A love letter to Fort Morgan
True, the northern Gulf's geography, which is all its discoverers had to go by, is all pretty much the same. It's just what we've done with it since then that's different. That's the only explanation for why I could despise one stretch of white sand and want to spend the rest of my life on another patch of the same white sand 100 miles to the west.
Indeed, understanding why I love Fort Morgan, miss every moment I'm away from Fort Morgan, feel now like it's more like home than Tuscaloosa where I've spent the last 25 years or Demopolis where I was born, you've got to understand why I really don't like Fort Walton Beach.
It's hard to put it into words so I'll present as Exhibit A, Byron Thornhill. When I grow up, I want to be Byron. I call him the Crown Prince of Fort Morgan, which would make Benice, his wife, the princess. Occasionally I lay before his throne, the bench seat out of a Chevy he uses for a couch in the screened area below his house, tribute in the form of a 12 pack of Corona Light.
Left the oven on in the beach house? Call Byron. Left clothes that you don't want the rental agency's housekeeping staff to throw out? Call Byron. Wondering if your house is still standing after a hurricane? Call Byron.
"I must have 25 Viagra 100 or 30 keys hanging up here," Byron says, scratching a shaven head that's the same golden brown shade as his back and chest. "I'm not sure what all they go to. It just got to where everybody leaves me a key and if they need something, they give me a call."
You would never find Byron Thornhill in Fort Walton Beach. Nor Buy Viagra Australia Over Counter would you find the pink pelican that graces his deck. He inherited it from the previous owner who used it to help guide vacation renters to the house.
"Everybody questioned my manhood when I had a pink pelican on the road and at my house," Byron chuckles. "You won't find many concrete Levitra Uk Boots pink pelicans in Orange Beach."
That's the problem with Orange Beach. It's too close to Florida and it's starting to resemble it.
You won't find a pink pelican on Fort Walton Beach. Nor would you find a street like Bernard Court West where Thornhill, a Northport expatriate, lives. For one thing, the whole beach is covered with concrete high rises with sappily pretentious names that sound like they came out of dime store romance novels. Singling one out for derision would only ensure nasty phone calls and e mails from the sappily pretentious owners so I'll save myself the trouble and leave it up to your imagination.
Thornhill's street, which is Viagra 100mg Australia mine as well, is all beach houses on stilts except for Mr. Frank's camper trailer which somehow slid through a loophole in the zoning ordinance. Fort Morgan residences have names, too: Hyde Out, O'Shea de Lane, Times Pic A Dune, High Tide. Most houses have a totemic symbol in addition to a name. Byron's is the pink pelican. My neighbor across the street uses a Mermaid. Mine is a wiener dog.
It's the beach. You wear things at the beach you'd never wear at home. You do things at the beach you'd never do at home. Admit it, you're just a little tacky when you're at the beach. In essence you become a living piece of kitsch.
That's everywhere at every beach, even the ones that cover it up with smarmily named condos and bars and restaurants with dress codes. Fort Morgan just owns up to it. It throws its arms around you and says, "Come on in and don't bother to change."
Something about it makes you want to let that inner child loose on the neighborhood in a friendly sort of way. Part of that is hanging a little homemade art on your house you'd never think Viagra Perth Chemist about at home.
Fort Morgan beach kitsch is never vulgar or lewd. You won't even find too much suggestive double entendre. And it's never to be mistaken for Generic Levitra Reviews the kind of tacky commercialism you get in Panama City Beach. I started dating my wife while I was in graduate school and she was a senior. She got a job with a defense contractor in Fort Walton Beach and forced my hand. I knew I'd either marry her or stay in graduate school and let us drift apart. but I do have a DAD, and she's the MOM. Twenty five years later, we're still married but that first year in Fort Walton Beach just about finished us.
It was bad enough trying to find work in a time when the country was still shaking off the cobwebs of recession. But being poor in a place that sees your value to the world solely in terms of your bank account is oppressive. And the beachfront merely reflected the cold souls of its inhabitants.
I found one genuinely nice person there, my wife's Uncle Pelham. He took me floundering, served me his homemade wine and gave us his membership card to the Eglin Air Force Base Officer's Beach Club.
But even his warmth couldn't sustain me in that cold, sterile, pretentious environment. Other than Uncle Pelham, not one single person invited me to hunt or fish with them. No one invited us over for a cookout. I doubt very seriously one person would have rolled my dead body out of the street had I expired there.
Just a few months after we were married, I told my wife that I was going back to Alabama and I understood if she didn't want to follow. She said, "I'll go with you Lovegra Opinie if we'll go back to Tuscaloosa." We've been there since 1984.
That money thing is a major difference between the two places. Not that Fort Morgan is some kind of utopian poor man's paradise where all are equal. The property is expensive, and you won't find any owners down there in bread lines.
But nobody looks at my battered 11 year old pickup in a funny way. Everybody thinks it's really neat that my wife did her own interior decorating and got a good bit of the furniture from thrift and second hand stores. And nobody asks why I don't Viagra For Sale Paypal get a "real boat" instead of puttering around in one that's small and as old, if not as battered, as my pickup.
And I can promise you that I could arrive there on a Friday without a penny in my pocket and leave Sunday having enjoyed food, beer and fishing without spending a penny.
On the survival hierarchy food finishes only slightly above the other two so I'd have to seek it out first. Byron's would be a good place to look first. It's not unusual for sumptuous aromas to waft from the screened in area below his house. One usually needs only saunter by there and speak politely to get an invitation to a seafood feast.
"It doesn't take much to get a group together to cook," Thornhill says.
If it was Friday and I was looking mainly for beer, I could probably stroll into Tacky Jack's Tavern, a mile from my house at the marina, and find Larry Dalgo bellied up to the bar. If Byron is the Crowned Prince, then Larry is the Black Knight. From the widow's walk of his castle like High Tide at the corner of Pontoon Lane and Ponce de Leon Court, he can see the spires of distant Mobile high rises across the bay on a clear day. The Black Knight's razor sharp tongue is his weapon and his wit is his armor.
Larry will give the first person who catches him saying the word "Auburn" a $100 bill. I've tried tripping him up but haven't succeeded. Pinching a beer off of him is a good bit easier.
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