One year ago today: April 7, 2020, chicken coop days.
Five years ago today: April 7, 2016, P-L-A-N.
Nine years ago today: April 7, 2012, six months difference.
Random years ago today: April 7, 2019, Agt. R gets millenialized.
I have a new definition of boring. Industrial boredom. If you want to experience it full mode, in the town of Mulberry, Florida, there is a phosphate mining museum. It is one small room full of fossils and that is your high point. The entire museum is smaller than my house, but they do have an old donkey (train) engine and a caboose. Across a breezeway, there is a doublewide (trailer) with some sparse offerings, such as this display of various phosphate salts.
This tells you it is a strip-mining operation. The whole area near Lakeland is an ancient seabed with immense deposits of sand containing phosphates. That’s where the water comes in. To remove the phosphates, which we are constantly reminded are “vital to human life”, it is dissolved in water and then settled out or something. By this point in the tour, I was ready to curl up in some corner and catch a nap.
My curiosity was how much do these mining jobs pay and we have a partial answer. Around $77,000 per year on average. Folks, I’m really straining here get you something interesting about this museum. Um, it’s behind the police station and library, which is across from McDonalds. The weather was fantastic but quite warm. Oh, I know. The caboose. If you are ever not sure you don’t want to work for the railroad, tour a caboose. Mind you, they do compare well with rooms I had to rent while back in college.
Downtown Bastogne, nowadays.
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Here is the second display that was not fossils. It is various types and colors of phosphates. Some are labeled with the chemical formulas (CaO2), I think. [Hmmm, the 2 will not subscript and I've no time for HTML.] I didn’t like the only chemistry course I ever took. From what I saw, the major difference was the color and size of the grains. That concludes the mining displays except for a lot of wall maps and posters assuring you that the environment is absolutely fine, especially since 1975 when laws were passed demanding it.
I was the only visitor, I think I startled the staffperson. I had been in the area at the Thrift to pick up some work clothes, only to find my size as usual were all gone. If I didn’t say, it is one of the few places I’ll talk politics because the ladies who work there are solid Trumpists, although I should define that more narrowly. They are part of the huge populist population who dislike Trump less than they dislike all other politicians. Trump is not an insider and millions support him on that alone.
It seems they have not yet got their stimulus checks. That’s Biden, trillions to give away for foreigners and special interests, but nothing for the Americans he put out of business. I don’t view conspiracy theorists as alike. They can be polar opposites, but they do share such characteristics as denying the facts. The latest, according to my sources at the Thrift, is that Kamela and Michelle are secretly men. It doesn’t take many of the unflattering pictures of them to support that, I must say. I bought two shirts and went for coffee. Then another coffee.
ADDENDUM
Here’s the caboose interior. I’ve seen them when I was a kid, parked like this one. On the southeast edge of town, the railroad would park these and let the old retired workers who had no homes or families live there on pensions. I delivered one paper there, where something like 14 men would read it. They were always poor. One by one they’d disappear and sometimes there were so few they had their own cabooses normally shared by two.
Most cabooses had the stove in the center because they were so inefficient. They were not insulated that I know of and in the winter the wall studs could be seen through the siding where the frost melted. One caboose was big with a metal frame, I guess you could call it the dining car, but mostly they played cards except on Xmas. The cupola on top had two chairs, only the one facing forward was used. They watched for shifting loads and I’ve just been informed by my millennial pal the cupola these days would be the observation deck. You know it is so because millennials usually squeeze your arm and start with, “To be honest with you.” Dave Barry said so.
The cabooses always had that baked wood sawdust smell and the aroma of lamp oil. None had running water or electricity. Yet life was bleak enough during the railroad era that the job was considered a catch. One big draw could have been the railroad paid a pension. If so, I was inadvertently looking at an early version of today’s shitbox retirement communities.
