Mobile was first settled in 1702. It was the capital of French Louisiana before New Orleans. It has the oldest Mardi Gras tradition in America. It’s the second largest metropolitan area in Alabama, and at the time of the Civil War was the fourth largest city of the Confederacy. And it was the first stop on the vacation excursion this year. It’s also as low in Lower Alabama as you can get, the spot where the coastal plain becomes the coast, and an exemplar of the historic, geographic and cultural divide between North and South Alabama.
I’ve described Mobile before as “methadone New Orleans,” and it’s an apt comparison. Our outpost there is garrisoned by displaced residents of the Crescent City, and they will concede the point. Mardi Gras aside, there’s a whole hell of a lot of antebellum architecture, not to mention more Catholicism than anywhere else in Alabama by a long shot. And seafood is a non-trivial concern, especially given the “jubilee” phenomenon when sea life spontaneously beaches itself in the early morning and you can walk off with bushel baskets of crabs and oysters for nothing more than showing up.
Mobile has also taken its licks from hurricanes. In my lifetime, the storm to swear by was Fredrick, in 1979, but Hurricane Ivan in 2004 didn’t do the city any favors either. Dauphin Island is the principal barrier island of Mobile Bay, and its hotel and condo construction seems to be rebuilt and smashed on about a 20-25 year cycle. Still, on a sunny weekday afternoon, it’s not the worst place to squish your toes in the sand and watch the water roll gently back and forth while defying Mary Schmich and Baz Luhrmann’s advice about sunscreen.
Mobile also seems pretty low-key and accessible – we just sort of free-rolled into VIP at “Club Insanity” (and then had to negotiate a bouncer to leave, WTF) – and the hipsters do the best they can with the beards and the earwear available to them. Still, downtown on a Saturday night seems a lot more San Jose than San Francisco…with some notable exceptions. (Here’s a hint: if you’re standing in line at a club and wearing a headband as a skirt so short I can see your soul from here, you need Jesus.) Still, there are plenty of spots where you can kick back with a beer and/or a burger and be just fine for hours on end (thinking of not only Esquire-Top-50-In-America bar Callahans, but the understated and exceptionally well-equipped O’Daly’s Pub). The utter lack of zoning also means that you’re as likely to walk into the next block and see an antebellum mansion, a quiet coffee shop, an exceptionally dodgy shuttered store, or a bar suitable for staggering home of an evening.
Mobile has a lot of money, and a lot of old money. Not surprisingly, it was the heart of GOP Alabama for decades at a time when such a thing was unthinkable (the vast array of Episcopalian churches calls to mind the description of that denomination as “the Republican Party at prayer”). Also not surprisingly, it evolved with two parallel and segregated Mardi Gras umbrella organizations – and the royalty of one race only began calling on the festivities of their opposite numbers in the past few years. And like too much of the South to this day, it’s the sort of place where someone like me would have to work hard to build the kind of bubble that would let me survive for very long. Which at some level explains why every move has been further away.
But then again, I know I always say the next move is New York or London, then Tokyo, then Mars – but I remember full well what it was like living in the ancestral lands without benefit of that bubble for the worse part of five years. (Of which more later.) It damn near finished me off, and I can’t fathom doing it now. So a useful object lesson for the times I think I might be happier in New York or London or the valleys of Switzerland – how badly would I need the bubble there?