ranking delivery vehicles - postal chronicles #1

introduction 

this summer (and winter) break, i worked as a rural mail carrier for the united states postal service. there are a lot of interesting stories to tell about this job, and i hope to make my way through them on this blog. to begin, i'm going to provide my opinions on the different vehicles i have delivered mail and packages. 

there are several important factors to consider when rating a postal vehicle. as a result, i've developed the following five metrics:

1. comfort: does it have ac/heat? does it have a speaker? is it really loud? and so on.
2. mail/SPR delivery:  is it right hand drive? is there a mail tray? how are the windows? (SPR stands for small parcels and rolls)
3. package delivery: how smooth are dis/re-mounts? how much cargo space is there? can you access (or at least see) the packages when you're in the front? what are the doors like?
4. handling: how's the acceleration? traction? cornering? how're the mirrors and/or backup camera?
5. juice: anything else that can't be described via another metric.

LLV/FFV

the grumman long-life vehicle is the classic postal truck, at least in my home town. it is, as of right now, the most used postal delivery vehicle in the country. they are profoundly old, having first entered service in 1986, and were manufactured until 1994

1. i fear the llv straight up looses this category. maybe it had functional ac when it was first manufactured, but it certainly doesn't now. this truck is an oven, and i am a baked potato in 90º heat. i don't think i've ever been as hot for as long as i was on a few days this summer. i knew it was bad because i would get out and be glad about how much cooler it was. does it have heat? also no. she's not very well insulated and doesn't have good air movement. she generates too much heat in summer, but nowhere near enough in winter. additionally, the llv has no onboard sound system, leading me to bring a bluetooth speaker which would often die before the end of the day. on top of that, it's absurdly loud. imagine everything rattling around forever. if that wasn't enough, the inside gets really dusty because there are open vents and all the whole dirt road comes right in. the seat is fine i guess, although the seatbelt is somewhat uncomfortable, and the ergonomics of the controls are ok.
2. despite its failure in the first category, the llv does very well in this category and sets a gold standard. it has a big adjustable mail tray, a big window at a good height, and it's right hand drive. the side profile of the llv makes it very easy to get close to a mailbox, and it's built like a tank in case you slide into one (yes that happens a lot in the winter.).
3. the llv is also quite good at package delivery. it's the only vehicle with a door between the back and front, which is a crazy huge advantage. you can kind of fit any number of imaginable packages into it, and the shelves are solid despite being absurdly noisy. there's space up front for packages in addition to my bag and mail. the dismounts/remounts, however, are not very good. the door is solid, but the movement in/out is awkward. the seat belt is hard to get on sometimes, as the lap belt gets caught. sometimes the back door is horrible but that's usually not an issue.
4. she's so sluggish. i can't blame her, she's old as hell. she doesn't corner well either. she is a tank though, and people expect you to be going slow. the mirrors are sexy (i love you front left pot mirror) but don't provide great view when backing up. no backup camera or rear window to speak of. she is the best of any vehicle in the snow, but that's not saying much. carriers at my office would joke about ramming their LLVs into mailboxes on accident because it's just that easy to slip in the snow.
5. it is impossible to describe how sexy the LLV steering wheel is. it's smooth, it's thin, it feels good to turn, it's just the best. she's also just by far the most iconic vehicle, and driving her fulfills my postal cosplay fantasy, or at least as close as i can get without a uniform (uniforms are sadly only for city carriers).

 

metris

 

the mercedes-benz metris is really just a van. the post office leased a bunch of them to replace LLVs, and they've been around longer than they were supposed to. it's a contemporary vehicle though, and it's rankings very much depend on that.

1. the metris wins this category easily. it has exceptional ac and heat, a sound system that immediately connects on startup, and is smooth and quiet. the seat is pretty comfy too.
2. at a small scale, the metris is alright for mail and SPRs. it is right hand drive and has a mail tray, but the mail tray is rather low and small. for a short route like the one i was usually doing it was pretty lovely, but it doesn't scale well. the windows are at a sort of odd height, and the mirror is really easy to ram into a mailbox.
3. mounts/dismounts are good, and the sliding door usually feels nice, but the metris falls short in this category. you can't access packages from the front, and there's no space up front or in the back. again, for a small route it's good but if you're doing anything serious it tends to get in the way. for doing just amazon it's ok, for amazon and mail it kind of sucks. it's kinda awesome to do everything in one smooth motion though.
4. in summer, she's great. beautiful acceleration and cornering. mirrors are lovely, and the backup camera is beautiful. she can't handle snow or mud at all though. 
5. if you're in good conditions, the metris is the cushiest vehicle ever. otherwise, you'll be struggling a bit. it's kind of cute how her door gets covered in paint from every mailbox door.

promaster

  

(this is my moving van)

the ram promaster is also just a van, but it's a bigger van than the llv. these are mainly for city carriers, and i technically never drove one of them as i wasn't trained on them. however, at the end of the summer i was given a chance to drive one of these when i rented a van from uhaul to move into my new apartment. funnily enough, when i returned in the winter the office had rented a van from uhaul and i got to drive that as well for package delivery.

1. the promaster is pretty comfortable. it has good ac/heat. the speaker is somewhat medicore, as it takes a long time to reconnect. it's a quiet drive though, and the cabin is cozy. 
2. i only did package deliver, so i can't speak to mail delivery. i imagine it would be good for city route nd kind of extremely annoying for a rural route.
3. it's kind of high off the ground, but there is a lot of cargo space. no access to the back from the front, but the doors are pretty solid.
4. she handles about the same as the metris, and the mirrors/camera are both quality. slightly better in winter due to higher weight. 
5. it's kinda fun being that high off the ground.

 

ethan's van

(i don't have a photo of the outside of this one but here's the inside)

there was a carrier at my office who used a specific van that there was only one of. more of a minivan than off the ground, i believe it was a ram of some sort. he asked me out one time which was weird, but he was otherwise a very friendly guy. his van though... oh boy...

1. it does have ac/heat, but no sound system. it's pretty quiet, but the particularly silly thing is that the door doesn't properly close so it is always wet on the inside when it rains. and yup, i pretty much always was driving it in the rain.  
2. i never delivered mail in it, but i did do SPRs and it kind of sucked. no mail tray to speak of, just a second seat. it's left hand drive as well. you have to get out for every SPR. horrible. 
3. dismounts aren't too bad, but the door is really insufferable. it was always broken. it even got fixed once and broke again. cargo space is lackluster, and there's no access between compartments. ultimately fine, but not great for anything tricky.
4. it's just a car. normal car stuff. works fine.
5. horrible horrible air freshener smell.

those big city ones

 

i can't for the life of me figure out what these are called, and we don't have them in my hometown. no clue what they're like to drive. seems scary. 

self-provided vehicle

(i trust you can imagine a normal car. subaru and jeep are common brand choices.) 

i am very very grateful i was never forced to drive my own car for mail delivery. it's absurd this is technically part of the job description, and the worst routes are often the ones where the carrier has to supply their own vehicle i imagine delivering like that would absolutely suck. 

 

conclusions

and with that i have given you my opinion on every postal vehicle. have fun knowing more whenever you see one on the street. postal chronicles will return at some point.

elvis & his pet cloud

another internet research rabbit-hole for you! this one was sparked by the professor of my creative writing class, who read us the following poem:

Elvis Moving a Small Cloud: The Desert Near Las Vegas, 1976

David Wojahn

after the painting by Susan Baker

“Stop this motherfucking limo,” says the King,
And the Caddie, halting, raises fins of dust
Into a landscape made of creosote,
Lizards, dismembered tires. The King’s been reading again -

Mind Over Matter: Yogic Texts
On Spiritual Renewal by Doctor Krishna
Majunukta, A Guide on How to Tap the
Boundless Mental Powers of the Ancients.

Bodyguards and hangers-on pile out.
His highness, shades off, scans the east horizon.
“Boys, today I’m gonna show you somethin’
You can tell your grandchildren about.”

He aims a finger at Nevada’s only cloud.
“Lo! Behold! Now watch that fucker move!”

it's a nice poem, and it's got a quality image to it with a bit of humor. the professor said that despite looking it up he was unable to find a picture of the painting. he joked that if anyone managed to find it, they would get an A and not have to come to class for the rest of the semester. now i want to go to class, it's likely my favorite i'm taking at the moment, but i also couldn't resist the challenge.

i began in the straightforward way, trying to find copies of the poem. it barely exists online, but i found it in a couple places, one of them being some random person's blog from 2013 with a dead image. using wayback machine i discovered the image is sadly just a photo of elvis. of course it couldn't be that easy. the comments section illustrates how those who trod this path before me have failed:

astute readers will note that that comment was posted earlier this year, doubtless by another student of the same professor. my journey continues, and having failed to find my quarry through the poet, the poem, or elvis, i resort to the remaining piece of information left to me: susan baker.

annoyingly, susan baker is a very common name. i search susan baker in any combination of the poet, elvis, vegas, nevada, anything that might get me closer. i come up empty handed. i am beginning to think this is the end of the path, but then i realize i can do something unthinkable: contact the poet.

so i find his website, look at his contact info, and send an email. i expect to wait a while, or maybe not even hear anything, but he writes back the next day. below is his email. 

 

his point about writing from an image is probably good advice, and something i find applicable to me, but it's not what i'm looking for. however, he has given me a crucial piece of information: a place and time to find susan baker.

i search up "susan baker provincetown" and am immediately rewarded. my results include an interview with her, listings of her paintings for sale, a book for an exhibition about her early work, and the website of the center mentioned in the email. i comb through these results, but none of them seem to be the painting i'm looking for. i like her art though, and it's fun to see her evolution as an artist.

luckily, included in these results is the susan baker memorial museum. this tells me that she's dead, but it also gives me a very clear next place to contact. i email them.

it's been a few months now and i haven't heard back. i imagine i won't. if by some miracle i do, you'll be the first to know.

Carolina's Bugs

On Monday, Carolina loved spiders. She woke up a bit before five, snoozed twice, and dragged herself to a sitting position on the edge of her bed.

“I gotta stop doing that,” she mumbled to herself, gathering her hair back in a messy ponytail and half-stumbling to the bathroom. She turned on her speaker with a small chirp and considered her options. Mississippi John Hurt and his layered fingerstyle trickled out of the speaker, and water poured over her curls and down her shoulders.

Blues all on the ocean, blues all in the air…

She pumped soap into her hands, worked it to a lather, and washed herself. Getting out of the shower, she appraised herself in the mirror for a moment, eyes drifting past the bruises covering her torso and fixing on their reflection.

“Stunning,” she whispered, then turned and broke eye contact.

When my earthly trials are over, cast my body out in the sea…

Descending the stairs, she grabbed her bag, packed the night before, and walked out the door. 20 minutes to drive to work. 20 minutes to weave through the cars on the highway and stare into the middle space between them.

Save all the undertaker bills, let the mermaids flirt with me.

Arriving at the library, Carolina began her daily duties. She unlocked the building, grabbed her pushcart with its broom, bottles and mop, and started her cleaning work for the morning. It would be a few hours before anyone would talk to her.

“Good morning, Carolina. Beautiful day today, isn’t it?” said a voice, cutting through the rhythm of her broom. Her head jerked up. Lewis had been wishing her a good morning for a month now, and she still almost missed it every time.

“Yeah, good morning,” she hardly managed.

Lewis had already walked away, on to another staff member. As the library’s director, he was technically her boss, connected to everyone in the library and everyone in the larger community. He knew what was happening with each member of the town, their marital troubles, their financial situation, and even their favorite book. His network was wide-reaching, and he felt each small disturbance. Carolina wasn’t sure what he got out of all his this. It seemed a bit overwhelming. She liked her music and her simple, methodical job. People are complicated, but Lewis was sweet.

The spider was in a random back corner of the stacks, somewhere near the end of the alphabet in the adult fiction section. Carolina liked fiction, but she never got books from the library. They had given her the job partially because her love of reading was one of the only things she’d been able to properly express in her interview. She hadn’t read in months, though, and was sort of worried she’d become defined by a past version of herself that she wasn’t living up to.

The spider sat in the middle of its large and impressive web. Carolina spotted three new trapped bugs: two bluebottle flies and one tiny housefly. The corpses were bound in silk, bounced in the web by the air currents of Carolina walking past. Carolina knew the spider well. She looked for it whenever she cleaned there. She wished it good morning when she walked in and good night before she locked up. She never spoke to it through — what would be the point?

ººººººººººººººººººººº

On Friday, Carolina loved cockroaches. She was at a DIY show with a friend under some bridge in the South End. She hadn’t been to this particular spot before, but she knew all the bands playing except one. They didn’t know her, though, or at least she didn’t think they did. Her friend, Nora, had invited her, was trying to get her out of the house, but Carolina was going to go anyway. Nora probably didn’t know that she went to nearly every hardcore show in town, that getting battered in the pit felt good. Being fairly new to the scene, Nora stood a bit away from the edge of the crowd, passing a half-smoked cigarette to Carolina.

“How was work this week?” Nora probed. She was in grad school, and they had met at the library, instantly recognizing something in each other. They hung out probably once a week, and each liked the other a lot, but they hadn’t quite broken through.

“It was alright. About how it usually is. I haven’t seen you there in a while,” said Carolina, her voice rising.

Nora laughed it off. “Yeah, they locked me in the campus library. Can’t get out. Five thousand years of reading about boat construction. No clue how I always end up on something like that.”

“Yeah, that’s a weird one.”

They would’ve said more, but the first band kicked up, a sheet of overdrive cutting off any further potential conversation. Bass thumping, Carolina wanted to join the mass beginning to scrabble, but Nora wasn’t ready for that. They stood on the side the rest of the night, Carolina fiddling with a bottle at her feet and watching the cockroaches scuttle around the side of the bridge.

ººººººººººººººººººººº

On Sunday, Carolina loved maggots. Every weekend, she went for a hike. Sometimes someone joined her, Nora or April or Mads, but today she was alone. She had been for the past few weeks, actually. She went to the same spot she always did when she was alone, a small mountain off some dirt road. There wasn’t a lot or a trailhead, it might’ve not even been a trail, but she always left her car on the side of the road and walked into the woods, following the twisting path.

Carolina would never describe herself as a hiker. She wasn’t serious enough about it; she didn’t have the appropriate equipment. She just wore her old sneakers. No boots, no poles, not even a particularly appropriate outfit.

On the trail, she passed a series of large maples connected by a stone wall. The trees were some of the oldest in the forest. Their sprouts first broke soil long before the land was cleared for grazing. They had been left, alone among their fallen siblings’ stumps, to serve as property boundaries. She stepped up onto the stone wall, dancing her way down the line, testing each rock before stepping, hugging the trees and whirling around them. Eventually, the wall petered out and the forest opened to a large meadow. Walking to the middle, she found the corpse and the rock she knew well.

The corpse smelled today, resting in the sun. Maggots had made their home in about half the face, but from the other half one could tell it used to be a man, probably around 30. He was splayed out, clothed in jeans and a hoodie, muddy, and not particularly nice to look at. Carolina didn’t look at him, but sat against the rock next to him, pulled out her notebook, and sketched. Quick pencil lines and smooth strokes filled the page, with Carolina only briefly pausing to get a sense of scale of the landscape.

She sat for a while, pencil working in her hand. At some point, she took an apple from her bag and ate it, core and all. Then she returned to her sketch. When the sun was starting to touch the horizon and the cicadas got loud, she headed back.

At the end of the trail, she put on Amyl and the Sniffers and started the car. It was dark now.

Guided by angels, but they're not heavenly…

The engine came to life. Shifting into gear, she pulled out into the road. Winding turns lit up by headlights sped past, and all the roadside trees slipped into the forest.

They're on my body and they guide me heavenly, the angels guide me heavenly, heavenly…

Bats flitted across the road, chasing their prey. Her mind turned to the week ahead.

And they pray for forgiveness, never give it, I never want it…

She was seeing Meg on Thursday. Work as usual.

I always carry on heavenly, energy — fuck!

She merged onto the highway, no cars in sight.

 

 

author's note: the songs in this piece are real, and i encourage you to listen to them. the first is "let the mermaids flirt with me" and the second is "guided by angels." the albums these songs are on also respectively have songs entitled "spider, spider" and "maggot." thank you for reading!

liquefy

they won’t even let you have

a chrysalis. you’ll liquefy

in the street. you'll be rapidly losing

precious fluids to the thirsty earth.

you'll be lucky if there’s a bucket

to fall into, to be contained by.

 

someone might come and keep an eye

on you, stir you a little. your face melted

down your chest, your joints came loose

from their sockets, and the liquid flowed.

a reformation is a choice, but did you choose

the circumstances? you're wearing two sodden

shoes, one of your eyelids winks

at the other from across the ocean.

pull it all together and squeeze

it through a cheese cloth, catch in a colander,

whisk until smooth.

i wish i could stop biting my nails

in the summer of 2021 or maybe 2022 i was sitting on the grass with blake and he said he bit his nails as a nervous thing, like when he was anxious. this is stereotypically why people bite their nails. i said i did it when i was bored and i didn't know myself well enough to know that i was lying. 

in 2024 i painted my nails a lot. i got a polish with flecks of white and black that was otherwise clear and it worked well because it stayed on for a while. i did red for a vampire party when it was halloween and redid it a couple times. it worked but the habit didn't stick. i have very clear memories of scraping it off in my art history class. that probably was because i was bored.

it's really not fun to bite my nails. it's not a satisfying activity. sometimes a bit breaks and then i have to bite them to fix them. but it doesn't fix them, it's worse, and eventually it gets to a point where i can't bite them anymore and i have to get out clippers to fix them when they're barely even long enough to cut. not that cutting them makes them smooth and even either.

i tried filing my nails for a while, but i hated the way it felt. when i was a kid i would scream and cry about getting my nails cut. i don't remember what my mother did about it.

i think i have fairly weak nails. they always have those weird little white spots in them, my cuticles are kind of a mess, it's all around not super cute. even if i didn't bite my nails, i don't understand how people get theirs to look as good as they do. 

in february, i tried to keep a list of every time i bit my nails. there are 2 entries on the list, 4 days apart. 

i think guitarists are supposed to have consistent, nice fingernails, but i'm probably not good enough at guitar for that to matter. maybe if i get good at fingernails i'll be better at guitar. or the other way around.

biking

memoir for creative writing class. please be aware of the format as you read. there are some things i would likely say differently if i was writing for myself.

I don’t remember the first time I rode a bike. I probably lived in Burlington then, only a few years old toddling and around some patch of grass or asphalt. I’m sure I was a little terrified and giddy when the training wheels came off. You don’t need me to tell you all this — the image in your head from countless Hollywood-produced mock home videos is good enough.

I don’t remember the first time I fell off my bike either. Surely it was while I was learning. If I was a biking prodigy, my mother probably would’ve told me. I don’t remember the first time I kissed asphalt and realized just how much something so intriguing could hurt. I don’t remember learning that stoves are hot, but my mother has relayed the story — I kept wanting to touch the burner, and eventually she let me, albeit only for a moment. I reevaluated what I wanted after that.

I don’t have any scars from falling off my bike as a kid. I have a scar on my lip from splitting it on a jungle gym, but that’s not even visible if I don’t show it to you. We biked a lot then, all over town. We biked before I could bike independently, a contraption attached to the back of my mother’s bike that gave me half a bike of my own. We biked through the dead of winter, long underwear layered and muffs on our handlebars. We biked to campus, we biked to my preschool, and we biked along the waterfront.

I do remember flipping over my handlebars when I was in first grade. We were going down to the intervale, probably to pick up our CSA, and I, impulsive child that I was, decided to bomb the hill. I would do the same now, but just as I was reaching top speed, I made the fatal error of only pushing the front brakes.  My bike bucked me, and I went tumbling.

Thankfully, I wasn’t badly hurt. The fall shook me up, though. It took several years before I felt comfortable going down a hill with that much reckless abandon. When we moved to Brattleboro the summer after my accident, I didn’t ride my bike nearly as much. The town was smaller, hillier, and my new school wasn’t really practical to bike to. I don’t remember much about moving to Brattleboro — it’s all sort of in a haze of locations. I have only vague senses of the people I left behind, and I know the people I met through later versions of them. Now that I’m back in Burlington for college, new memories get overlaid on old ones, fresh grease building up on the chain.

My new school was entirely uphill from my house, and a long ride at that. It was called Hilltop, and the name fit. The only people dedicated enough to bike up there on a regular basis had electric bikes and were really, really into them. Maybe you know the type. Maybe you don’t if you’re not from a hippie-filled small town, where, as your grandmother says, there are “a lot of windchimes.” We didn’t make the mounted pilgrimage up to school very often, and when we did it was an event, not a method of transit. As I slowly rebuilt my confidence, the hill was still too large. Even so, Multiple switchbacks, steep straightaways, and an overlook of my town nestled among the mountains made for an excellent ride, as liberal as I was with applying my brakes.

In fifth grade, I joined the mountain biking afterschool activity. It was mostly middle school boys, and I was there with my rigid frame, no disc brakes, and padded gloves my grandmother had gifted me. I’ve never considered myself a biker, and this activity certainly cemented that. I couldn’t keep up with them socially or on the trails. It always felt like I was the butt of the joke or last in the pack, like there was something they all knew that I didn’t. Maybe it was just about masculinity, or experience, or age.

We moved outside town to a small dirt road, I got a new bike with some half-decent suspension, and I started high school. In the early-pandemic lockdowns of my freshman year I spent a lot of time speeding down our road, riding without my hands. Those rides gave me an outlet in a lot of ways; blitzing to the end of the road and back got me away from my desk and away from the house. It didn’t require the endurance and commitment of some longer ride, but it got me moving. I would’ve had a much harder time that year if it weren’t for those small escapes with the wind in my hair. I don’t remember any of these rides, but I know they happened. I can see the tapestry, but not the threads. Most of my memories of the early pandemic are like that.

I didn’t ride my bike at high school. Some friends were in a mountain biking club, but it wasn’t appealing to me, mostly because of last time. My freshman year I was pushed away from sports after dealing with malicious teenage boys as teammates, so I continued to do an odd panoply of activities, riding my bike sparingly. My first two years of college, I brought my bike to school and didn’t use it once. The barrier to getting off campus felt insurmountable, and I wasn’t as confident in the city as I had been as a small child.

This summer, I fell off my bike. My partner, who was staying with me, hadn’t rode a bike in years. They’re from a city and went to our boarding high school, so they hadn’t really had a chance. We dug my old bike out of the shed, pumped up the tires, and set out down the less-steep portion of my dirt road. They told me after we finished our first ride that it was the most comfortable they’d ever seen me in my body. Something about the way I knew the road, its texture familiar, riding past the trees I’ve seen hundreds of times. Something about my hands being out and the wind in my hair that was longer than it had ever been. On another ride, I think I was lost in the beauty of the moment, a moment that was, in a way, a culmination of thousands like it. I was myself then, a version of me built on everyone I was before. My foot slipped off the pedal and I fell hard, hip scraping. I got back up though, wiped off the dust, and rode home. There’s still a mark, a reddish circle blending with the stretch marks on my hip, telling the ways I’ve used and changed my body.

It’s hard to write in a new and exciting way about a story you’ve told a hundred times. Sometimes it’s easier to write one you haven’t, one that you don’t already have language for. I’ve told a lot of the stories in this piece before, and I’ll probably keep telling them. I’ll keep riding my bike — I ride it to class whenever I can. I might forget the details of the stories, I might rewrite them in my mind, and they might blur and merge together, but you know what they say about riding a bike…

 

five haiku

from the first assignment of the semester for my creative writing class.

strange marks cross my skin

but bring me no pain. i woke

late, my sheets tangled.

 

twelve bells envelop

the neighborhood at midnight.

who said they should ring?

 

cascading cups lie

stacked, filled with playing children

in a narrow gorge.

 

i carefully pinch

and pluck strings at the right times

but my thumb fails me.

 

of the two streetlights

outside my window i much

prefer the softer.