Tale of Two Beaches

Orange Beach & Dauphin Island, AL

2—14

Orange Beach, AL

I remember staying in a beach-front hotel with five stories of balconies. I remember swimming in the hotel pool when the heat or jelly fish got too bad. I remember chasing crabs with flashlights. I remember the sound of the surf all night.

I wanted to experience that again.

Instead of re-visiting Gulf Shores where my family vacationed 30 years before, this trip brought me to the neighboring Orange Beach. I wasn’t prepared for what I saw.

I remember a wall of hotels blocking the road from the beach, but not as dense or tall. And it was expanding. Everything felt almost the same, but improved. The beach was whiter, the water was bluer, the hotels were cleaner, and the pool was even more pleasant.

3—14

Dauphin Island, AL

Imagine seeing a standard hip-roofed ranch house pushed aloft 12 feet by a few pilings at corners and in between. Imagine whole blocks of houses like this. That’s how they built them on Dauphin Island when I was as a kid. I never thought much about it until I returned and saw that they are still building them this way. In the 30 or so years since my last trip to the island, I’ve been to beaches all over the U.S. and seen many varieties of houses. This is the only place I remember seeing the elevated ranch house.

Nowadays it’s not the only type of house on the island, but there are enough to seem like they are the majority. What I also noticed are the places where there aren’t houses—the gaps, medians, shorter streets. Dauphin Island has a flooding problem—from hurricanes and extreme tides. With each rise of the water, parts sink or are reclaimed by the Gulf of Mexico. Flood insurance allows existing houses to be rebuilt if damaged or washed away, but new houses on vacant lots are few.

4—14

**Gulfs [Dauphin Island & Orange Beach] (2018)**
Mark Sanders

5—14

Safe

Although only 30 miles separate these two beaches and they both abut the Gulf of Mexico to their south, the difference in mood and attitude is surprising. They have similar meteorological challenges, but one continues to expand while the other literally shrinks.

6—14

Wild

One provides a variety of ways to be comfortable, while the other is very much what you make of it. Both steadfastly protect their placeness and geography, but in very different ways. Comfort or risk. Clear horizons or oil drilling platforms everywhere you look.

The differences now seem more directly exhibited by these places than when I was younger. That may say as much about me as it does about Orange Beach and Dauphin Island.

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All it would take is one storm. Land, buildings, and persons would go missing. But the audacity that went into building structures that are ‘hurricane proof’ would return to remake them. This place has several breeds of tenacity and foolhardiness.

That’s what I will remember from now on.