What Working as a Mailman in Appalachia Revealed About Public Service

“Delivering the mail is a ‘Halloween job,’ ” Stephen Starring Grant observes in Mailman: My Wild Experience Delivering the Mail in Appalachia and Lastly Discovering Dwelling. “An occupation with a uniform, instantly recognizable, even by youngsters.” What to name Grant’s e-book is tougher to say. It’s an uncommon amalgam: a pandemic memoir, a love letter to the Blue Ridge Mountains, a participant observer’s ethnography of a rural submit workplace, an indictment of presidency austerity, and a witness assertion testifying to the exceptional and at instances ruthless effectivity of one in all our oldest federal bureaucracies. Not least, Mailman is a lament for the decline of service as an American perfect—for the cultural twilight of the Halloween job: these occupations, comparable to police officer, firefighter, Marine, and, sure, postal employee, whose price just isn’t measured in the beginning in {dollars} however in public esteem. Or needs to be, anyway.Discover the September 2025 IssueCheck out extra from this situation and discover your subsequent story to learn.View MoreAt the identical time, Grant’s mission is straight away recognizable as “Hollywood materials.” A company swimsuit loses his job throughout COVID and spends a 12 months as a rural blue-collar employee reconnecting along with his internal nation boy and coming to understand the dignity of bodily labor—silently nursing, one suspects, the dream of a e-book contract (and possibly a studio choice) all alongside. A stunt, in different phrases, {that a} cynic may see as extra within the spirit of self-service than public service.This rigidity isn’t misplaced on Grant, a proud son of Appalachia who’s abruptly laid off from a advertising company and will get a job as a rural provider affiliate for the Blacksburg, Virginia, submit workplace. He second-guesses his {qualifications}—and his motivations—however doesn’t let both concern cease him.“What I’m feeling is a religious disorientation,” he confesses, having been jolted into downward mobility. “Misplaced within the sense that I don’t know what I’m doing, misplaced in confronting the truth of being again in my hometown at fifty years of age, delivering the mail.” He berates himself for his failure to develop a flexible ability set or “construct any job safety,” regardless of compiling a formidable résumé (together with beginning a behavioral-economics lab at a Fortune 50 firm). As he arrives on the resolution to take the post-office job, he’s going through actual hardship: He has most cancers, which he mentions nearly in passing to clarify the urgency of getting medical insurance. However he’s additionally a seeker, unapologetically so, and making an attempt to show one thing to himself—that, regardless of his white-collar CV, he’s an genuine Appalachian who can nonetheless draw on a reserve of mountain grit.From the June 2025 situation: Sarah Yager on how the USPS delivers mail to the underside of the Grand CanyonGrant doesn’t disguise the self-indulgence latent in what his spouse calls “one in all your quests.” But he additionally proves to be a compelling and empathetic information, observing his nation and its residents, not simply himself, with open and unjaded eyes. If his jaunty prose generally feels pressured, his curiosity doesn’t: He must give attention to the small print of his new handbook labor, and milieu, or else fall hopelessly behind his co-workers (which he does anyway).Immersing himself in unfamiliar work in a well-known place throws him off-balance in a approach that feels bracing. Driving his late grandmother-in-law’s 1999 Toyota RAV4 (rural carriers, he learns, usually need to depend on their private autos) via breathtaking Appalachian landscapes exhilarates, and sometimes terrifies, him. The automobile loses traction on an uphill dust highway that abruptly turns into “a rutted-out washboard.” Heedlessly reaching a hand into an deserted mailbox turned hornets’ nest induces “a full-body, screaming freakout, standing in the course of a dust highway.” He savors stunning, candy moments, too: an outdated widower who reveals him the sprawling model-train setup in his storage that he started assembling “as soon as Jennie handed”; a person in a trailer who reacts with boyish delight when the Lord of the Rings reproduction sword he ordered along with his pandemic test arrives. “That is Anduril, Flame of the West!” the person explains. Grant chimes proper in with “Reforged from the shards of Narsil by the elves of Rivendell.”Along with his co-workers, his method is “present up, don’t sandbag anyone, be humble, play via to the buzzer.” However he’s additionally keenly conscious of being a delicate former white-collar employee on a workforce of hardened veterans—and through a interval, the pandemic, when the Postal Service is “on a wartime footing,” its intricate processes strained by new magnitudes of mail. Kat, a terse USPS lifer, helps him get via the worst days: “I believe so long as she noticed a provider making an attempt, she was supportive.” Serena, a lady who handles surging Amazon deliveries with Sisyphean dedication, instructs him in a brand new process, chucking parcels into metallic cages organized by route: “Begin scanning, begin throwing, and get the fuck out of my approach.” Glynnis, a 70-something whose again is killing her, “swore like a marine with busted knuckles”—loudly and creatively, generally with racist verve. She drives him loopy together with her incessant complaining, not that the fan noise and the warmth don’t make him cranky too.Against this, Wade, an Alaskan, is the Michael Jordan of backwoods mail supply, which includes a diploma of “freedom by way of when and the way you wished to work” absent from greater city routes absolutely plugged into the Postal Service’s centralized system. Wade’s “course of fluency” awes Grant—his preternatural potential to maintain observe of each number of mail (“the new case, the uncooked flats, the parcels, the uncooked mail,” plus the trays of machine-sorted first-class and commonplace mail, arriving each morning) after which match all of it, Tetris-like, into his car’s cargo space, organized for supply; his mastery of a labyrinthine route; his agility in consuming sandwiches with one hand whereas delivering the mail with the opposite. Wade might do a route “rated at 9 hours” in 5. Grant barely manages half of it in 11 hours, with assist.Philip F. Rubio: Save the Postal ServiceMailman consists of its share of epiphanic knowledge. However in contrast to many works of nonfiction that concentrate on this area and its individuals, it avoids treating those that discover themselves in its pages with the type of condescension or reflexive romanticizing—or worse, a mix of each—that always seeps into writing about Appalachia. Grant doesn’t faux that the Blue Ridge is all healthful water-bath canning, porch sitting, and verdant greenery. He doesn’t deal in crude stereotypes of poor rural individuals, however neither does he avert his eyes from particulars that is likely to be construed as backwoods caricature. He will get a glimpse into the trailer the place the person who buys the costly sword lives, watching as he has to “slide crabwise” alongside the wall, fingers raised excessive, to get previous an enormous flatscreen TV that dominates the house. Imagining what number of instances a day he does that, Grant doesn’t choose; he simply notes “the type of trade-offs persons are keen to make for image high quality.” His portrayals all through have a tendency towards the gently sentimental, no noble savagery in view.Grant’s forthright evocation of group, a phrase so continuously used that its which means has grown fuzzy, could be simple to attribute to his personal roots within the rural-Blacksburg space, the place the story unfolds. The reality, although, is extra sophisticated. Sociologists have generally categorized Appalachia as an “inner colony”: an impoverished and economically exploited space inside a rustic that’s usually considered by elites as if it have been an underdeveloped area outdoors that nation. The firmly upper-middle-class Grant—raised within the mountains as a result of he was born to a Virginia Tech professor, somewhat than into a protracted line of coal miners or lumberjacks—doesn’t actually attempt to disguise that he generally feels extra like a colonizer than an “genuine” Appalachian.Mailman: My Wild Experience Delivering the Mail in Appalachia and Lastly Discovering HomeBy Stephen Starring GrantIn one second of apparent angst early on, after his spouse accuses him of getting an inordinate delicate spot for Virginia’s nation individuals, Grant proclaims, “I’m from Appalachia. I’m Appalachian!” She tells him pointedly, “You aren’t!” Identitarian nervousness crops up extra subtly too: Grant wistfully recollects his want to hitch his high-school classmates on their annual November deer-hunting journeys, his father’s refusal to take him, and his envy of the home made venison jerky the opposite boys would carry to highschool. When he says, “I wished a large Ziploc bag of venison jerky,” he appears to be saying, “I wished to be an actual Appalachian.”mailman is most distinctive when it ventures into territory that feels well timed in a approach that goes past COVID-era tributes to “important employees.” Grant finds himself preoccupied with the character of public service, its scale and scope, and with coordination amongst programs and people, of which the Postal Service seems to be fairly an astonishing instance. He focuses in on the scene, not simply the large “superscanner, like a seven-foot-tall mechanical praying mantis,” that logs incoming parcels, but additionally the low-tech mail-sorting strategies. He additionally will get to understand up shut the skillful interaction between mind and physique concerned in turning into “unconsciously competent at complicated duties”; the place as soon as he knew solely the tutorial phrase course of fluency, now he can see the intricacy concerned, and the dignity imparted by mastery.When Grant declares, “My robotic mind was in cost” at one level, reflecting on the execution of letter gathering whereas driving, he’s talking with pleasure and pleasure about reaching a circulate state within the achievement of a worthwhile process; he’s not complaining about drudgery or soul-sucking labor. Ever the marketer, Grant celebrates the Postal Service’s uniqueness (indulging in a little bit of statistical overreach). “FedEx? UPS? They merely can not do what the USPS does. All they carry are parcels,” he scoffs. “We feature every thing for everyone, with 99.993 p.c accuracy.”Learn: What occurs to mail throughout a pure catastrophe?Mailman can be a shameful revelation of the inexcusable working situations that letter carriers are subjected to: The damage price for postal employees is increased than for coal miners. You’ll be able to nearly really feel Grant’s blood stress rising as he describes the decades-out-of-date, unsafe, and AC-less supply vans—“dying traps,” he calls them. (The arrival of recent electrical autos, due to a 2022 infusion of federal funds, doesn’t make it into his e-book, maybe as a result of their anticipated supply final 12 months has been operating delayed.) Grant’s indictment—and his celebration—predates DOGE, whose arrival solely makes each extra related: a counter to the slander of public servants routinely allotted by Elon Musk, a person who accrues more cash in an hour than the typical USPS worker will make in a lifetime.When Grant says he lastly realized that “what was important was simply doing all of your job,” he doesn’t imply that the USPS work is straightforward however that it’s laborious, and that being a mail provider, displaying up day in and day trip, issues. “That’s the distinction between a daily and a sub,” he observes, remarking on the excellence between being a fill-in and somebody’s day by day letter provider. “The sub simply delivers the mail. The common is delivering one thing else. Continuity. Security. Normalcy. Companionship. Civilization. You already know, the stuff the federal government is meant to do for its individuals.” In Grant’s telling, postal employees carry order and predictability to a rustic that may really feel prefer it’s unraveling, particularly throughout crises that starkly illustrate how reliant we’re on the federal paperwork.If Hollywood have been to choice this story, the hero would get supplied the job of his desires and switch it down, realizing in his coronary heart that he’s meant to be a mailman in any case. However Grant has indicated from the beginning that his USPS stint is a placeholder. He applies for and finally ends up accepting a comfortable place at a media company, turns in his Halloween-job uniform, and takes a dig at himself for turning into “simply one other white-collar ghost with a job that no person understands.”You might roll your eyes when this interloper describes the solace that his temporary sojourn in blue-collar life has introduced: that after a long time of “feeling like I wasn’t doing any good on the planet, being a part of one thing—even one thing as mundane because the Postal Service—made me really feel complete.” Glynnis definitely takes a unique view as she counts right down to retirement. When Grant, hoping to quiet her carping, says, “I’m in the identical jam as you’re,” she calls him on it: “No you ain’t, as a result of I’m right here to get my motherfucking pension, and also you’re too goddamned silly to remain at house and accumulate unemployment.” Grant acknowledges that “she had a degree.”His closing revelation is that People misunderstand the distinction between white- and blue-collar work. “Each types of labor need your whole time and each actual a toll. One type is not any kind of noble than the opposite,” he writes. “The actual distinction is between work and repair, and I believe it’s one of many nice dividing strains in American life.” The query this leaves for readers isn’t why Grant determined to cease being a mailman. The query is how we ended up with a rustic the place selecting a lifetime of service all too usually feels financially untenable and socially undervalued.This text seems within the September 2025 print version with the headline “Enjoying Mailman.”​While you purchase a e-book utilizing a hyperlink on this web page, we obtain a fee. Thanks for supporting The Atlantic.