I wandered to Chicken’s cute little Post Office No. 99732 of the US Postal Service, half expecting to burst out into laughter at its token activities. My joviality drained in an instant under the steely gaze of Robin, judging this wanderer in front of her workspace. Postmaster and de-facto town in charge, a couple of sharp questions from her led me to inadvertently stammer out my biodata. She broke into a smile. “India?”, she asked and proceeded to verify in-depth information she had heard on Public Radio. She told me of how her India plans back in the 1970s had gone along with her gold miner love story. Her bring-it-on attitude now that she had raised two daughters, one of them delivered by a doctor brought in on a dog sled in the depths of winter; her nature photographer husband who was always out on field; how wolves were welcome but moose were more her worry; the triweekly mail plane that brought letters in and her responsibility in ensuring that it reached far out homesteads dozens of kilometres apart – word by word, picture by picture I could see my cliched adventurer image disintegrate. Person-in-charge couldn’t have had a better personification.
[Part of the Series: Notes from the Last Frontier]
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