Let me tell you about my mother. For twenty-five years, five, sometimes six, days a week, she drove the same fifty miles, following the main roads and back roads of her mail route, which included some five hundred households. She left home before six in the morning, dropping my sisters and me off with one babysitter or another—unless my father had a later shift at the grocery store, where he worked as a clerk—until we were old enough to stay home and wait for the bus by ourselves. In the course of her career, which also included a dozen earlier years on other routes, she drove an old postal jeep that she’d bought for a song, as rural letter carriers were often responsible for providing their own delivery vehicles. It was the boxy kind you’d imagine as a Matchbox toy, or that Norman Rockwell might paint. Its steering wheel was on the passenger side, making deliveries easier and safer, but it wasn’t designed for the era of online shopping, so later she switched to a regular minivan. That had plenty of room for packages but required her to straddle the front seat, stretching her left hand out to hold the steering wheel while delivering mail from the passenger window with her right. She told me it was only ever a problem when she was nine months pregnant, which she was three times; each time, she delivered the mail until she went into labor, though the last time, with my younger sister, her best friend did the driving during her final week, because her belly was too big to fit beside the center console.
My mother started every workday at the office casing mail, separating everything on her route into little pigeonholes made by arranging thin metal slats to various widths depending on the volume of mail a household received—a larger one for, say, someone with a small business; a smaller one for the widower who received nothing but bills. This sorting took anywhere from two to four hours, though it rewarded patience because any mistakes made in the office would bedevil carriers on their routes, not only slowing them down but also causing headaches, or worse, for customers who received the wrong mail or didn’t receive something they were expecting. After my mother finished casing, she’d load everything in its rightful order into her vehicle, along with the packages, then leave her post office on the Eastern Shore of Maryland and cross the Tred Avon River, tracing the course of the Miles River and turning in to and out of housing developments and side roads, turning around after hundreds of stops and another four or five hours, right about when she reached Oak Creek and the edge of 21601, her assigned Zip Code. If she was lucky, she’d finish in time to pick us up from school or at least meet us at the end of the lane after the bus dropped us off.
If that sounds peaceful at all, it’s because my mother always made it sound that way. I never heard about the flat tires, dead batteries, hornet-filled mailboxes, rabid dogs, black ice, drifted snowbanks, angry customers, or rude and menacing drivers; she never complained about the lack of heat or of air-conditioning in the delivery truck that the post office eventually provided for her, or all the money she spent on rain gear, rubber gloves, duct tape, trash bags, and other items she bought to make things a little easier on her or nicer for her customers. It’s only since she retired that I see the wincing pain of her torn rotator cuffs and the swollen soreness of her arthritis—in her knuckles, from all that artful sorting, and in her knees, from all that heavy lifting (by regulation, anything up to seventy pounds, whether boxes of kitty litter or bags of dog food or even a tombstone). Never mind snow, rain, heat, and gloom of night; my mother has had three melanomas removed from her face and arms, all on her driving side, whatever genetic predisposition she had exacerbated by thirty-eight years of near-constant sun exposure.
My mother, the rural letter carrier: forget nails, she’s tougher than the anvil on which the tools to fashion the nails were forged.
I have known that for years, of course, but I was reminded of it by “Mailman: My Wild Ride Delivering Mail in Appalachia and Finally Finding Home” (Simon & Schuster), an amiable new memoir by Stephen Grant which chronicles Grant’s short stint as a rural carrier associate in 24060—to those of us outside the craft, in Blacksburg, Virginia. Others have written accounts of the mail, from the encyclopedic (the journalist Devin Leonard’s “Neither Snow Nor Rain: A History of the United States Postal Service”) to the polemical (the Kansas bookseller Danny Caine’s pamphlet “Save the USPS: A Small Business’s Love Letter to an Essential American Institution”). “Mailman” is a charming addition to that canon—part personal journey, part sociology study, part cri de coeur for an agency more imperilled than ever.
Grant’s year working for the United States Postal Service was not an exercise in immersive journalism conducted to understand one of the most dangerous jobs in America—a job with a higher injury rate than mining coal or working in construction. Nor was it an act of political resistance, seeking to illuminate one of America’s oldest government services in an era when conservatives have targeted it for extinction, or at least privatization. No, Grant came to the work out of desperation: laid off from his marketing job during the pandemic, the only place he found that was hiring was the U.S.P.S. For two decades, he had bounced among lucrative gigs with such titles as brand strategist and consumer psychologist, but many marketing agencies and advertising firms were shuttering as COVID-19 devastated the global economy. The father of two teen-age girls, he had been given a diagnosis of prostate cancer a few months before losing his job, so he knew his family needed a reliable income and that he needed serious health insurance. Grant grew up in Blacksburg, where his father was a beloved engineering professor at Virginia Tech, and he had happily moved back to southwestern Virginia when his daughters were in their single digits; for years, the family enjoyed a posh life style on rural Brush Mountain with a New York City salary to support them. Now, with no practical skills to speak of, the newly unemployed Grant struggled to find work. By chance, he saw an advertisement for postal workers on the state unemployment website and soon made himself into—as the language of the moment had it—an essential worker.
Grant thought he knew about the mail from all those years opening his own mailbox, but then he encountered the U.S.P.S. 474 Virtual Entry Assessment. Somewhere between seventy and ninety per cent of applicants fail this aptitude and personality test, which includes more than a dozen hypothetical questions about work situations, including how to handle crying co-workers or needy customers; a cluster of questions focussed on attention to detail, such as accurately sorting packages and verifying addresses; and more than a hundred questions about work style and personal motivation. Grant passed, got fingerprinted and underwent a background check, then travelled to Roanoke for postal-academy training. A sign outside the door asked “Why Come to Work?” Below the question was an answer, which read as if someone had forgotten to add “make it inspiring” to a ChatGPT prompt: “Numerous studies have shown personal and financial benefits to those who show up to work as scheduled.”
This all unfolds in the early days of the pandemic, so there’s talk of masks and skepticism about vaccines, and Grant’s best friend at the academy is a woman who packs her own toilet paper. Mostly, though, there are packages, a tsunami of packages mailed by retailers to a nation of new shut-ins, suddenly ordering everything online for delivery to their front door. The U.S.P.S. operates some thirty-one thousand post offices around the country and handles more than three hundred million pieces of mail each day, delivering at least six and sometimes seven days a week to some hundred and sixty-six million addresses. But an overwhelming aspect of its operation is the seven billion or so packages delivered every year—more than a billion for Amazon alone.
The opening chapter of Grant’s book focusses on one such parcel. He’s sitting in the passenger seat of a fellow-carrier’s Ford Explorer, reaching his left leg over to the gas and his left arm over to the steering wheel, the way my mother and thousands of other letter carriers did while delivering mail in their personal vehicles, barrelling past an “END STATE MAINTENANCE” sign, finishing a sixty-mile rural route. In the back is a three-foot-long cardboard box with the return address “Ronin Katana, Fair Oaks, TX.” The flip-flop-wearing customer who answers the door at the trailer that Grant finds at the end of this scrub-pine-lined dirt driveway has, it turns out, ordered a steel replica of Andúril, the sword forged by the elves of Rivendell from the shards of Narsil. If you don’t speak Tolkien, it’s the “Flame of the West” carried by Aragorn in “The Lord of the Rings,” or, to quote Grant’s customer, “Yeah, man. The blade that smote Sauron.”
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen my tax dollars put to better use,” Grant writes of the man’s absolute joy upon opening the package. He’s not referring to the cost of delivery: the customer had spent his second stimulus check on that sword, so the United States Treasury paid for the sword. As for what it cost us taxpayers for it to arrive on that doorstep: not a cent. “The USPS is a universal service,” Grant writes, “the largest postal system on the planet, invisible infrastructure like the Federal Aviation Administration’s air traffic control system or the Food and Drug Administration’s food safety programs. Except the United States Postal Service pays for itself.” As Grant learns on his first day of training, the U.S.P.S. hadn’t taken a dime of taxpayer money in decades.
A self-sufficient agency mandated to cover its own costs, the Postal Service was profitable, running an operational surplus until the mid-two-thousands, when a series of legislative congressional requirements including pre-funding employee retirement accounts, burdened its balance sheet. During the year that Grant worked for the agency, it received a ten-billion-dollar loan through the Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act for pandemic-related costs, which was later forgiven by Congress, converted into direct funding. Despite that taxpayer infusion and some federal investment in electrifying the agency’s fleet, efforts now under attack by Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill,” the U.S.P.S. continues to operate at a loss, last year more than nine billion dollars. The agency’s finances are complicated; its future uncertain. But Grant delights in the fact that every mail carrier is a sworn agent of the federal government, feeling a surge of patriotism when he completes his two weeks of training and then raises his right hand to take his official oath: “I, Stephen Grant, do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the same; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties of the office on which I am about to enter.”
If that oath seems grandiose for the men and women who stuff your mail slot with junk catalogues and fill your porch with Amazon packages, Grant reminds readers that, along with the protection of the Continental Army, the universal-service obligation of the Postal Service was one of the first services this country guaranteed its citizens, a right in and of itself and a key to other rights, too. Two hundred and fifty years ago, before the delegates at the Second Continental Congress declared their independence from Britain or even got around to naming the United States of America, they created the Postal Service and appointed Benjamin Franklin the first Postmaster General. Later authorized by the Constitution, the U.S.P.S. is tucked into Article One: somewhere between collecting taxes and declaring war, Congress is empowered “to establish Post Offices and post Roads.” “In the eyes of the USPS,” Grant writes, “you are all created equal: You will receive the mail, irrespective of who you are and where you live. You are all invited to be part of the nation’s commercial, legal, scientific, and artistic conversation, entitled by the simple fact that you are American.”
In the COVID era, this invitation felt especially charged. “Delivering the mail was dumb and anachronistic,” but also, “Delivering the mail was a vital act of normalcy,” Grant writes. Whether providing the utterly essential—medicine, seed packets, live chicks, feed, and ballots—or the essentially frivolous, like replica swords, Grant felt that he and his co-workers were a crucial presence in the lives of their customers. More than a few times, he knocked on the door of someone who hadn’t seen a human being other than family members for weeks: “I had joined a brotherhood that stretched back to Benjamin Franklin, to men on horseback and in biplanes. I had become a flag-wearing, sworn federal officer in a position of trust, the duly appointed agent of the United States Government in a time of national crisis, the dedicated and beloved civil servant of the people.”
