By Virtue of a Letter Carried

I am not a person that likes edges; I feel most comfortable in the wide open-eyed expanse of prairie places. I love to swim, but I do not like to be near water. I love the *feeling* of the beach, though not the physicality of it—I think of the beach as a place where people sit together and do not work on their computers. Beach is a place for picnics or for sunshine or for gazing at a horizon line. Beach is free play: some people swim, some people nap, some people look for treasures, some people read their books. Beach is inconvenient, where it’s so much harder to use your phone (sun, sand, sunscreen)… so maybe you just don’t.

I recently drove the entire coast of Maine, taking one hundred right turns to keep me on whatever roads ran closest to the water. I made about one hundred left turns on my way home to see every edge I may have missed. I was out looking to learn something—I was wondering about perimeters, the joints of land and sea, the autonomous zones where one thing becomes another. The twice daily movement in a mapped borderline because the shore is constantly in flux: the highest high tides, and the lowest lows. Submergence, emergence, convergence. Beach feelings.

The coast of Maine is less sand and more seaweed. The coast of Maine is slippery, rocky, clever, contemptible. The coast of Maine was absolutely shrouded in late winter and I was always on the heels of another storm system. Even with all the snow, the shadows were so much bluer and greener than anywhere I had ever been. I used Mom’s old compass for the first few days, until I could start sensing the feeling of north. My paper maps got thrashed on the dashboard from taking corners too fast. The constant ritual of re-orienting was thrilling and the practice felt downright deciduous, an annual roundabout of unknowing and relearning. How to find one’s way, how to feel your way in the dark, how to run your eyes along an edge of land and let the line blur you back.

I was hauling around and writing letters in my head, trying to frame the beach feeling of this place in a way I could share. I am so good at writing letters in my head and narrating to no-one out the window—I am also okay at writing letters on paper later, but they are never as good as the ones I dictate to myself while driving. When I finally got to where I was going, I sent a letter to Paul about the weather because I had already lost the words I’d found for land.

The first organized mail systems on the east coast were defined by the water’s edge and duty-bound at every port: “No inbound ship was allowed to report, make entry, or break bulk until the master had delivered all letters to the postmaster, if there was one.”^* I had never thought about letters arriving by boat before because my western notion of mail delivery is firmly situated in the nostalgia of boys and ponies. The connective commons of the postal communities in Maine were all situated on the shore, with ports connected to post offices over two hundred years old, and engendered by a relationship to the sea. All the letters rode out on the waves, on ships made from trees, on trade routes run by the wind.

The first official “postal roads” were established by the United States Congress in 1792, stretching from Wiscasset, Maine to Savannah, Georgia. The sense of road in 1792 was both ambiguous and comprehensive, loosely defined as the way that one goes from one place to another. Postal roads are further clarified in Title 39, Section 481 of the U.S. Code as:

All the waters of the United States, during the time the mail is carried thereon,

All railroads or parts of railroads which are now or hereafter may be in operation,

All canals, during the time the mail is carried thereon,

All plank roads during the time the mail is carried thereon,

The road on which the mail is carried.

A shore becomes a sea at high tide, and so does a road become a postal road by virtue of a letter carried. The ocean becomes an island at low tide, and so does the water become the post road when carrying the mail. By 1794 the designated postal roads stretched to Passamaquoddy, Maine, and all the way out to the easternmost point in the United States. Another hundred years later, Rural Free Delivery promised mail to inland and overland rural folks, with the first experimental routes opening in Maine. The coastline becomes a communication corridor with an act of Congress, and the connective web becomes a widening gyre. The way that one goes from one place to another is suddenly synonymous with the way that one sends a letter to a loved one.

I am almost always thinking about the post office. It is a modular network of local to local, by human for human, across land and sea and air. We have a right to privacy, connection, and safe passage via the postal service: all my love letters are federally protected, with a promise of delivery into the hands of the designee.

The erosion of our privacy in the data-driven economy has fractured our shared communication systems. We ceded our rights to private communication and opted for mass surveillance by our pocket computers, the neighborhood-branded front porch cameras, and relentless social corporate content machine. Our privacy is as endangered as our water, our climate, and our trust in one another. There is some dual-representation possible here: our endangered environmental and social systems both demand responsible shared stewardship for survival.

You can receive a letter anywhere, especially in rural places, if you can guess at where you’re going to be and you use the General Delivery service. All it really takes for your mail to find you is your name and about ten days. I told Paul he could write to me at general delivery in Maine, but a letter still hadn’t arrived by the time I left. I gave the postmaster a stamp and my home address in the case that anything came along later. A package arrived at the Palouse post office this week: the letter had gotten caught in a sorting machine and the corner was torn; it was held up for repairs but made its way to Pembroke, Maine a few days behind me. There was a note of apology and the mail was reassembled and sealed in a bag that said WE CARE. The postmaster had taped my unused stamp to the inside of the envelope. I found myself extraordinarily moved by the gesture.

I visited 99 post offices in Maine and they all reflected something of their place and people back to me. There was a beach feeling in the blurred snow-kissed lines, there was beckoning and belonging in the hand-painted signs and window dressings. I pet a black rabbit that was munching on some grass at the Seal Cove post office. I pet a stuffed white bunny in the planter boxes at the Bayville post office. I ate lunch on the curb in Corea, where someone had painted a lobster trap and a buoy on the post office sign. There was a post office in a home, a post office in a community center, a post office in a general store, a post office in a border crossing station, a post office in a sub shop. I sent another letter about the weather.

I’m still thinking about the joints: the way the mail connects me to myself and to others, and the way a correspondence can connect us across geographies. I’m thinking about the importance of knots for seafaring and for splicing relationships together, the ties that bind us to place and the tides that move the landscape in and out of focus. I’m thinking about how every joint can be a breaking point, and how there is hope when a bone heals stronger. Atmospherically speaking, we’re circular beings. A postal road becomes a person, and the parabolic edgelands are no longer a periphery: a center squared during the time when the mail is carried thereon.

︎
This piece was published in a print issue of Group Hug by Elise in Janauary 2025.

^*Maine Postal History and Postmarks, Sterling T. Dow, 1976