death of a mailbox

This afternoon, I was called upon to fish the crumpled metal corpse of our rural mailbox out of a snow-filled ditch after it was cruelly side-swiped by the blade of a municipal snowplow. When faced with this task, I generally employ the “stealth mode” of retrieval, timing my foray until the highway will be clear of traffic for several long moments. By doing so, I reduce the likelihood of being gawked at my some passerby smirking with the self-satisfied schadenfreude of one who thinks, “Better you than me.”

Recovering a mangled mailbox is always more than a little awkward. First, you have to ascertain whether it contained precious mail — perhaps the cheque that you’ve been anxiously awaiting for that photo sold to a magazine several weeks ago. Arrrrghhh… could it be that Fate has chosen this of all days to hand over the booty? You check the surrounding snowbanks for evidence of slush-covered envelopes. With nothing in sight, you gently yank at the mailbox, pulling at its twisted door flap, rather like tugging at the tail of a road-killed raccoon. Slowly, you work the box loose from the packed snow. The weight and resistance give you some idea of how it must feel to be buried by an avalanche.

After hauling the mailbox back to the porch, you give it a cursory inspection to decide whether it can be repaired just one more time. This box has lasted through… is it three winters? That’s got to be some kind of a record. Of course, it’s been looking mighty tough for over a year — sides canted about thirty degrees off of vertical, bottom rusting through in a few spots due repeated splashings of road salt, and the door hinge almost torn off on one side by the truck that backed over it while turning around at the end of your lane. It just might be that you can keep it going for a couple of more months to see things through to the end of winter. That way, the new replacement won’t have to risk being splatted by a snowplow during its first few weeks on the job.

After a quarter of a century, one gains a certain level of expertise at assessing the prospects of restoring mangled mailboxes. You check the relative weakness of the rusty panels in an attempt to discern whether they’re sturdy enough to secure a few pop rivets through a patch of tin hammered flat from a tomato juice can. Triage session over, you sigh as you determine that it just might not be possible to restore the health of this particular victim. True, you have worked miracles in the past. There was the time your first mailbox, a lovingly handmade model pieced together with pine plank off-cuts left over from building your barn, was busted all to pieces by a road grader. Compared to most, the driver was a conscientious fellow who pulled over onto the shoulder and came back to gaze sadly at the victim of his carelessness. You watched from the house as he grabbed a ball-pene hammer out of his toolbox and proceeded to bash the planks back together, leaving your mailbox looking like a smashed orange crate perched atop a wooden post. Disgusted, you carried your once beautiful creation into the workshop to drill, glue and screw it into some semblance of its former self.

And then there was the classic rural mailbox, the Real McCoy metal box with the big red metal flag, given to you by your parents — a Christmas present to replace the handmade wooden box destroyed by the grader. You were determined that this mailbox was going to last! Now, as most rural people will know, the weak link in the chain for mailboxes are their posts. If you mount them on top of something wimpy, the graders and snowplows have no sense of respect and will whack your mailbox off at the knees. For this classic mailbox, something special was in order… a 4-inch steel pipe going down below frost into a couple of feet of concrete. Surely that would be enough of a deterrent to keep the plow blades at bay. And, by god, it did seem to keep them away almost as well as a necklace of garlic might keep the vampires off your neck. But then, one icy night, with the thundering roar of an earthquake, an 18-wheeler turned that mailbox into a hood ornament and sent the post and attached concrete footing, torn loose from the frozen earth, on a trajectory that landed it a good sixty feet onto the front lawn.

After that incident, you lost most of your pride and gave up trying to keep a handsome mailbox. You went into guerilla mode and bought the cheapest damned mailbox you could find, then fastened it to the scariest looking contraption that you could slap together. The most current edition, and one that seems to work about the best of all, is a big livestock water tub jammed tight with heavy, split cordwood, with an L-shaped metal swing pole coming up from the middle. You smile with some satisfaction as you note that nobody wants to tangle with that sucker, especially in winter when the tub gets full of water and ice and probably weighs more than three hundred pounds.

But, well, even with all of these precautions, eventually the day comes when someone or other manages to succeed in taking a deadly swipe at your cheap metal mailbox and leaves it crumpled in the ditch. And there you are, going through the now-familiar motions of recovering and evaluating its mangled remains. This time, it doesn’t look good for the victim. In the morning, maybe you’ll get out the pop rivets and the tin can and see what can be done. If successful, this mailbox will go back out to the post to live and die another day. If not…. well….it picked a good day to die — tomorrow is garbage day.

R.I.P. Mr. Mailbox.

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One Response to “death of a mailbox”

  1. Burning Silo » Blog Archive » R.I.P. Mr. Mailbox #7 Says:

    […] Well, as foreshadowed in my post of February 17th, 2006, the life of Mr. Mailbox #7 came to an end last weekend. As some of you might recall, just before the holidays, the truck that delivered my new laptop computer backed over our mailbox. I sensed that the delivery driver seemed somewhat embarrassed as he scooped the remains off the road – maybe not so much for knocking the Mr. Mailbox down, as in worrying that some passerby might think that HE was the owner of the poor, rusted-out, old carcass that perhaps should have been consigned to the township dump many months ago. […]