Working Girls

After two months at 9400 feet, I was able to walk up to the Old Depot Cafe and Grocery Store without long pauses for breath catching. I walked slowly, true, but steadily, in my Vibram soled boots. Because Ward was full of crushed rock and therefore slippery. I didn't make that walk much. We usually drove the pickup to the Cafe because we needed to fill our five gallon water cans every second day. They got filled at the grocery store hose, just like everybody else's who didn't have running water. We might have made do with water from the creek across the road, but the creek ran down through town, down where everybody's outhouse leached into the stony soil. If you got your water at the top of the town, it was unpolluted, straight down from the forest, maybe having drowned a few small forest creatures or been shat in by large roaming creatures with antlers or fur, but otherwise pristine.

Once I was acclimated, I needed something more to do than those Rescue Me! letters I'd been sending to my feminist friends in California. And along came a Job! The woman who had been postmaster was planning to retire and have a baby. No one seemed to want the job. And I had creds, having worked a whole Christmas month for the USPS in San Francisco. With a minimum of training, mostly involving learning the locations of stamps and cancellers and how to send certified or registered mail, there I was installed in the old schoolhouse, with access to everybody's magazines and postcards.The post office was open from 8 - 11 a.m. and 1 - 4 p.m. I got paid every two weeks and there was pension money building up, at a slow but sure rate. We immediately started buying better beer and wine.

My dog, Zoom, liked hanging out at the post office. I didn't deliberately take him with me to work but he usually found his way there within half an hour of opening. He'd wait out on the stoop until a customer opened the door and then he'd prance in, ever so delighted to see me, happy to lie at my feet while I skimmed through Field and Stream or Playboy or Modern Romance, and waited for the post truck to arrive.

Mike drove the truck up from Golden, through Nederland and Ward, on up to Jamestown and then looped back. She was a genuine mountain girl, big all over, particularly ponderous in the thighs and calves. She took a shine to me and began coming over to hang out in Ward, keeping me company. Fortunately for my magazine addiction, she had to be on her way out of Ward and back to Golden with the outgoing mail by 2:30 p.m., which gave me almost enough time to peruse all the days magazines before their subscribers came in to collect them. In extreme cases, I held back delivery for a day.