Signal Decoder – DUBUQUE – A House Unbuilt

Each flag pairing in 100 Rivers: Signals of Repair carries a unique signal code drawn from the logic of the International Code of Signals (ICS), a maritime communication system historically used to transmit messages across distance, uncertainty, and changing conditions at sea.

“How do we listen to the water within us? What is she saying to you today?”

These responses emerged through postcard exchanges throughout the watershed and from A House Unbuilt’s earlier listening research conducted in Dubuque, Iowa during Relay of Voices: The Great River Run (2019), which gathered stories reflecting on home, landscape, memory, ecology, and the community’s relationship to the Mississippi River.

To decode a signal, enter the code printed on the sign holding the flags (example: YV1 KPC – without spaces) into the search bar below. Each entry reveals the original sentiment, a paraphrased interpretation, and the ICS-inspired signal logic used to construct the code.

The signals are not direct translations, but interpretive acts of listening — attempts to hold emotional, ecological, and communal experiences within a shared language of movement, warning, care, repair, and relation.

Signal Code	Detailed Quote	Paraphrased Meaning	ICS Logic	Dubuque Location
YV1MQC	I am in the flow of life. All life flows through me.		M = stoppage, pause, stillness; Q = healthy condition, clear passage; C = affirmative, agreement	Mines of Spain
YV1DKPC	"It's very difficult in Iowa because we have a lot of conventional farmers who are concerned about losing money on conservation practices. So it is just trying to create a conversation and meet people where they are instead of telling them what to do."	Change begins with conversation, not instruction.	D carries economic and ecological difficulty; K creates conversation; P meets people in community/place; C affirms practical change.	Dubuque TBD
YV1KPC	If you can increase the benefits and decrease the barriers as a whole, people will choose to implement practices. What I see in Iowa with landowners is they trust each other, and changes that do happen are organic changes—"My neighbor did it, it worked. I'm gonna do it." That's going to take a very long time, but that can be some of the most effective change, when it's peer-driven.	People follow what they see working.	K communicates practical benefits; P relies on peer/community trust; C affirms organic change through neighbor-to-neighbor example.	230 Alpine Street
YV1RKC	It's the personal, one on one contact that you have, the stories that you hear and others hear, and it's about success. You are not going to guilt somebody into making change.	Guilt does not create change.	K is one-on-one communication; P grounds change in relational contact; C affirms success stories over guilt.	Roll on Records
YV1UDW	You realize people mowing their two acre yard are also contributing to the problem. By concentration, urban environments are just as destructive or maybe more in the way that we manage our turf grass, in the way that we have impervious surfaces all over the place, concrete roofs. Thermal pollution is a concern in this part of the country because we have trout streams. We have cold water species and when those water temperatures get up to a certain threshold, those animals start to be pushed out and out-competed by other warm water species, decreasing habitat in that case.	Damage is not only rural—it is everywhere.	U warns of danger; D signals destructive urban practice; W marks water harm	Carnegie Stout Public Library
YV1PXKC	People are part of the River system. The River has been altered so dramatically, just like the state of Iowa, that without people managing the River responsibly, it could get worse.	Concern begins where we stand.	P places people inside the River system; X asks attention to alteration; K calls for responsible management; C affirms human responsibility.	919 Main Street Gallery
YV1KPQC	There is a power to hope and community wide messaging for the River System. You have to avoid traps, learn to bridge and pivot away from unproductive dialogue, and frame things as solution and calls to action by providing solutions that are community wide, bigger scale.	Bridge the conversation or lose it.	K frames solution-oriented messaging; P makes it community-wide; Q seeks River health; C affirms hope as a practical force.	919 Main Street Gallery
YV1PKC	It is great for people to act individually, but collectively is where the larger impact happens. But it does have to start somewhere, with indivudal action. Individual action could evolve into community wide whether it be township, city, county, state, and expand.	Change starts alone but succeeds together.	P moves from individual to collective community; K transmits action outward; C affirms that small acts can scale.	Bluff Strokes Art Center
YV1CPQ	Dubuque as a community always wants to be better.	The city is trying to improve itself.	C affirms the wish to improve; P grounds it in Dubuque as community; Q points toward civic/ecological health.	919 Main Street Gallery
YV1NLC	The moment you become great and stop there is the moment you begin the downward spiral toward mediocrity.	Stopping is the beginning of decline.	N warns against complacency; L says stop the downward spiral; C affirms the continuing work of improvement.	Dubuque TBD
YV1UXQ	John Anderson-Bricker had a lifelong connection to water, finding Lake Michigan the greatest force of the outdoors because it was most beautiful but most hostile, the most dangerous thing. It's where you went to recreate but people often could get swept away from it's currents. As a child, he was experiencing it, but not having some kind of internal dialogue about it. But	Water holds both beauty and risk.	U signals danger/hostility; X holds attention to water's power; Q acknowledges beauty and attraction alongside risk.	Bluff Strokes Art Center
YV1XDC	The other thing that's intimidating as a painter is you need certain compositional elements in the canvas in terms of having geometrical areas to divide the composition into, and when you're dealing with raw wilderness you need to know what to look for. In a cultural landscape it's already been done because everything's been stripped away to very geometrical shapes. That's what Grant Wood was drawn to. So when you go into a wild environment, how do you create a composition where the viewer will move through it, but still keep the wild feel in place.	Order is imposed where wilderness resists it.	X asks us to notice the landscape; D marks the difficulty of raw/wild composition; C affirms the artist’s act of seeing.	Mines of Spain
YV1XTC	When the River is high, there's some really interesting things you can experience,	When water rises, the landscape shifts.	X signals attention; T marks high-water timing/condition; C affirms the unusual experience of flood-stage river.	Voices Studios
YV1DXN	I knew that the dams had an impact on the River but I never realized the extent of how much it changed what the American River and that American River bottom looked like. Originally it was all just islands and backwaters, so you couldn't really see a main channel.	Infrastructure reshaped what the river once was.	D marks dam-altered difficulty; X asks attention to changed river bottom; N marks the lost backwater/island condition.	Mines of Spain
YV1XKD	for me I had a big eye opener in thinking about the locks and dams and thinking about how we view it and see it, and also those kind of tensions between the different, what people want to use it for, the function of the River, whether it's for recreation, whether it's for shipping	The river is asked to serve conflicting needs.	X holds attention to locks and dams; K opens dialogue about river use; D carries the tension among recreation, shipping, and function.	Voices Studios
YV1KXC	My husband and I were on a road trip and God spoke to us, It was an unplanned stop between planned stops. We spent less than 24 hours here. We both heard something speaking to us, and we had a feeling. In the end it was this building that was calling us here, this property that was calling us.	Place can call you before you understand why.	K marks a call or message; X asks attention to the place; T2400 preserves the less-than-24-hour turning point; C affirms the call.	Carnegie Stout Public Library
YV1RPQC	Susan is used to being connected to an ocean, so the River holds a different kind of space for her. To be coastal, it doesn't matter where, to be on the coast‚ it's kind of free. But we came to at least agree that the River will get you to a coast, and being on a River, on any body of water, is better than being without water.	All water leads somewhere larger.	R carries relation/distance toward coast; P locates water-place; Q holds well-being; C affirms that water is better than being landlocked.	695 Perry Street
YV1NVK	there are a lot of places here, they don't have the means to go to the other side of town, to go to work, and the buses stop working at ten o'clock at night. Alanda went on to say, we first moved here the buses only ran to six, and so intermodal wasn't there. There was only a few buses and if you did not‚if you had a job that went past, you would have to take a taxi home. There was only two or three taxi companies and‚ it was really expensive.	Movement is not equally available to everyone.	N marks lack of access; V signifies a need for assistance; K signifies the ability to connect and communicate.	Dubuque Museum of Art
YV1MXC	our last couple of thoughts drifted back to the River, back to the uniqueness of this place we were in. It kind of slows you down, Alanda said. It makes you go‚ it makes you slow down. There's a lot of things here that make you slow down, and that's what I value after I looked at this calendar and I saw this. I said, oh, there's not really anything happening on Sundays unless I make it happen. Unless we create it. So I'm like, Oh! This place slows you down, and I'm like, okay. I'm okay with that.	The river changes your pace.	M slows/stops forward motion; X asks attention; C affirms the value of the River’s slowing effect.	Voices Studios
YV1NWQ	We've always had boat docks, interacting, jumping in the River, playing in the River, and now it's not even something that we probably should do. Michaela said the water quality has deteriorated.	The river is no longer something we can enter.	N marks loss of former river play; W signals deteriorated water quality; Q invokes the healthy condition that should return.	Voices Studios
YV1NWV	There used to be lily pads and frogs, and now we just have blue green algae, which I mean isn't anything you want to interact with. In addition to the algae, there were recent fish kills in the area, and authorities were still testing to see if that was caused by chemicals or not. Overall, it's the future of the River	What once lived here has been replaced.	N marks absence of lily pads/frogs; W signals algae/fish-kill harm; V asks for assistance or response.	Planted
YV1DWVC	It's been very frustrating to watch, especially these last couple of rains leave a lot of debris, so there's a lot of conversation about what can we do to protect our soil, so our topsoil‚ not going into the River. What can we do to make it so when my daughter at some point in her life can feel comfortable going into the River and know that it's not going to destroy her life or anything like that.	What leaves the land ends up in the river.	D carries frustration and difficulty; W marks soil/water harm; V asks what can be done; C affirms protection for future generations.	919 Main Street Gallery
YV1MPQC	I will probably always be here, she affirmed. Nothing seems to be calling me outside of Dubuque other than stay here and put my nose to the grind and make the community thrive with a new generation coming in.	Stay and make this place better.	M stays in place; P marks community; Q aims toward thriving; C affirms endurance and generational commitment.	317 East 22nd Street
YV1PKQC	It's always been the old white people who just do things, and they are very active and now it's time to continue that thought process and continue to be active but with a newer generation, too. They founded our city. They founded our progressiveness, and so it's time to continue that work.	The work must continue with new voices.	P gathers civic community; K continues active work; Q seeks community health; C affirms generational continuity.	919 Main Street Gallery
YV1XDR	On a day like this, with the water recently thawed, we must let it rest and gather its bearings.		X holds action in suspension; D signals unstable or difficult movement; R marks reorientation and the need to gather one’s bearings.	Convivium Urban Farmstead