Death cuts a little deeper in a small town
In Kiron, Iowa, with a population of 229; aging takes major toll
KIRON, Iowa — Russell Paulson had already heard by the time he arrived at the Quik Mart for his afternoon coffee. Walt Miller had died.
"Died last night, huh?" someone was saying as Russell pulled up a chair.
"Yeah, last night," another man said.
Russell listened; he had known Walt. At the age of 80, he knew almost everyone in Kiron, a town of 229 people, one of whom is U.S. Rep. Steve King, who has a house on the edge of town. Russell knew King, too, knew that he was the sort of person always stirring controversy, often by raging against what he called "cultural suicide by demographic transformation."
More recently, King had said that "we can't restore our civilization with somebody else's babies," a comment embraced by prominent white supremacists and widely condemned around the country as demonizing Latino and other non-European immigrants.
There was little controversy across King's district, though, a swath of rural America made up of tiny towns with tiny, aging white populations that routinely elected King with more than 70 percent of the vote. In Kiron, people brushed it off as King being King, a man they all knew, expressing a plain truth they all understood: the white population was shrinking and towns like theirs were vanishing, with the few exceptions being places such as Denison, Iowa, a pork-processing town 20 minutes down the highway where population growth was being driven by immigrants from Mexico and Central America.
Kiron, meanwhile, was losing steam.
According to the most recent census figures, the population included nine Mexicans; the other 220 were all white, and their numbers were decreasing by 10 or so each year, and now, on a Wednesday, by one.
"Oh Walt Miller? He did pass?" Dwain Swensen, 67, said, sipping his coffee.
"What'd he have, pancreatic cancer or something?" said Ron Streck, 70.
"Liver," said Herman Kohnekamp, also 70. "I think that's what it was, wasn't it, Russell?"
"I knew he passed but didn't know any details," Russell said.
It was a quiet afternoon, the ritual 3 p.m. coffee in a place where, as one regular put it, "You can figure out Steve King by understanding all of us."
Every day but Sunday, the bell on the front door rang as they arrived. The wood-paneled backroom was waiting. The Bunn-o-Matic and the Styrofoam cups. The space heater humming. The clock with the squinting Merit cigarette man on one wall, the calendar on the other, the cracked blinds dangling over the window where the view through the slats was a sea of farm fields, and on a hill in the distance, a stand of evergreens where the cemetery was. Now the bell on the front door rang again, and Russell looked up.
"Oh," Ron said under his breath, seeing who it was. "Here comes trouble."
It was Kevin Lloyd, 52, who came in occasionally, and had been in the day before, all riled up about the latest Steve King situation, waving his hands and going on about how people had misunderstood what he'd meant about "other peoples' babies."
"If you're American, you got to take care of America!" he had said then. "I love that people want to come here from Mexico, from Ukraine, from the Middle East, but they need to come here legally."
Dwain, Ron, a woman named Jane Gronau and Russell had been there, sipping their coffees, as Kevin had continued that he had no idea why people would call King a "white supremacist," or, for that matter, why people would call President Donald Trump racist. "Now, is Barack Hussein Obama a Muslim? In my opinion, yes," he had said, and that had brought him to the other thing he figured King meant about babies. He had meant Muslim babies of the Muslims that Obama had allowed into the country.
"And here, I'm going to quote a great president, Abe Lincoln," he had said. "He said the fall of America will come from the inside. Well, if you're allowing all these children in, and if they hate America, how long is it going to be before we're not the United States of America anymore?"
Jane had nodded: "If you study the number of Muslims, there are going to be so many here, and they're going to have so many kids, they're going to be able to take over that way."
Dwain had nodded: "They say 'freedom of religion' but if you're Muslim, and you become Christian, you're ousted. Sometimes, they kill 'em."
"They behead 'em," Kevin had said into a quiet Iowa afternoon.
"I think what King was trying to get across is, look: We can only grow so many hogs, so much beans and so much corn," Kevin had said. "If we let everybody in, we're going to be without a food source. And what happens when that's gone? Then we're all in trouble."
Chaos, beheadings, starvation, the death of one America and the rise of another — that was the trouble Kevin had raised the day before, and now he was back, interrupting the conversation about Walt Miller.
"What are you up to, Mr. Paulson?" he said to Russell.
"Just listening and learning," Russell said, looking at the floor, holding his coffee. "Every once in a while, I learn something here. Every once in a while, I learn something about myself."