Seafood Gumbo
By Jeannine Patané
• December 2004
My
second evening in Pensacola was spent in Seville Quarter; a downtown building
that is almost a block-long and contains several bar rooms, each with
a different atmosphere. My plan was to stay in the building until late
in the evening, and then head to my car for a night’s sleep on the
street. I already secured a parking place to sleep along the downtown
pier after talking with a police officer, and he was going to keep an
eye out for me through the early morning.
I headed straight to the Back Alley, the smallest
and most relaxed bar room, where an acoustical guitarist was scheduled
to play later in the evening. I pulled myself up on a bar stool and ordered
a large bowl of seafood gumbo.
In between spoonfuls of gumbo, I wrote sentences
in my journal. An attractive, well-dressed woman moved up next to me,
and a man accompanied her side. She asked me how the seafood gumbo was.
I liked it, but I told her I never had seafood gumbo before, so it would
be difficult for me to compare. Her name was Donna, and this was the first
time she went out for the evening with her fiancé since Hurricane
Ivan. She had been living with her two daughters in a hotel room for the
past month, because her beach home was so extensively damaged, it was
condemned. She talked about how her life was disrupted and how her and
her daughters had to adjust their schedules for school and work. Donna
lived in Pensacola all her life, and now she misses the everyday sights
that she used to see for so many years, like the fishermen on the pier.
Now there was no pier for fisherman to stand on. She asked the bartender
for some seafood gumbo to go; the bowl I was eating looked good to her
and she wanted to take some home.
Donna
left and I finished my gumbo. I pushed the bowl aside to give myself more
room to write in my journal. My preoccupation intrigued the following
bar patron who moved into Donna's empty seat next to me. Dan asked me
what I was writing about, because he has to write and keep a log each
day at work. I asked him what his line of work was. He was an electrician
working on an offshore oil platform with a two-week on, two-week off schedule,
and he liked to do handiwork on his off time. He was currently working
on a home repair project that was caused by the hurricane. Dan offered
me his phone number and his address, in case I wanted to help him with
a few of his projects or if I just wanted to use amenities. I let him
write his contact information on the next page of my journal. Bars can
be the quickest and easiest place for me to scout out certain resources
when I want to.
The bartender cleared my gumbo bowl and the condiments
that came with the meal. As Dan got ready to leave, we stepped onto the
patio to witness a lunar eclipse. This was the first of several times
I went to the patio see the eclipse’s progress. Two men came out
and looked at the eclipse with us, then they sat down a few seats away
from me at the bar. Dave was from Wyoming, and he was part of the administration
for the I-10 bridge project over Escambia Bay. Hurricane Ivan destroyed
parts of the bridge, and Dave worked for the company under contract to
get the bridge fixed. Sitting next to him was Cory, a young, handsome
commercial diver from Charleston, South Carolina, who worked for a subcontractor
on the bridge project.
Making conversation with the bar patrons who surrounded
me was easy; we all had something to say about the hurricane. Whether
our lives had been disrupted by it or we came to Pensacola because of
it, we all had our stories to share. I settled my bill with the bartender,
stepped outside and walked back to my car with a belly full of seafood
gumbo, and a journal filled with several more pages of peoples’
stories.
