Beyond the beach

 Steve Barnes

PENSACOLA, Fla. — The pastor was pleased. He could not believe, he said, that so many would make a Sunday morning service part of their Labor Day observance.

Thank you, he intoned, raising his eyes from the congregants to the sanctuary’s ceiling and beyond. And then, with mock seriousness, thanked all the outof- towners for helping fill the pews; a standing-room-only audience of the local membership, he winked, was a rarity save for Easter and Christmas. Left unsaid was the possibility that a quest for salvation, or the impulse to repentance, was not the crowd’s motivation. Intermittent showers and inhospitable winds put the beach, only a couple hundred yards to the south, off limits.

In the preceding days the question confronting one family after another was not which church but whether the weather would confine the brood to their own churches, in their own cities. The week began with the meteorologists and their voices of controlled concern, and the jargon of their trade: disturbances and tropical depressions, low pressure troughs, millibars and replacement cycles and eyewalls and…and in the hours to come there was Category this or that, storm surges, evacuations (mandatory or recommended), National Guard deployments, Red Cross appeals. The Sunshine State wasn’t very sunny, and twothirds of its 67 counties were under a gubernatorially declared state of emergency.

Her name — or, its, to be gender- neutral — was Idalia. And, naturally, no one could predict with certainty where she, or it, would make landfall. So all those folks in the cars with Arkansas license plates who were following the same route as we, down through Dumas and Lake Village into Mississippi (and the irresistible lure of Yazoo City) and then Alabama and then De-Santisland — we were all companions, united in the hope that somehow Idalia would leave us be, leave us to our brief holiday. And spare our fellow citizens elsewhere.

She, or it, did and didn’t. Idalia turned to the northeast, giving this section of the coast a lot of rain and wind but no real damage, while claiming lives and causing billions in property losses in the Big Bend area and beyond. So we could hardly complain of Idalia’s peripheral perils, the occasional lightning and recurrent rains, and a surf so angry and riptides so treacherous that only the strongest would venture into the water above their knees and only the dangerously careless beyond their waist.

It was just such a mini-maelstrom two months ago that claimed the life of Ryan Mallet, the former Razorback quarterback who played for three NFL teams before returning to Arkansas to become head coach at White Hall. Although fit and muscled at 35, Mallet was no match for the exceptionally powerful currents that swirl about the sandbars this season. Nor were the dozen other swimmers who have drowned along Florida’s northern coast since the season began.

Even when the sun returned on the last day before the journey back to Arkansas — or Colorado, or Georgia, or elsewhere in Florida; our clan is here and there — the waters had yet to calm themselves. High or low tide, whitecaps began in the shallows and extended to the horizon.

Is the unseasonable now the decidedly seasonal? It is question as issue, one that demands discussion on the platforms of the sciences but which long ago was diverted to a different arena, to possibly existential effect, one in which science plays second fiddle to political ambition and is subsumed by populist upheaval. “Experts” and “elites” are, surely you have heard, the enemies of the people.

Within days the governor of Florida, who offers himself as a candidate for the country’s highest office, would thumb his nose at any notion of restrictions that might counter the recent rise in COVID cases. (At least one other governor of a nearby state would follow suit.) And he would not stop there: He will stand shoulder to shoulder with his appointed surgeon general, who warns fellow Floridians that the pending series of COVID vaccines are as unnecessary and unadvisable, as hazardous, as previous versions. Follow your instincts and ignore the professionals, the governor’s doctor says, presumably including those at Yale Medical School who, in a new research paper, contend that COVID vaccines have prevented millions of deaths and more than a trillion dollars in medical costs.

Summer ends, but it will return. We will be a year older. Some of us.