GOING POSTAL

In Valier we don’t have mail delivery door-to-door, but go down to the post office to pick it up. We voted to keep it this way because it’s a good chance to run into neighbors. This morning there was quite a group of us, so I got to tell my sewer story. The post master, at the moment a woman named Lorraine, says she’s like a “bartender with stamps.” We had an illustration this morning when one of the older guys in town, a widowed contractor who in his time could build a house single-handed, asked mournfully if anyone could fix a zipper for him. She sent him to the Quilt Shop, where there are good machines and clever hands. It’s in the back of the Conoco station. I didn’t find it for the first few years I was here.

The person I am always most pleased to see at the post office is Corky, whose dad helped us build the Scriver Bighorn Foundry in Browning 45 years ago and who was once my student. What I never quite registered was just how smart he really was, though the math teacher picked up on it -- at one point Corky wanted to be a math teacher, too. It didn’t happen. Instead Corky has had one of those fix-everything lives, doing what came to hand. A few years ago he had a brain aneurysm which was repaired by emergency surgery, leaving him just as smart and funny as he ever was but causing him to have perpetual pain and an occasional internal lightning strike like a taser hit that doubles him up. His mail included books on tape -- authors like John McPhee, who also likes to know how everything works.

I’ve never had the contempt for working men (and now sometimes women, though they are political enough to escape criticism) that many people mostly keep hidden. But I think it’s real and I think it hurts us all to have a shortage of guys who can do plumbing, electric stuff, water and sewer -- jobs that take logic, strength, tools and a willingness to crawl under houses. When I bought this house, part of my motivation was to learn how to do this myself -- at least a little bit -- and I did crawl under there a few days ago to disconnect my hose bib.

I love big hairy men who can really do stuff. Maybe it’s because my folks grew up on farms. My dad used to show us how he could burn the red hair off his arms with a blowtorch. My brothers and I would sit on the basement steps, all agog, while he fixed things. Then there were the foundry years with Bob when we sweated from heat and exertion. I was the only woman, but I was kept humble by the knowledge that one of the workers who was doing the same thing I was had flunked out of my English class. (No, not Corky -- he was a little kid then.) I mean, if he could do the same work as me, why couldn’t I teach him English?

Today my U of Chicago Alumni mag came and on the cover is a guy who could easily be my father from the looks of him: red-headed, beefy, freckled, dressed in ball cap and baggy jeans. (He’s twenty years younger than me.) Kevin Murphy, a PhD ‘86 economist, a “genius” according to the MacArthur Foundation, is said to be a brilliant economist but he hates to write (oh, oh -- not ENTIRELY like me). What he really likes is fine carpentry. Of course, he’s a professor with a huge classload because he likes that, too. He likes to think “with” people.

In the years of this past century must of our population has left rural life and I would propose that in the process we lost much knowledge that came from doing things, handling materials, learning tools and strategies. Someone was recently praised as a woodsman because he could make a willow whistle. Heck, my mom made good willow whistles. I’ve been looking at horse and rider sculptures and thinking how much we’ve lost in terms of knowing horse breeds, being able to read horse language, internalizing the feeling of a big, muscled, and yet obedient (mostly) animal under us. When we look at equestrian statues nowadays, we lose much of the information once plain to everyone: what kind of man would ride this horse, what this horse thinks of its rider, what sort of work this horse is meant to do.

So I was telling Corky about the trench in front of my house so deep the shovel guy needed a ladder and he told me about one part where the sewer is twelve feet down. Jack Smith came in sporting an elegant Spanish round-crowned hat this morning. (He runs a mountain man gallery -- http://www.medicineriver.com/lame_bear.htm -- in case you need a pure white buckskin wedding dress with authentic Indian details.) He said the slip liners were trying to do something in the trench using a solvent that made him, quietly sitting at his desk, suddenly feel like Saturday on a happy night. His demonstration was vivid.

I live here for the competence, the gusto, the stories. But when I go to the post office, what I pick up is stuff like the U of Chicago Magazine so I can read about economics and the Argonne National Laboratory. That there is an article about Susan M Bielstein’s book “Permissions, a Survival Guide: Blunt Talk about Art as Intellectual Property” (U of Chicago, 2006). It would be pure gravy except that it is information I really need.

Before there was the Internet, there was the Post Office, which comes equipped with a community and a “bartender with stamps.” And you know who else came in? The librarian!