In King's fading hometown, friends understand

KIRON — 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 Republican U.S. Rep. Steve King.

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 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, 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 recent Wednesday, by one.

'Oh Walt Miller? He did pass?' Dwain Swensen, 67, said, sipping his coffee.

'What'd he have, pancreatic cancer or something?' asked 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 bell rang again.

'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, riled up about the latest Steve King situation, going on about how people had misunderstood.

'If you're American, you got to take care of America!' he had said. '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 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.'

'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 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, holding his coffee. 'Every once in a while, I learn something here. Every once in a while, I learn something about myself.'

'So how old was Walt?' Ron continued.

'Mid-60s, I'd say,' said Herman.

'Died last night,' Ron said again.

'Last night,' Herman said again.

The next day, Russell had his morning coffee and got into his car.

He stopped by the bank where he'd been going since the 1940s.

He got back into his car and drove one block to the edge of town, turned onto the two-lane highway, then one long gravel road after another, straight lines stretching out into fallow fields.

'Some of the roads have been abandoned,' he said. 'Because there's not as many people living out here, the roads just disappeared.'

He knew the roads better than anyone. His family's roots in the area stretched to the 19th century, when the U.S. government was aggressively removing Native American tribes to make way for one of the largest immigration waves in American history. The Swedes came, the Germans came, the farms, the towns and generations of babies, one of whom was Russell Elmer Paulson, born in 1927. He was raised on his mother's farm in rural Kiron and never left other than a stint in the Army, and one in Dubuque.

'It wasn't for me,' he said, driving along.

He and his wife, Glenda, inherited land when Russell's parents died and lived on it until they retired and moved into town. Russell's work had been farming and insurance adjusting. His culture was being a Methodist, a Mason and listening to polka, though most of that had fallen away. The church he and Glenda had gone to 'died for lack of people and money,' he said.

His kids left for jobs elsewhere. Glenda died last year.

Soon he turned onto a narrow dirt road leading to the farm where he and Glenda had lived, a collection of storage buildings where Russell now kept his old tractors, and one he used as an office, where he went these days to work crossword puzzles or sit and think.

'Commune with God and the birds,' he said. 'Well, not too many birds now.'

Pulling back onto the gravel road, he passed a rotting barn and a bird on a stretch of barbed wire, and after a while, a gray house with a huge American flag.

'This is Steve King's house here,' he said.

He had known King a long time and saw no reason to be bothered by something or other he had said. He supported King — 'I have no reason in the world to dislike the man' — but wasn't one to rant about politics. He had no computer, no smartphone. His television had no cable. He watched a half-hour of national news, a half-hour of local, followed by 'Wheel of Fortune' and Lawrence Welk.

'He's just kind of one of us,' Russell said of King, driving on past a field where a church had burned, and the home of a man who'd died last year. It began to rain.

He drove past fields and more fields until he came to another stand of trees on a hill.

'This is the cemetery,' he said, pulling in.

He drove slowly past the headstones. 'A lot of these people I knew,' he said, and read names.

He headed back to town, pulling onto Main Street where a wooden sign said, 'Kiron, Blessed with the Best.'

After King made his comment about babies, some out-of-town protesters put up another sign below that one that said, 'White Supremacist.'

The sign didn't make any sense to Russell and, after it was removed, his main worry was that the protesters might have damaged the town sign, which had started to rot a few years ago.

Russell had taken on the job of maintaining it. He had trimmed the tree branches that had grown through the wood. He had taken down 'Blessed with the Best' and repainted each of the letters. He went to a lumberyard and had a new K, I, R, O, and N made, painting each letter several times and spraying them with wood preservative. One year, he and Glenda planted a bed of petunias and geraniums.

'I don't think we will ever have a better display of flowers,' he said, and soon he was pulling up to the Quik Mart for the afternoon coffee.

The funeral home was in Denison, and the sun was going down as Russell turned onto the two-lane highway toward one of the only towns in Steve King's district that was growing, and which appeared in the distance as a cluster of lights and rising steam from the pork-processing plant.

Russell turned by the Wal-Mart, bustling on a Friday payday, and turned again into a neighborhood where Latino kids were playing in a yard. Up a hill, he parked in front of the funeral home, where people were still streaming in near 7 p.m.

Russell made his way through the receiving line, his hat off. He shook hands with Walt's family, who thanked him for coming, and inched forward until he reached the open casket.

He stood there a moment. He looked at Walt. He looked at the satin lining and the farm scene etched into it. A man stood next to Russell.

'Went fast,' he said of Walt, who died soon after his diagnosis. 'That's what you hope for.'

'I do,' said Russell, still looking at Walt, and soon headed back home.

The funeral was the next day at Zion Lutheran Church in Denison, and more people came from Kiron and other vanishing towns like Odebolt and Ida Grove.

They sat in jeans and dresses and suits on the wooden pews of a church founded in 1872, and read about Walt in the program, where it was said that 'farming and fixing equipment and household items were his favorite things to do,' and soon the church bells began ringing.

The pews creaked as everyone stood to watch the pallbearers roll in the coffin draped in a white cloth with a red cross, and a procession of dozens of family members.

'Your world has changed,' the pastor began.