The Post Office
Better living through twigs and tarp
By ROGER LEBOVITZ

We encountered it purely by accident. My friends and I followed a chance line through the woods at our local hill and spotted parts of a plastic tarp surrounded by spruce boughs, broken sticks, and twigs. You'd be curious too.

As a shelter it defied gravity, sitting there with a dignity born of makeshift dilapidation. It reeked of snow and balsam, and inside were two or three old plastic buckets for sitting on. The shelter provided refuge from the wind and we, presumably like those who built it, stopped to refresh ourselves in a time-honored fashion. For reasons we couldn't fathom, an old rotary telephone hung from an inward-facing twig. In all the times we sat there, it never rang once.

We added our discovery to our list of regular stops, and later someone learned its name—The Post Office—but never the story behind the name or its original engineers.

As winter wore on, the interior of the post office filled with snow and shrank to even cozier proportions. Its diminishing dimensions, however, only heightened its appeal of being a modicum of shelter and conviviality for snow sliders and friends. Occasionally, the odd beast of the forest would wander in. A friend once related how he shared the space with a sleeping porcupine, although at the time I wrote this off as a case of over-refreshment.


Some people can't wait to begin a season of Sisyphean riding up and down the mountain. As I put my boots on in the parking lot, a friend yelled at me from the base of the lift to hurry up. Hurry up for what? This year's opening day consisted of two open trails under a sunny and very late autumn sky.

I prefer to ease into things. The snow was soft, the vibe friendly, the air warm, the sky blue, and the major muscle groups functioning adequately. It was November, that quintessential time of year of early-dark, seemingly empty woods, and wan light of day. I see these all as necessary and good, and in no need of rushing.

A week earlier a big storm dropped nearly three feet of snow and I hiked for thigh-deep powder turns among brutal gusts of wind. It felt like mid-winter. Then a warm and sopping rain took it all away, leaving us no option but the artificial stuff. It's precisely this kind of setback that defines the most existential month in the near-deep North.

So we decided to inaugurate our season properly with a stop at the Post Office. We had grown accustomed to our shanty away from home, and the off-season had strengthened our desire to sit and gab and drink and laugh on the old buckets.

But the Post Office was no longer there. Either it had finally collapsed or had been removed as a public hazard, or both. All that remained was a little empty spot of bare snow beneath the trees.

Perhaps we should have expected this. Nothing man-made lasts for long in the mountains. We too often lull ourselves into a deceptive sense of permanency.

I suspect, however, that the Post Office may well rise again, if not in the same location then in a new mountain grove. For quiet shelter and gathering are old traditions on our local ski hill, and on local ski hills everywhere.


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