Mobile Bay, Alabama
Mobile Bay, Alabama
There is unincorporated land in Florida and if you have a gun you can go there and shoot at things. I went out to a large piece of nothing that was carpeted in shotgun shells and bullet casings and shot a gun that was first used to shoot at Korean people during the Korean War. The gun belongs to my brother in law, he competes with it against other people with old guns that were also first shot at strangers. I shot his gun at a cinder block and some broken pieces of a Hyundai. Nothing happened when I shot the car but when I shot the cinder block it jumped up into the air.
Heading west from Pensacola the land becomes thin and wispy and low. Sand climbs up from the water and spreads itself across the flat roads and then back down again. I drove until the land ended west of Gulf Shores, Alabama and waited for the ferry to take me across Mobile Bay. The ferry docks in the shadow of Fort Morgan, a star-shaped fort dating from the Civil War that was built by slaves. Back then, slaves built a lot of things.
For a long time forts were built like stars. I’ve seen them in the Spice Islands. I’ve seen them in Africa. On the island of Banda Neira there is a star-shaped fort that was built by the Dutch and called Fort Belgica. The Portugese started the project but the heat and mosquitoes made them all sick so they gave up and went home.
Even though the fort was built by two different groups of people it was built for the same reason. The fort was built to scare all of the islanders into giving up their nutmeg and their cloves which grew on their trees and were worth as much as gold.
I found a ladder in the overgrown grass behind the fort and stood it up against a wall and climbed up and jumped over the ramparts. It felt illicit and dangerous even though I knew there was no-one left to attack. I walked around the ramparts and climbed down the circular stairs in one of the turrets and found a rusty box that had been left their for donations.
The brickwork in these forts is intricate and impossible. Archways and corners blend into each other perfectly. Nobody knows how to make them anymore. Sadly, the star-shaped forts were built before people had the perspective and time to appreciate the complexity of the brickwork or anyway to see how nice they looked from the air and so many thousands of people have died in them without knowing how pretty their deathbeds were.
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Like all forts, Fort Morgan was once loaded up with giant guns that were hammered, wrought and cast from dirt and rocks and fire. Soldiers used these guns to shoot at anyone who was not supposed to be coming or going past their fort.
There is a fort in Key West that had guns so big that when they needed to make the fort bigger they just pushed them over and used them for filler. They were simply too heavy to move. You can still see them there, frozen forever at weird angles and useless. The old guns were replaced with new ones that were built on half-moon shaped rails and swivels and were protected by the beautiful brickwork that we can’t make anymore. The canons were arranged and limited so they could only shoot through the small openings in the fort walls. Those guns are still there too because they were also too big to move after the war. Sometimes those big cannons would explode and kill the wrong people.
The war ended in Alabama 150 years ago, but the people there still like the stories of their old fort and so they built nice information boards that are tilted at just the right angle to make them easy to lean on and read at the same time. It allows you to feel almost like a field general, making plans to attack the enemy.
Anyway, I crossed mobile bay and nobody shot at me. The guns were all gone. Some of them had been melted down to make bullets and some of them were broken, some of them had blown up and killed some people and some of them got shipped off to Europe a hundred years ago to be put on railroad cars to tour the European countryside and be shot at other people.
The crossing was nice and the air was fresh and salty. Pelicans hovered above the bow of the big boat that carried me and scared the little fish we came across. The little fish tried to escape but the pelicans, from high above, would spot them and then tuck their wings in and dive into the water with big splashes and eat them. I don’t know what kind of fish they were but I know they were not flying fish because I didn’t see any of them break free from the water and flit above the waves on their translucent wings and flip the water with their tails.