Send a letter. The Post Office

My last summer in college, my roommate and I drove from Athens, Georgia to Alaska, with many interesting stops in between. Those stories are another blog for another day. While we were there, the local post office was our connection back to home.

We worked at a fish processing plant on the Kenai Peninsula, three hours south of Anchorage for six weeks that summer. This was pre-technology and collect calls back home were rare and expensive, so we took advantage of general delivery at the local Kasilof, Alaska post office. We could get letters and care packages from friends and family back home, even though our “address” was an open field near the river down the hill from the fish camp. Once a week or so, we’d walk or drive or hitch hike up to the post office to see what had come in. I’ve added a picture of the post office and it has not changed much in the last 27 years.  

The US Post office is amazing. For 49 cents, 34 cents for a postcard, you can get a letter from one end of the country to the other. Even overseas if you are writing to service-members or other Americans serving abroad. Last year the USPS delivered 61 billion pieces of first class mail, down from a peak of 103 billion in 2001. I don’t know what their success rate is but I have to guess it’s pretty high. I can’t recall of a single piece of mail I know of being lost, either personally or professionally, as sender or receiver. On one trip I mailed a card home and it still got here, even though I forgot to put a stamp on it. I got a letter from my son when he was on vacation, addressed in faint, 12-year-old boy chicken-scratch print. It still made it.

In a time when most of us spend hundreds or thousands of dollars a year for all our constantly available digital communicating technology, the USPS and the letters they deliver every year are remarkable for their value, reliability and simplicity. We’ll probably never write as many letters as we used to but maybe the decline is slowing and we’ll see letter writing make a return. I hope so.

#sendaletter