to a Mardi Gras alone. There are families, couples on dates, students from the Sea Lab, all outfitted in colorful tutus and wigs, and not another lone straggler. Even my neighbor, the day-drinking Confederate, has a posse. I’m also the only person carrying a reusable water bottle. I stick out like a sore thumb. A Yankee sore thumb. Second: it’s all about infrastructure. Most folks are driving SUVs and trucks: they’ve got portable barbecues and are grilling up chicken and burgers within minutes, popping cans of beer, setting up stadium seats and boom boxes.

  I am so little of a football fan that it takes me a half an hour to realize that I’m at my first tailgate party. There’s a group who’ve come in a motorized covered wagon decorated with University of Alabama banners. My father attended the law school for a year and never misses a game, but I haven’t inherited the Roll Tide gene. The covered wagon has a wide-screen TV tuned to the game and is pulling its own porta-potty on a small trailer. The bathroom has been covered in aged wood so that it resembles an outdoor latrine. These folks know how to laissez les bons temps rouler and then some. I have been plotting my trip down for the last ten years and I didn’t even pack an umbrella.

  I stroll past the town square, where the town hall, visitor center, and police station look like those friendly forest ranger stations you see at national parks. Kids coast lazily on scooters and bicycling moms pedal right down the middle of the main street. Vendors hawking cotton candy and ice cream from pushcarts make their way toward me as the parade starts, led by the Mobile Police Department Mounted Unit, and it makes perfect sense that in an e-mail the mayor called the town Mayberry by the Sea.*

  If you’ve ever been to a Fourth of July parade in a small American town, it’s a lot like Mardi Gras on Dauphin Island, except for the beads that are being hurled at your head, which will one day wind up, best-case scenario, I know now, on a gravestone. It doesn’t have that undercurrent of sexuality that infuses Mardi Gras in New Orleans. Instead, there are Shriners: old guys in fez hats perilously perched on an even older convertible with a toilet seat hanging off the back, the sagging trunk of the car scraping the asphalt. There are floats with the casts of the local school productions of musicals: Cats, Annie Get Your Gun, and The Wizard of Oz. Hamilton, the hip-hop smash-hit musical, hasn’t made it down here, and it seems doubtful it will be premiering in this zip code anytime soon.

  Interspersed between themed floats, local bands like Mud Bucket and MT Pockets are advertising their hard-rockin’ sounds by offering up musical entertainment as they travel down the parade route on small platforms pulled by Ford Raptors. The musicians seem to have attended training seminars that recommend dressing for the job you want, because they are uniformly outfitted in a manner that screams, “I am in a band from south of the Mason-Dixon Line.” They sport mullets of varying lengths, a fair number of cowboy hats, sleeveless black T-shirts, jeans, and at least one bandana tied around an arm or ankle or worn do-rag style.

  The Mardi Gras parade is over in maybe forty-five minutes and the crowd thins out quickly. I jump into my car and drive past Hunley Place, just beyond the trailer park to Fort Gaines. The fort overlooks the water at the far east end of the island. Before arriving, I studied maps, plotting out routes for my visit, and I understand why Neal looked at me like I’d grown a second head when I pressed him for exact directions to each of the island’s points of interest. The minuteness of the island was inconceivable to me.

  I’m the only visitor. As I make my way inside the Civil War–era fort, I picture the starry nights when Boy Scout Troop 484 pitches their tents in the grassy courtyard, and I think on how my son probably wouldn’t have dyed his hair pink when he was fourteen if he’d grown up in Mayberry by the Sea. I stroll through the empty barracks built in 1851, shoes echoing loudly on the stone floor. It’s impossible not to feel like there’s been a zombie apocalypse and I’m the last person left on Earth. From the cannon bay atop the brick wall surrounding the fort, I’ve got an unobstructed view of both Mobile Bay and the Gulf of Mexico.*

  During my youth in Miami Beach, entire neighborhoods were blighted by boarded-up kosher hotels. When the art deco district was first revitalized, one could leisurely enjoy stylishly restored low-rise elegance. Now towering condos rise out of the sand and nightclubs crank out pulsing electronic music 24/7. Here, there is nothing to mar the view between sea and sky and I’m so glad the island hasn’t been overdeveloped.

  There is an invigorating majesty one can experience on the steep white cliffs of Dover, a sweeping epicness that rouses the soul. The flatness of the gulf shoreline has a different kind of beauty. It’s a relaxing mellowness that inspires kicking back and cranking up the Jimmy Buffett.* Coupled with that low Alabama minimum wage, it’s understandable why day-drinking in a lawn chair
—not under the Confederate flag, but drinking a beer at eleven a.m.—might seem like a reasonable way to pass an afternoon.* I’ve never been much of a beer drinker, so when I explore the brick-lined ammunition storage areas carved deep into the cool earth, I can’t help but think that the fort would make a great wine cave. If I’ve traveled twelve hours to get somewhere, I would like to have a really good glass of wine waiting for me, and there is nary a wine bar on Dauphin Island. There is one sit-down restaurant outside of the numerous self-identified dive bars.

  I wander into the original blacksmith shop, a small brick enclave at the base of the fort, where a blacksmith, costumed in a style worn in the 1800s, is sweating through his cotton smock as he hammers out an iron cross on a steel anvil. This part of Alabama is really churchy. I can just make out something penciled onto the wall above his head. Is that his name? “Ivan?” I ask in a total tourist move.

  “No, I’m Ralph. That’s the mark where the water got up to during Hurricane Ivan in 2004,” he says, instantly snapping me back to just how precarious life is on a barrier island. I introduce myself as a landowner, and when I say that I’m meeting the mayor for dinner, Ralph asks me to tell him that it’s the dredging of Mobile Bay that’s the real problem for the island. Like everyone I meet, he has strong opinions about the potential fate of the island. He’s so worked up that I don’t mention I’m aware of the issue. The bay is shallow; that’s why the island had such a great value in the early part of the last century. Large ships would dock and unload at Dauphin Island and then the cargo would be moved by smaller barges across the bay to Mobile. Now dredging allows shipping to come directly to Mobile, but it’s robbing the island of sand, as if storms and sea-level rise weren’t enough! I nod, compliment him on his ironwork, and express my disbelief that the fort is empty; it’s so well preserved. The museum has a collection of letters written by Confederate soldiers while stationed at the fort. The stories of their laboring with no soap and no pay, chronic hunger, and the unrelenting heat make for fascinating and terrifying reading. You’ll never be more grateful for modern plumbing than when reading the soldiers’ accounts of the dysentery epidemic at Fort Gaines. But when you live near a historical site, you don’t stop in on a regular basis, unless maybe they’re serving a chilled rosé.*

  It’s time for my scheduled dinner with the mayor but the island recently won the right to call itself “the Sunset Capital of Alabama,” another ploy to attract vacationers, and I have to check it out.

  The sun is large and low on the horizon and the sky ribbons into bands of red, orange, and purple, right on cue. It is one of the most vivid sunsets I’ve seen in Alabama or elsewhere. I’m reading a sign along the beach about how the ibis was once endangered but thanks to the Audubon Society is making a comeback, when a baby bird scampers over to the water’s edge.

  I snap a shot of the sprightly ibis and text it to my husband. Looks great! he writes. To get a dramatic close-up of three ancient tree stumps in the water, I zoom in on the smooth, bleached-out grooves. Widening my view, I notice water lapping at the roots of several live trees on the shoreline. Wait a minute. We’re on the ocean side of the island. These stumps aren’t ancient; they are recent casualties of the salt water. This is that beach erosion coupled with the sea-level rise that I’ve read about: the two to three feet that are lost each year, taking the trees and other vegetation with them. The island is only 1¾ miles wide; you can do the math. I look back toward the fort and try to imagine how different it would look with an added seven hundred feet of beachfront. That’s how much has been lost to date.

  • • •

  JEFF COLLIER is wearing khakis and a polo shirt, wardrobe left over from his former career as a golf pro. With his easy, friendly manner he’s every bit the mayor of Mayberry. I tell him that my cousins in Mobile knew his dad. “Isn’t he oyster people?” cousin Shirley had asked.

  “That’s right, there’s a seafood business that’s been in the family for eighty years.” My people know his people. Over plates of blackened gulf shrimp, I gush that I’ve fallen for the island and I can see his problem: the very thing that gives the island its charm, its refusal to enter the twenty-first century, is the same thing that is threatening its economic future.

  “When I added the one traffic light on the island a few years back, people were angry. They don’t like change.”

  He just approved a building that is six stories high, making it the tallest building in town, and people are really pissed off.

  “But is there a place for Mayberry in the future?” I ask. It’s a Mayberry that is expensive to maintain.* They are not only trying to hold back time, they are literally trying to hold back the tide. He has successfully funded beach renourishment for Fort Gaines and hopes to do the same for the west end, but it seems like a long shot. Hank Caddell, secretary and treasurer of the Alabama Coastal Heritage Trust, has called such interventions in nature’s plans “folly,” even invoking Joni Mitchell: “We’ve paved paradise and put up a parking lot!”

  “Hey, if a hurricane takes out the west end, will that make my east end land more valuable?” We both laugh. He tells me my land is probably worth now just a bit more than what my grandparents paid for it. Or not. He has land there as well. Who wants to buy now, anyway, when the sea is rising? We’re in the same boat.

  There’s the briefest pause in our conversation. We’re exactly the same age. If I had stayed in Alabama it’s likely we would have met years before. We are both invested in and enamored with the island’s history, appreciate its natural beauty, and my people know his people. I admire his advocacy and he’s a good-looking guy. Am I Reese Witherspoon in Sweet Home Alabama?

  In that rom-com, Reese, who has been living the high life in New York City, comes back home to Alabama to resolve some unfinished relationship business. Essentially Reese must choose between her childhood love, who flies a crop duster, Pilot McSixPack, played by hunky Josh Lucas, and her big-city boyfriend, played by Patrick Dempsey, aka Dr. McDreamy. Both are blessed with shiny white teeth and are great-heads-of-hair-over-heels in love with her. Decisions, decisions! In the end, Reese chooses Pilot McSixPack, who conveniently is able to pick up and move to NYC, successfully merging her past with her present and future.

  The check comes and we’re informed that a local businessman at the bar is paying the tab. Damn, they take that Southern hospitality seriously. Only it turns out that it’s just the mayor’s check that’s being picked up, not mine, and Jeff doesn’t offer to pick up my tab. I’m no Reese; he’s more interested in how I’m going to portray his beloved home than getting into my pants. When I say, “Can’t you guys just have one wine bar?” he shrugs it off dismissively. He knows that “wine bar” is code for someone who does hot yoga, marches in gay pride parades, thinks her kid looks great with pink hair, and will ultimately find the slow pace and solitude of the Gulf Coast oppressive.

  I’m emotionally exhausted from the day, so I skip the local nightlife—trivia game and darts night at Fins Bar—and head for the Willow Tree Cottage.*

  Bill Harper built and owns the cottage, which is adjacent to and is a twin of his own. The cottages, on nine-foot pilings, overlook the marshland on the bay side of the island. Bill is a little younger than my dad but went to Murphy High School in Mobile with my cousins. Mobile really is a small town.

  Bill is retired but has worked all over the world with the Red Cross and Red Crescent and met his wife in Montenegro. Bill and Slavica welcome me into their home and promise to make me an espresso in the morning with their Jura Giga 5, one of the best machines in the world. I settle in, and just as I’m wondering how they occupy themselves, Bill’s knocking on my door to tell me that he needs to move my car; the tide is surging and there might be flooding. Residents must be vigilant at all times. It’s not even hurricane season. Is this nature’s way of reminding me how expensive flood insurance is going to be for Gurwitch Grove Writers’ Retreat?

&nbs
p; I’m not exaggerating when I say that I sleep that night the kind of satisfying sleep you have when you’ve been away for a long time and you’re so glad to be home.* In the morning, I enjoy an exquisitely tight espresso with Bill and Slavica, but how many mornings in a row can I stop in before I wear out my welcome and a PERMANENTLY CLOSED notice goes up on their front door? I send my sister a shot of the view of the marshes. Don’t you want to move down with me? She writes back, Sister, I hate to break it to you, but it’s going to be you and fifty cats, you know that, right?

  On the drive back to Mobile, I’m the only car on the road. I stop when I see the Hot Boiled Peanuts sign.

  “Hi, baby, did you like your gamma’s land?” Gloria has remembered me!

  “I loved it, I really loved it.” I buy some blueberries and we chat about how healing the beaches are here.

  “Of course you love it. I lost my husband to mesothelioma, and my girlfriend and I, we walk the beach every morning. It helps. I just had surgery on my leg.” She shows me the scar and we commiserate about getting older and talk about our kids.

  “My granddaughter is twenty-three and she still has her purity ring,” she tells me, beaming with pride.

  It seems like a good time to make my exit.

  “It really brings them in,” she adds, pointing to the Hot Boiled Peanuts sign. I nod in agreement, but I know that “them” means the tourists and that “them” includes me.

  Sandy’s got a bowl of gumbo waiting for me in her kitchen. My plane leaves in a few hours, so I eat slowly. I want to return to Los Angeles with the taste still in my mouth.

  I ask her if she knows why my family left Mobile. “Of course. Your daddy didn’t have two pennies to rub together. He had an idea to sell health insurance for pets and open a pet cemetery. He went to everyone in the family to raise money but he’d gotten the reputation, like his daddy, of being someone who wanted to make a fast dollar. Leaving was tough on your mother; she loved it here. We all felt badly; Billy wanted to help, but I said no. We were just starting out.”