SMALL TOWN POST OFFICE

In August, 1961, I traveled from Portland to Browning to begin my first teaching job which was, like the character in the comic strip “For Better or For Worse,” on an Indian reservation. I dressed up like a school ma’arm in a Western: straw boater, silk blouse, little string of pearls. The spectacles were a constant. The distance is about a fourteen hour drive in a car, but on the Western Star of the Empire Builder it was about 24 hours. By the time we cleared the Summit of the Rockies, I was sitting on the edge of my seat -- sweaty, steamy, crumpled, and a little goofy.

The conductor, checking tickets, looked me over. Then he and the brakeman settled into the empty seat behind me and began a loud conversation.

“Understand we’re stopping in Browning this trip. Haven’t done that for a while.”

“Yep. And they say they found that fellow who’d been missing. He was murdered in the streets.”

“That so? Whereabouts?”

“Right in front of the post office -- that’s why they didn’t find him for days.”

Of course, they were just teasing me. They could have been Andy Devine and Walter Brennan.

The post office in a small Western town is just about the most visited spot there is. Mail in such a place is not delivered to your door. Rather you go get it. If you’re relatively permanent and solvent, you have your own little brass-doored box. The older, more fancy ones have a little window in the door, so you can see if anything is in there. I don’t know which is better: the moment of suspense when you open a door that has no window, not knowing what to expect, or the moment of suspense when you can see a nice clean envelope in there but don’t know what it is.

Likewise, I don’t know which is worse: a door with a combination lock so you have to remember the code, or a door with a key so you have to remember the key. Postmasters (and they are all postmasters even when they are female) are notoriously cranky about having to go get your mail out for you. Some aren’t even all that generous about looking through the general delivery mail which is back there with them, alphabetically sorted. And some are much too curious about what’s in the plain brown paper package you’ve just received, looking from the return address to your face as though they were your parent.

I get scolded for the packages I send out, mostly because of my lousy handwriting. At last I’ve learned to wrap and tape in a way that satisfies them. I used to get into trouble with string all the time. There was a terrible period when the new postal sorting machines couldn’t handle string, caught on it, and unraveled your package -- in those days one always included a second address inside the package on an index card.

Once at a Hyde Park postal station near the University of Chicago, I stood behind a man from India who had not wrapped his package in paper but carefully sewn it into canvas with tiny dressmaker’s stitches and written the address elegantly in India ink. The postmaster wouldn’t accept it because the stamps (both paper ones and purple ink ones from a stamper) would not stick to it. But in India his package would not arrive safely if only protected by paper -- what could he do?

When I was living in Canada, the female but mustached little round postmaster would rise on her toes and demand, “Why are all these letters going to the United States? Have you made no friends in Canada?” Actually, I was paying off bills accumulated on the Stateside. Postmasters in Canada must be bilingual (English and French) so they tend to come from Quebec where everyone is bilingual. (In Alberta people speak Western American and in Saskatchewan people speak Ukrainian.) Quebequois are inclined to feel morally superior, though studies show they are much more tolerant of drunks and crazies than the other provinces.

When I lived thirty miles from here, the postmaster was a woman with no mustache but dyed black hair. She was a meddling, trouble-making, gossiping woman but not French -- Greek pretending to be an Indian. She read your magazines before you did -- keeping them as long as it took -- and pretended your expected check was “lost in the mail” for a few days if you gave her trouble. The older Indians thought she could control the amounts on their SSI checks. She once showed me how much welfare one woman was getting by bending the window envelope a certain way. She told me she could smell beer on the school superintendent’s breath when he came for stamps. I could go on. They finally got her when a big load of grocery special circulars came in and she decided that putting them all in boxes was too much trouble, especially since no one had much money anyway, so she just dumped them in the wastebasket.

My present postmaster is a peach.

Bob Scriver, born in Browning in 1914, used to tell about the couple who ran the post office there for a while in the Forties. Their thing was punctuality. If it was time to close, you had to get your hands off the counter quickly or risk having them smashed by the window coming down to close the wicket.

These reflections were prompted by a news story about the displaced people of New Orleans going to a big sorting center to claim their mail, since now no one can find their street, let alone their house or house number and if you did, there would only be an empty foundation coated with toxic mud. Anyway, “occupants” might not be living within a thousand miles. Any check that was in the mail in New Orleans when the hurricane hit is gone forever. There are five hundred CHILDREN that haven’t been found yet and they weren’t in the mail. When the World Trade Towers crashed, their mail took to the air and rained down randomly on people clear across town. What was the name of that Kevin Coster movie about delivering the mail after the apocalypse?

Once Bob and I were driving out the Duck Lake road when we came upon a tri-colored shepherd running pell-mell along the edge. We figured he’d fallen out of the back of a pickup. Just fooling around, Bob stopped and inquired of the dog, “Wanna ride?” He did and hopped in. Then we stopped at every ranch access road we came to and said, “Is this your place?” None were.

So we took the dog home with us and started asking around about whose it was. No luck. The dog had his own strategy. He went down to the post office every day and sat there until his human showed up. Nothing stays unfound at the post office very long. Unless the postmaster is involved. Or there's a catastrophe. Amazing when you think about it.