Originally published in The Nome Nugget, Summer 1994
On my mother’s recent visit, she asked me when the mail would arrive at the apartment. “We don’t have home delivery,” I said. “No home delivery?” she said, as if I had said Nome had no food or water. “You mean you have to go down and get it yourself?” Yes, I told her, in Nome we have to go down and get the mail ourselves. Actually, it was a shock to me, too, when we arrived last spring. Until then, I had always been able to sit in my house on any day, rain, sleet, snow or dead of summer heat and wait for some poor soul to drop it into my mailbox whatever someone in the world decided to send. Through the ice storms of Ohio, the gummy heat of Galveston Island, or a really cool American movie classic, all I ever had to do was wait. But now the shoe is on the other foot. Now if I want my mail, I have to go get it.
Now I’m the one who has to trudge through the blizzard’s drifts, slide through First Avenue’s mud, tramp through the rain, and dodge pickup trucks and taxis on Front Street. In my heart I know this is fair and that home delivery is a wasteful luxury. Having residents go to the post office themselves has got to be the most efficient way to run a postal service. Maybe if I worked at the post office, some newcomer would come up to the counter and say to me, “How come you guys don’t deliver this to my house?” I’d say, “Hey! We’ve done most of the work. Come down and get it. It’s your turn.”
I’ve never had a post office box before. I know people who have post office boxes. One lives in Iowa, one has a ranch in Texas, and another lives on a rural route in Oklahoma. Some of my best friends have P.O. boxes. Oh, I occasionally needed to go to a post office to weigh things and process large packages but I never needed to go very often. Until now.
The Nome post office is probably like small post offices throughout the country where everybody has to come retrieve mail and packages. If you stood at our post office every day for long enough, you’d eventually see every resident or someone representing them in the whole town. You’d also see people mailing buckets and coolers swaddled in duct tape full of crab meat and frozen salmon. I just wish Nome would go one step farther to take advantage of this daily mass postal migration like my California hometown did. They put in a bakery and a coffee shop in the same building with the post office. “The Cookie Post” had chocolate chip cookies on a stick and little tables and chairs to sit on that added a lot to my experience of buying a book of stamps. So why couldn’t the Park Service sell hot cocoa and doughnuts or the BIA set out some benches, sticky buns, and a 55-cup percolator in Nome’s Federal Building this winter? The BLM might even want to sell slices of Fat Freddies’ bumbleberry pie. I’d be sure to clear out my box every day! But, aside from the lack of coffee and Danish, you won’t hear me complaining about our postal service. It’s a wonderful thing that my friend in Phippsburg, Maine, can go up to her post office counter, give the employee a birthday card addressed to someone who lives in Nome, Alaska, and slap down two dimes, one nickel, and four pennies to get it here.
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