{"id":110200,"date":"2025-08-01T12:07:10","date_gmt":"2025-08-01T12:07:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/110200\/"},"modified":"2025-08-01T12:07:10","modified_gmt":"2025-08-01T12:07:10","slug":"what-working-as-a-mailman-in-appalachia-revealed-about-public-service","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/110200\/","title":{"rendered":"What Working as a Mailman in Appalachia Revealed About Public Service"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cDelivering the mail is a \u2018Halloween job,\u2019\u200a\u201d Stephen Starring Grant observes in Mailman: My Wild Ride Delivering the Mail in Appalachia and Finally Finding Home<\/a>. \u201cAn occupation with a uniform, immediately recognizable, even by children.\u201d What to call Grant\u2019s book is harder to say. It is an unusual amalgam: a pandemic memoir, a love letter to the Blue Ridge Mountains, a participant observer\u2019s ethnography of a rural post office, an indictment of government austerity, and a witness statement attesting to the remarkable and at times ruthless efficiency of one of our oldest federal bureaucracies<\/a>. Not least, Mailman is a lament for the decline of service as an American ideal\u2014for the cultural twilight of the Halloween job: those occupations, such as police officer, firefighter, Marine, and, yes, postal worker, whose worth is not measured first and foremost in dollars but in public esteem. Or should be, anyway.<\/p>\n

Explore the September 2025 Issue<\/p>\n

Check out more from this issue and find your next story to read.<\/p>\n

View More<\/a><\/p>\n

At the same time, Grant\u2019s project is immediately recognizable as \u201cHollywood material.\u201d A corporate suit loses his job during COVID and spends a year as a rural blue-collar worker reconnecting with his inner country boy and coming to appreciate the dignity of physical labor\u2014silently nursing, one suspects, the dream of a book contract (and maybe a studio option) all along. A stunt, in other words, that a cynic might see as more in the spirit of self-service than public service.<\/p>\n

This tension isn\u2019t lost on Grant, a proud son of Appalachia who\u2019s suddenly laid off from a marketing agency and gets a job as a rural carrier associate for the Blacksburg, Virginia, post office. He second-guesses his qualifications\u2014and his motivations\u2014but doesn\u2019t let either concern stop him.<\/p>\n

\u201cWhat I\u2019m feeling is a spiritual disorientation,\u201d he confesses, having been jolted into downward mobility. \u201cLost in the sense that I don\u2019t know what I\u2019m doing, lost in confronting the reality of being back in my hometown at fifty years of age, delivering the mail.\u201d He berates himself for his failure to develop a versatile skill set or \u201cbuild any job security,\u201d despite compiling an impressive r\u00e9sum\u00e9 (including starting a behavioral-economics lab at a Fortune 50 company). As he arrives at the decision to take the post-office job, he\u2019s facing real hardship: He has cancer, which he mentions almost in passing to explain the urgency of getting health insurance. But he\u2019s also a seeker, unapologetically so, and trying to prove something to himself\u2014that, despite his white-collar CV, he is an authentic Appalachian who can still draw on a reserve of mountain grit.<\/p>\n

From the June 2025 issue: Sarah Yager on how the USPS delivers mail to the bottom of the Grand Canyon<\/a><\/p>\n

Grant doesn\u2019t hide the self-indulgence latent in what his wife calls \u201cone of your quests.\u201d Yet he also proves to be a compelling and empathetic guide, observing his country and its citizens, not just himself, with open and unjaded eyes. If his jaunty prose sometimes feels forced, his curiosity doesn\u2019t: He needs to focus on the details of his new manual labor, and milieu, or else fall hopelessly behind his co-workers (which he does anyway).<\/p>\n

Immersing himself in unfamiliar work in a familiar place throws him off-balance in a way that feels bracing. Driving his late grandmother-in-law\u2019s 1999 Toyota RAV4 (rural carriers, he learns, often have to rely on their personal vehicles) through breathtaking Appalachian landscapes exhilarates, and occasionally terrifies, him. The car loses traction on an uphill dirt road that abruptly becomes \u201ca rutted-out washboard.\u201d Heedlessly reaching a hand into an abandoned mailbox turned hornets\u2019 nest induces \u201ca full-body, screaming freakout, standing in the middle of a dirt road.\u201d He savors surprising, sweet moments, too: an old widower who shows him the sprawling model-train setup in his garage that he began assembling \u201conce Jennie passed\u201d; a man in a trailer who reacts with boyish delight when the Lord of the Rings replica sword he ordered with his pandemic check arrives. \u201cThis is Anduril, Flame of the West!\u201d the man explains. Grant chimes right in with \u201cReforged from the shards of Narsil by the elves of Rivendell.\u201d<\/p>\n

With his co-workers, his approach is \u201cshow up, don\u2019t sandbag anybody, be humble, play through to the buzzer.\u201d But he\u2019s also keenly aware of being a soft former white-collar worker on a team of hardened veterans\u2014and during a period, the pandemic, when the Postal Service is \u201con a wartime footing,\u201d its intricate processes strained by new magnitudes of mail. Kat, a terse USPS lifer, helps him get through the worst days: \u201cI think as long as she saw a carrier trying, she was supportive.\u201d Serena, a woman who handles surging Amazon deliveries with Sisyphean dedication, instructs him in a new task, chucking parcels into metal cages organized by route: \u201cStart scanning, start throwing, and get the fuck out of my way.\u201d Glynnis, a 70-something whose back is killing her, \u201cswore like a marine with busted knuckles\u201d\u2014loudly and creatively, sometimes with racist verve. She drives him crazy with her incessant complaining, not that the fan noise and the heat don\u2019t make him cranky too.<\/p>\n

By contrast, Wade, an Alaskan, is the Michael Jordan of backwoods mail delivery, which features a degree of \u201cfreedom in terms of when and how you wanted to work\u201d absent from bigger urban routes fully plugged into the Postal Service\u2019s centralized system. Wade\u2019s \u201cprocess fluency\u201d awes Grant\u2014his preternatural ability to keep track of every variety of mail (\u201cthe hot case, the raw flats, the parcels, the raw mail,\u201d plus the trays of machine-sorted first-class and standard mail, arriving every morning) and then fit it all, Tetris-like, into his vehicle\u2019s cargo area, arranged for delivery; his mastery of a labyrinthine route; his agility in eating sandwiches with one hand while delivering the mail with the other. Wade could do a route \u201crated at 9 hours\u201d in five. Grant barely manages half of it in 11 hours, with help.<\/p>\n

Philip F. Rubio: Save the Postal Service<\/a><\/p>\n

Mailman includes its share of epiphanic wisdom. But unlike many works of nonfiction that focus on this region and its people, it avoids treating those who find themselves in its pages with the sort of condescension or reflexive romanticizing\u2014or worse, a blend of both\u2014that often seeps into writing about Appalachia. Grant doesn\u2019t pretend that the Blue Ridge is all wholesome water-bath canning, porch sitting, and verdant greenery. He doesn\u2019t deal in crude stereotypes of poor rural people, but neither does he avert his eyes from details that might be construed as backwoods caricature. He gets a glimpse into the trailer where the man who buys the expensive sword lives, watching as he has to \u201cslide crabwise\u201d along the wall, hands raised high, to get past a huge flatscreen TV that dominates the space. Imagining how many times a day he does that, Grant doesn\u2019t judge; he just notes \u201cthe kind of trade-offs people are willing to make for picture quality.\u201d His portrayals throughout tend toward the gently sentimental, no noble savagery in view.<\/p>\n

Grant\u2019s forthright evocation of community, a word so frequently used that its meaning has grown fuzzy, would be easy to attribute to his own roots in the rural-Blacksburg area, where the story unfolds. The truth, though, is more complicated. Sociologists have sometimes categorized Appalachia as an \u201cinternal colony\u201d: an impoverished and economically exploited area within a country that is often viewed by elites as if it were an underdeveloped region outside that country. The firmly upper-middle-class Grant\u2014raised in the mountains because he was born to a Virginia Tech professor, rather than into a long line of coal miners or lumberjacks\u2014doesn\u2019t really try to hide that he sometimes feels more like a colonizer than an \u201cauthentic\u201d Appalachian.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Mailman: My Wild Ride Delivering the Mail in Appalachia and Finally Finding Home<\/a><\/p>\n

By Stephen Starring Grant<\/p>\n

In one moment of obvious angst early on, after his wife accuses him of having an inordinate soft spot for Virginia\u2019s country people, Grant proclaims, \u201cI\u2019m from Appalachia. I\u2019m Appalachian!\u201d She tells him pointedly, \u201cYou are not!\u201d Identitarian anxiety crops up more subtly too: Grant wistfully recalls his desire to join his high-school classmates on their annual November deer-hunting trips, his father\u2019s refusal to take him, and his envy of the homemade venison jerky the other boys would bring to school. When he says, \u201cI wanted a giant Ziploc bag of venison jerky,\u201d he seems to be saying, \u201cI wanted to be a real Appalachian.\u201d<\/p>\n

mailman is most distinctive when it ventures into territory that feels timely in a way that goes beyond COVID-era tributes to \u201cessential workers.\u201d Grant finds himself preoccupied with the nature of public service, its scale and scope, and with coordination among systems and humans, of which the Postal Service turns out to be quite an astonishing example. He focuses in on the scene, not just the enormous \u201csuperscanner, like a seven-foot-tall mechanical praying mantis,\u201d that logs incoming parcels, but also the low-tech mail-sorting methods. He also gets to appreciate up close the skillful interplay between brain and body involved in becoming \u201cunconsciously competent at complex tasks\u201d; where once he knew only the academic phrase process fluency, now he can see the intricacy involved, and the dignity imparted by mastery.<\/p>\n

When Grant declares, \u201cMy robot brain was in charge\u201d at one point, reflecting on the execution of letter gathering while driving, he\u2019s speaking with pleasure and pride about achieving a flow state in the fulfillment of a worthwhile task; he\u2019s not complaining about drudgery or soul-sucking labor. Ever the marketer, Grant celebrates the Postal Service\u2019s uniqueness<\/a> (indulging in a bit of statistical overreach). \u201cFedEx? UPS? They simply cannot do what the USPS does. All they carry are parcels,\u201d he scoffs. \u201cWe carry everything for everybody, with 99.993 percent accuracy.\u201d<\/p>\n

Read: What happens to mail during a natural disaster?<\/a><\/p>\n

Mailman is also a shameful revelation of the inexcusable working conditions that letter carriers are subjected to: The injury rate for postal workers<\/a> is higher than for coal miners<\/a>. You can almost feel Grant\u2019s blood pressure rising as he describes the decades-out-of-date, unsafe, and AC-less delivery trucks\u2014\u201cdeath traps,\u201d he calls them. (The advent of new electric vehicles, thanks to a 2022 infusion of federal funds<\/a>, doesn\u2019t make it into his book, perhaps because their expected delivery last year has been running behind schedule.) Grant\u2019s indictment\u2014and his celebration\u2014predates DOGE, whose arrival only makes both more relevant: a counter to the slander of public servants routinely dispensed by Elon Musk, a man who accrues more money in an hour than the average USPS employee will make in a lifetime.<\/p>\n

When Grant says he finally learned that \u201cwhat was essential was just doing your job,\u201d he doesn\u2019t mean that the USPS work is easy but that it is hard, and that being a mail carrier, showing up day in and day out<\/a>, matters. \u201cThat\u2019s the difference between a regular and a sub,\u201d he observes, remarking on the distinction between being a fill-in and someone\u2019s daily letter carrier. \u201cThe sub just delivers the mail. The regular is delivering something else. Continuity. Safety. Normalcy. Companionship. Civilization. You know, the stuff the government is supposed to do for its people.\u201d In Grant\u2019s telling, postal workers bring order and predictability<\/a> to a country that can feel like it\u2019s unraveling, especially during crises that starkly illustrate how reliant we are<\/a> on the federal bureaucracy.<\/p>\n

If Hollywood were to option this story, the hero would get offered the job of his dreams and turn it down, realizing in his heart that he is meant to be a mailman after all. But Grant has indicated from the start that his USPS stint is a placeholder. He applies for and ends up accepting a cushy position at a media agency, turns in his Halloween-job uniform, and takes a dig at himself for becoming \u201cjust another white-collar ghost with a job that nobody understands.\u201d<\/p>\n

You may roll your eyes when this interloper describes the solace that his brief sojourn in blue-collar life has brought: that after decades of \u201cfeeling like I wasn\u2019t doing any good in the world, being part of something\u2014even something as mundane as the Postal Service\u2014made me feel whole.\u201d Glynnis certainly takes a different view as she counts down to retirement. When Grant, hoping to quiet her carping, says, \u201cI\u2019m in the same jam as you are,\u201d she calls him on it: \u201cNo you ain\u2019t, because I\u2019m here to get my motherfucking pension, and you\u2019re too goddamned stupid to stay at home and collect unemployment.\u201d Grant acknowledges that \u201cshe had a point.\u201d<\/p>\n

His final revelation is that Americans misunderstand the difference between white- and blue-collar work. \u201cBoth forms of labor want all of your time and both exact a toll. One form is no more or less noble than the other,\u201d he writes. \u201cThe real distinction is between work and service, and I think it\u2019s one of the great dividing lines in American life.\u201d The question this leaves for readers isn\u2019t why Grant decided to stop being a mailman. The question is how we ended up with a country where choosing a life of service all too often feels financially untenable and socially undervalued.<\/p>\n

This article appears in the September 2025<\/a> print edition with the headline \u201cPlaying Mailman.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u200bWhen you buy a book using a link on this page, we receive a commission. Thank you for supporting The Atlantic.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cDelivering the mail is a \u2018Halloween job,\u2019\u200a\u201d Stephen Starring Grant observes in Mailman: My Wild Ride Delivering the…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":110201,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[31],"tags":[1022,171,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-110200","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-books","8":"tag-books","9":"tag-entertainment","10":"tag-united-states","11":"tag-unitedstates","12":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/114953431179363121","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/110200","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=110200"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/110200\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/110201"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=110200"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=110200"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=110200"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}