julien dubuque and the Pb mines of Spain
- jl kyd
- Oct 5, 2019
- 5 min read
2 January 2011 SUN @ home
Cedar Rapids, Dubuque, Waterloo IA 10 Nov 2010
That day was a major meeting & semi-substantial drive to another client, then 2 hrs drive to Dubuque airport where my business associate flew out from there, airport perched atop plateau 10 mile or so behind the bluff’s besides the Mississippi.
Changed in car. Drove a mile. Trudged up embankment & under the barb’d edge through some trees twisted torsos where some mud beneath bespoke of some past flood. Up amid tufts of shorn alfalfa (?) lay back 20 or so minutes & catch the last of the sun at the end of a splendid day i’d not had a relaxed second in. Near lost my glasses among the shorn grasses at eventide, and then where’d i be?
Then drove NE down (literally) to Dubuque by way of the Pb Mines of Spain & Julien Dubuque Monument. <1st Nations past>. 200’ down to the purling big river the lights of the town north coming on & the workers mostly headed home. Wandered around the city’s frowsy self caught a fish burger & bagged some beers all for $12, caught up on the Hawkeye’s season, then blew towards Waterloo cueing up Aloe Blacc’s “I need a dollar” on the ipod to go.
<Southland bar, Waterloo IA>
-...he was the first guy in line for GM buyout, Lansing, MI. After that there was a 2-tier pay scale, if you were grandfathered in from beforehand you made $28 an hour minimum plus plentiful benefits. if after it was $14 an hour with basically nothing else.
His brother-in-law was making $14 an hour. You can’t bring up a family on $14 an hour no benefits and I don’t care how frugal you are. [he tried to help them out, backing their mortgage, but then they’d be beholden to a family member if things fell through, so they bowed out.] He felt bad for his sister & brother-in-law because, man, they were poor.
Lost their house; offered to put down the deposit & sign-off on the payments but in the end they wouldn’t go with it.
Bartender, Michiganite, & me in this drinking hole in a backeddy behind a bunch of upstart hotels near a locally major throughway crossing.
How & why did we three get thrown in same interchange at this hour? Bartender grew up 30 miles away. Still lives about the same or less. Wouldn’t catch him living anywhere else..
Mich is HS class of ’85 abouts, Flint. <outside Lansing now he lives in a more natural setting - I get the feeling>.
-- What crops grow around your parts? the bartender asked, when Michigan went into the can for a sec & I’d asked about whether or not his family’d been in farming.
Mich: After i found out about the buyout offer i decided what i wanted to do & when the day finally came i went in there bright & early & the union guys are there waitin’, sayin‘
you’re making a mistake don’t do this don’t go through with this.
Cripes what? I said. I’ve been searching for a way out of this f- job (man i hated that job)
for the last 15 months! & all the sudden these guys are offering me $150K to leave & you’re telling me that i’m making a mistake?
And so they pretty much left him alone as a hopeless case after that & went off after more likely prospects & he cleared maybe $92K post-tax. He hadn’t let it go to waste & had built his own entrepreneurship out of it is what i figured had happened & pretty sure about it too.
Bartender grad of HS in ’68 hair fair long sleek & silver & lanky frame a bit cranky from time. Admitted student in school of hard knocks. Mich is burly big brawny near-bearded kill you with a backhand if he didn’t love all around him - & just as swiftly must I leave this assortment for the morrow...
Mich: was in the “skilled trades” - an electrician with an ME - 3 hundred some in rank w 5 below him @ start, 180 left w 3 below him @ finish, so it’d been a war of attrition among the electricians already.
Gunbox in his basement. seriously installed. bolted thru 8” concrete slab. That’s just the way they’d poured. Gunbox has a special grip-mold lock. vs. his neighbor’s kids not his own ‘cause his boys knew about guns. From anyplace in Michigan you're less than 7 miles from any point to a body of water. (This might have come up because I’d been in Dubuque on the Mississippi earlier that evening...& also I’d displayed my ignorance of the true scale of outdoor recreation in MI, when I made light of the Upper Peninsula).
- Well that gunbox pretty much isn’t going anywhere, bartender & i agreed.
- Maybe you could get it out with a jackhammer but my neighbor & I watch out for each other’s place I have property but a jackhammer’d draw notice...
Bartender & i are in similar situation. Maybe all three of us lead charmed lives! It’d only taken about 10 minutes to establish that the shared predicament of our each of our younger lives was Vietnam. Though right now we are alternately lounging, hip, and hard-ass, murderous even maybe but -.
Mich’s wife (his 2nd, bartend on his 3rd) works in Flint public hospital. 5-6 gunshot wounds per day. Maybe 2 undeserved gunshot wounds per year. She’s pretty unperturbed about it anymore - except last week - a kid 5 yrs old asleep in a backseat shotgun blasted over $40.
Mich's grandfather served in both Africa & Japan. Never’d talk about it.
Bartender -- my grandfather wouldn’t talk about it either.
Mich: My grandfather refused to be served by an oriental woman doing checkout. “Been 40 years coming in here” he called out to the proprietor, “I’ll no longer do business with you!”
B: My 1st wife raided my safe deposit box at my bank. When she decided to make her move she figured out beforehand the details on the account and withdrew the whole. the bank basically said, “?”. that did set him back a bit. 10-15 yrs @ least.
B: I don’t know if i could shoot anyone.
[Bartender & Mich go off in a fairly long discussion after this about how long it actually takes, how much time you really have, if somebody really wants to break into your house & attack you while you’re sleeping & then in the end, in that moment when it’s up to you will you kill that other person? there were some depends upons but the general consensus was 15-90 seconds if you were asleep, not encouraging].
Bartender: i knew someone who shot someone. killed somebody. a burglar or vandal or something he shot. He never recovered. Lots of people say they’d have no trouble doing it but it’s not so easy to kill someone. I hope I never have to.
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