Re-Tired

Well, so much for my plan of blogging if not every day at least on a semi-regular basis. So much for my plan of sorting 27 years of detritus (important only to me) in the month of November. So much for cleaning up the house. So much for . . . well, let’s just say I’m learning what my former colleague Gilly, who retired a month and a half ahead of me, said: retirement is busy.

Now, Gilly did the things I thought I was going to do. She took bags and bags from her house down to Montrose, where there are now a Goodwill and Salvation Army. (Our options in Gunnison these days are limited: Six Points vets its donations pretty severely, and the Op Shop is long gone.) She raked her yard. She rode her bike around the Van Tuyl Trail.

What have I done since leaving the workforce? I have gone to work.

Most of it is unpaid but rewarding: our food pantry put out a call for additional volunteers in order to boost hours when our government decided to weaponize SNAP benefits. I already help unload the big truck that arrives the first Wednesday of each month, but since I suddenly had free time I signed up for lots of other shifts. Now that the pantry has settled on extra hours and staffed accordingly, my time there is down to conducting inventory and unloading the big truck.

I did find one paying position, which was my plan — I would like to work part-time. This is very part-time, but the learning curve and holidays have kept me busier than expected.

Lynn, who would love to be at the Almont Post Office and who the Gunnison PO would like to send to Almont, can’t be there because in the wacky world that is the US Postal Service, if you have experience you can’t work at Almont, so they send people with three weeks of training to a one-person old-school office and it results in great frustration for all, including the postal patrons.

So Lynn is in Gunnison but she knows the rural carriers who work out of Almont, which if you aren’t from here is such a small spot in the road that I once, in my collegiate gas-station days, directed someone 10 miles up the road, which he drove, but then he came back and said there was nothing there. “Did you see some cabins?” I asked. Why yes, he had. “That’s Almont,” I said.

However, in the world of mail, Almont extends in a giant 20-plus-mile sprawl, north toward Crested Butte and east pretty much to the Continental Divide. One of the carriers, whose route encompasses 110 miles of driving each day in the summer, is in his late 70s with some lung issues. He can’t afford to quit his route, but he was wanting to cut back, so one day a week I now drive 66 miles to deliver mail to the fine folks of “Almont.”

Before you get too excited about me working for the Postal Service, let me note I am a subcontractor to a subcontractor to a contractor to the USPS. That’s pretty Kevin Bacon right there. I don’t have a uniform, badge or name tag, but I do have a torn magnetic that says “US Mail” that I put on the back of Lynn’s bright yellow Jeep Renegade that I hope will save me when I stop right in the middle of Taylor Canyon Road because it’s snowy and there’s no place else to go.

Not that it’s been terribly snowy so far — we had a balmy December that felt like spring thaw. Which I would complain about more if I wasn’t driving mail up a couple narrow twisty roads that often sit in shadow all day.

I departed Pat’s Screen Printing on Halloween Friday, getting out five hours ahead of my projected midnight departure thanks to help from several friends. I started my adventures in mail the following Monday.

I had assumed that I would enter the world o’ mail leisurely, doing ride-alongs for the month of November while trying to decide if this was a job for me. It starts earlier in the day than I like to, and it involves a lot of driving, so I wasn’t sure — although I wasn’t certain how many takers Gary was going to find and listening to him try to catch a breath made me feel like I am in a position to help.

Like all things postal, however, my vision of the learning curve was not matched by reality. Veterans Day was coming up, and Gary had his sights set on a four-day weekend. So we did a crash cram on Week One, and I went out on my own on my third day. I did feel better about it as Gary counseled that nothing was so important that it couldn’t wait one more day if weather got too bad or I wasn’t sure about something.

So far, two months in, I’ve managed Taylor Canyon just fine. It’s Spring Creek that bedevils me.

Spring Creek is a canyon that runs into Taylor Canyon and if you’re so inclined in the summer you can make a big giant loop of the two. Spring Creek is where my friend Matt and I used to go for his firewood, and once upon a time on our way up the canyon we encountered a small sedan coming down the road with a large tree sticking out the back window.

Spring Creek has cluster boxes, seven of them on my winter route. (I don’t know how many on my summer route, because “Almont” is a land of second- third- and fourth-homeowners and campers who say “no” to winter and “yes” to summer.)

For some reason, Cluster Box 4 has caused me no end of grief, and for the first weeks I had to open it at least twice each time. And once I forgot to go to Box 6 (because everyone is now gone for the season from Box 7) and didn’t realize it until I got back to Taylor Road, so I had to go back up Spring Creek.

The most flummoxing part is a road called Shawnee. It’s located near Box 4, but inexplicably two residents get their mail in Box 2, one has a box in front of his house at the start of the street and only one is in Box 4. There are probably others who have post office boxes down in Actual Almont. Once you quit expecting the USPS to make sense, it goes a lot easier.

I like regular mailboxes better than cluster boxes, because keys and I have never gotten along well, and packages along Spring Creek still stress me out because I don’t know where everyone’s house is and the parcel lockers are often inadequate, but now that I’ve got the route mostly figured out (until spring brings the chickens home to roost and boost my side roads by two or three and extend Taylor Canyon Road to the hamlet of Tincup tucked on the side of the big mountains) I’m thinking that rural mail delivery works for me. One day a week.

The food pantry is closed for a couple weeks to refinish the floor, and I think I’m finally running low on things I need to do to close out my ownership of Pat’s, so perhaps in this new year I won’t find retirement quite so busy. But you never know what lies around the next corner.

All these actors are closer to Kevin Bacon than I am to the actual Postal Service.