On the road with Jan Walker, known from Anderson Valley to Point Arena as “Jan the Mail Lady,” Jan the Mail Lady was one of the many unsung persons whose commitment to their essential work holds this county (and this country) together.
Jan the Mail Lady, before her hard earned retirement, set out from her home in Yorkville before sunrise six days a week, and didn’t return to her home in Yorkville until the sun was dipping into the sea, and she completed that grueling schedule every day but Sunday, 51,148 miles a year for 20 years, never missing a day in all that time delivering and picking up the mail for Postal customers in the vast area lying between Cloverdale, the Anderson Valley, Greenwood Road and Elk, Manchester and Point Arena.
At Point Arena, Jan the Mail Lady reversed herself and made her way back to Cloverdale and finally home to Yorkville, the whole loop being nearly two hundred miles of winding road replete with hazards ranging from drunk drivers to barely accessible mailboxes erected by persons who seem to think their mail flies into their boxes on its own.
Six days a week for twenty years, Jan The Mail Lady successfully negotiated what most drivers might rightly regard as a sort of highway obstacle course, and she did it with an amiable serenity which belied the great care she took to accomplish her formidable daily task. This lady was on task, even with me peppering her with questions from the passenger seat.
When someone wasn't taking up the passenger seat, which someone wasn't most days, Jan The Mail Lady, a great reader who scoured the library system for books-on-tape, accumulated the equivalent of several PhD’s in English and American literature.
All those miles over all those twenty years beginning in 1987 Jan had one accident when “a guy kinda ran into me and scraped up the side of my van.”
That’s it, that and no missed days despite occasional vehicle breakdowns, whatever the weather, and Mendocino County gets some real weather in the winter when the Garcia near the Stornetta Ranch, which Jan passed over or through twice a day when the rain swollen Garcia raged. And trees fell across the road, and animals ran out in front of her van and odd people popped out of the bushes beside the road, “Which is fine with me so long as they stay out of the road,” Jan laughed.
By the time I boarded Jan’s van in Boonville, she’d already been on the job for a couple of hours, driving from Yorkville to the Cloverdale Post Office where she’d picked up the mail for several thousand people strewn over some 500 square miles of western Mendocino County. (There was no Netflix without Jan The Mail Lady.)
She’d already dropped off Boonville’s mail at the Boonville Post Office and was now headed for Philo where Joe and Sheila would quickly have it in their customer’s boxes by noon, usually way before noon.
Then it was up and over the Greenwood Road to Elk where Postmaster Melissa and, occasionally, the legendary Joel ‘Mole Man’ Waldman directed the day’s post to its seaside destinations. Down the road at the Manchester Post Office Postmaster Kathy with a y was filling in for Kathe with an e, and in Point Arena, once presided over by Boonville’s vivid postmaster, the late Al Zischke, another Kathy and a Shawn were hurrying around Point Arena’s hillside post office. Rural post offices always seem to be a person short, meaning the on duty people have to hustle.
As the day grows longer, it occurs to me that I am meeting one highly capable woman after another, confirming old suspicions that Mendocino County is held together by women, reliable, capable men having always seemed in short supply.
The Point Arena Post Office’s front door featured a sort of town greeter whose high decibel conversations were independent of second parties. The greeter was talking loudly to himself as we arrived.
“Local color,” Jan explained. As we pulled into Point Arena, the late Eddie Scaramella (the Major’s cousin) drove up in his perfectly maintained early 1950s Chevrolet, a museum piece with probably not more than 10,000 miles on it since his dad, the late Joe Scaramella, drove it out of the show room in Santa Rosa the year the vehicle was produced. Eddie Scaramella drove it from his service station a block away to the post office, and then he drove it back to his service station where he put the pristine Chevy back in its box.
Scaramella turned down numerous offers from car collectors for his rare first edition. “I’ll sell it when they move the post office next to my gas station,” he said.
We then drove the six steep miles up the hill to the long abandoned Point Arena Air Force Radar Station where we found… well, imagine a tiny suburb, complete with a two-lane bowling alley, a community swimming pool, a gym, a mess hall, and thirty neat little homes whose residents have unaccountably disappeared, a self-contained village with no people deep in the remote Coast Range.
“Every election someone running for supervisor says they want to do something with this place,” Jan commented, “but nothing ever happens.”
Jan The Mail Lady knew more about her vast service area than any politician before or since, including several 5th District county supervisors. She knew all the people and, as we made the rounds, noted changes in the landscape I would have missed completely if she hadn’t pointed them out. “That’s a new road there, and that house on the bluff just appeared one day, it seemed, it went up so fast.”
After a truly excellent lunch at The Point Arena Record Building, we reversed direction and headed back to Boonville, the sun now at our backs. When Jan dropped me off at Uncle Ed’s Ice Cream and Assorted Edibles, Edward F. Donovan the Fourth, proprietor, Jan The Mail Lady still had to drive to Cloverdale and then back to her home in Yorkville.
Whatever the Post Office paid her it wasn't enough.
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