Deja Dubuque
I have been here before. I remember it clearly. (This very recently has been confirmed when my sister arrived for a holiday visit bearing photos and digitized 8 mm home movies from the places I had described from my visit as a 4-year-old. Mary was there, too.)
My mother grew up in these parts 94 years ago. I traveled with her here in 1969 to visit her aunt and uncle. My memory is limited to Uncle Bill and Aunt Pearl’s back yard, a precipitous terrace of grass, flowerbeds, and mature trees behind their bluff-top home, at least in my memory.
Now, we’re staying down the hill and below the dominating bluff on the downtown river, in an old hotel with a view west toward those Dubuque homes on the town’s heights.
Our walk-about this evening and our drive out the next morning, bolstered by knowledge not yet gathered during in the coming week pedaling back to our jumping off point here, revealed how my mind very ably grasps two-dimensional information conveyed by maps, I fail to appreciate the third dimension. I’m not too good at connecting the detailed, specific information offered by elevation graphs and memorably indicated by relief maps even when they are digital rather than the amazing bumpy globes of my junior high experience.
That’s a very long way of saying Dubuque this night and the ride for the next week featured hills I knew were there but had not reckoned on being quite so steep or quite so long. Maps, for me, are very good at placing me on the x and y axis of the land, but I have a hard time with depth perception along the z axis.
Tonight, though, was a delight. Downtown was busy for a Sunday evening. A country performer was playing and concertgoers roamed the streets wearing tour T-shirts and beaming in pre-show anticipation. There was a war-memorial clock tower, an apparent Dubuque landmark. The courthouse was fantastic, a baroque behemoth reflecting the former glory and import of this seat of county government in northeast Iowa. The detail of the towering courthouse showed off in the closing of the day. Our return path showed us where we would have breakfast in the morning, Dottie’s Café, and further wandering revealed our dinner spot. Both are exemplars of the very reason to take these trips, to visit restaurants and landmarks and features you have never seen and can’t experience at home. The courthouse in Dubuque was as novel and surprising as the Eiffel Tower – I’ve never seen it, either, and would love to do so. But one’s the same as the other to me: A brand new delight.
Similarly, a ramble ‘round a new town is a lot like how I don’t order pasta at a restaurant. I can make pasta at home.
But I can’t see the Mississippi River in Tallahassee, there is not a turn of the (previous) century baroque courthouse where I live, and I can’t go to Vinny Vanucchi’s Little Italy back home. But I can on this trip with Avery. And so we do.