Mailman: My Wild Ride Delivering the Mail in Appalachia and Finally Finding Home
By Stephen Starring Grant
Simon & Schuster
Early in Stephen Starring Grant’s endearing memoir “Mailman: My Wild Ride Delivering the Mail in Appalachia and Finally Finding Home,” the author explains that he learned he’d lost his white-collar marketing job while sitting in an eerily empty airport at the start of the pandemic.
Bad news, obviously, since similar positions vanished from the jobs landscape. Grant had a family (with two teenage daughters) to support and a recent prostate cancer diagnosis. “My cancer was as benign as cancer gets,” he writes. “But what had seemed manageable—treatable—now loomed as an existential issue. I was about to become one of the undoctored in America while I knowingly carried a disease that could kill me. The world was going someplace weird. And I was sitting in a white rocking chair in an abandoned airport, eating a Whopper with a biological time bomb strapped to my nuts.”
This passage helps explain what led Grant, at age 50, to apply for low-paying work as a postal carrier in his hometown of Blacksburg, Virginia. It also showcases his wry storytelling style and eye for the absurd – which, as you might guess, comes up often when sharing stories of his year spent as a rural mail carrier during a global pandemic.
Though Grant never dives too far into the United States Postal Service’s history, he does provide a front-row seat to the training sessions, tests, and processes now involved. He demonstrates that while modern technology can certainly streamline some USPS tasks, the job is still often physically and intellectually taxing on the delivery end, with little to no room for human error.
Grant regularly confronts failure – a feeling he's grown unaccustomed to – as he gets his bearings. Because he’s challenged, he also experiences moments of elation and awe: “White collar work never offered physical thrills. I had worked in a climate-controlled environment for almost thirty years, a sensory-deprivation chamber. Working outside with the mail, I felt close to the land, the weather, to my own material person. I wasn’t just a brain in a jar. I could scramble hills, dodge dogs, deliver the mail in the dark of night and the noonday sun. My body could do it all. Sometimes, looking out over the valley and eating a 7 Eleven sandwich, I would be struck with how fucking good it was, to be outside eating a sandwich. To be hungry, have something to eat, and then feel full. To be in the rain and have a really good set of raingear, to just laugh at the weather and be part of it. It was so good to be flesh and blood, and know it.”
Downsides arrive in the form of an Amazon/UPS contract battle that results in parcels overwhelming the USPS for a couple of months in the summer of 2020; dangerous ventures into dark corners of Appalachia, where an unfamiliar mailman may find himself facing armed, suspicious neighbors; unleashed, aggressive dogs that give chase (mail carriers are advised to spray Halt! Dog Repellant into the canine’s nose and eyes until the can goes dry); and a paycheck that can’t come close to covering a middle class family’s basic expenses, despite the job’s long hours and brutal demands.
This last drawback not only impacts Grant’s family in a pragmatic way, but also acts as a humbling check on Grant’s ego. On one of Grant’s first mail routes, while filling in for a vacationing carrier, he must revisit a building where he’d rented office space to do his previous job remotely: “Really, I was delivering mail to my past self. I stood outside and looked in the mirrored window at my desk with its two monitors. My couch and my bookshelves. My mini fridge. The old TV on which the girls could come over and watch a movie while I worked. … I just couldn’t bring myself to surrender the lease. I hung on to it, a promise to myself that I would make my way back to the interrupted narrative of my life.”
Of course, the pandemic “interrupted the narrative” for all of us, in multiple ways. What I so appreciate about Grant’s charming, often funny, and moving memoir is the way he reminds us that a deviation from our expected path is often worth the sacrifices and hardships that come with it. Delivering the mail during the pandemic, hard as it was, gave Grant a sense of pride and purpose and connection – the chance to “touch grass” while also serving his community in a tangible way.
You get a palpable sense of all this right away, in the memoir’s prologue, when Grant describes delivering a Lord of the Rings-inspired sword to a man living in a trailer. The addressee – who purchased the item with pandemic relief money – unboxes the sword. As they take a moment to admire it, Grant writes, “It was one of the most intimate moments I’ve ever had with a stranger. We weren’t up a hollow deep in the Blue Ridge Mountains, lost in the radio hole at the center of one of the longest rural routes in the Blacksburg, Virginia post office. We were in the middle of a myth, a molten dream of a place where great deeds, brave words, and the right sword in the right hand could make a broken world whole again. Honestly, I don’t think I’ve ever seen my tax dollars put to better use.”
