It is that time of year in Maine. Tourists drive, fly, boat and hike to see the clear skies and the leaves turning to the red, gold and yellow colors of autumn. Mainers mostly just look out their respective windows, shake their fists at drifting leaf piles, and head out to the garage in the direction of a rake… or leaf shredder, or leaf blower, or riding mower with good ground clearance. After three cycles, I am pausing contentious leaf removal and moving on to other tasks until the abomination of accumulation is over.
I should never venture away from home…
I attended a political party town meeting the other night. Got in my truck, drove up and down hills in the dark until I arrived at the huge Safety and Fire Department building set off into the woods. Lit up like daylight, the setting was a little surreal. I was hoping to gain some insight into town and state Republican Party efforts.
What I found were some very dedicated people, a small gathering of people who obviously have known one another for a very long time. Most town employees, or ex-employees, they spoke in the code common with people of familiarity who understood one another, and did not particularly care if inexperienced attendees did not. I am a newcomer to the town, twenty-six years and I only knew one other person, the meeting chair.
It was easy to read the room. Internal spats, obvious agendas thought to be hidden. The earth shaking problems bringing tension to town management were quite easy to resolve, but I know speaking up in any regard would be an affront to meeting decorum and position of time in grade seniority.
Conclusion based on a hundred years of corporate and small business? The town is in trouble, terribly mismanaged, and spending tax dollars without regard to residents’ needs or desires. The budget has ballooned, a reassessment on property is looming large, and the town has not even reconciled its financial accounts for over three years. They hire people, who quickly quit to avoid personal liability. I don’t know if I should pursue issues, or call the FBI. No more meetings for me.
Never abandoned its post
This is the handy work of Raymond, Maine’s Public Works Department, a bit of bad news, a bit of good news, and a bit of being left conflicted. I am at the road crest of a very steep hill. Subsequently, when that big ol’ diesel plow truck comes huffing and puffing up the hill, pushing a plow-topping, accumulated snow pile, the truck does not slow down until it tops the hill. It will not slow or stop, even when it clips my mailbox, or its post, or just buries the whole thing under five feet of iced snow.
At least Raymond has a policy of fixing what they damage… sort of. After assessing the handy work for a few moments, it dawned on me what they had done to repair the mailbox. An attempt at covering over a clear case of mailbox homicide. The broken post is the original, the one on the left is the replacement. They pulled the broken original out of the post hole I had dug on OEM installation, inserted a new post, cut the bottom off of the original post at ground level, then attached it in paralleled with the new post. Yes, really. Don’t make me explain it again. I suspect alcohol was part of the new installation.
Swing Clear to the rescue
OK, I’m a sucker for PT Barnum ad copy. A Swing Clear mailbox is designed for placement farther from the blacktop than a traditional mailbox post, and higher above the road surface, while still in compliance with postal requirements. The bottom of the box opening must be 6″ – 8″ from the road, and 41″ – 45″ above the road surface. Additionally, the Swing Clear mounts the mailbox on a boom that projects out from the mailbox post.
In theory expressed for the gullible, me, the snow plow will not hit the mailbox post located fifty-eight inches from the street surface, and it will pass under the boom mounted mailbox in the event the plow truck driver spills hot coffee in his lap and veers off the road. In the event that theory doesn’t hold up and the plow/truck strikes the mailbox and/or boom, the boom will rotate in the struck direction, and gravity will return it to its proper orientation after the ten ton interloper has passed.
If I assume the role of a reasonably intelligent and logical human being, I can pretend, do I believe the rebound return to be plausible? Hell no! In the past dozen or so cases of plow truck mailbox interaction, a quarter mile hike further up the road was required to recover the mangled metal form and associated wood pieces. The lbs/ft of kinetic energy was something on the order of KE = 1,069,737 and box and post trajectory was SpaceX like. I bought the Swing Clear not so much to solve the problem, but rather enhance the collision spectacle.
The digging of the hole, A.K.A. the auger trap
The fill that resides next to a roadbed, is several feet of roadbed outer limits, rife with sand, gravel and palm-filling size rocks, leveled atop some significant boulders. The aggregate fill is seriously compacted, probably by decades of plow truck traffic, and the foot traffic of people replacing mailbox/post assemblies.
Striking with a post hole digger got rid of the surface sand. Unfortunately, several inches down I encountered the earth’s lithosphere or tectonic plates. Too… frugal to buy an appropriate San Angelo digging bar, I opted for a $19.95 Amazon 2.5″ Auger. Not as close of a substitute as one might think. Additionally, I found that a small auger with a 1/4″ drive head, when coached with an impact driver, will screw itself into a bed of large rocks, and have little desire to exit.
So I threw a lasso around the augers flight, tied the other end of the rope to one of the tractor’s bucket tie downs and hit the lift lever. It took a few attempts to understand the auger is a giant screw and a tugged rope would only unscrew. Hmm… So I ended up clamping a long piece of soft wood to the spiral, securing it with a C clamp. The C clamp grabbed at the auger’s shaft. The soft wood prevented the clamp from traveling up the spiral, and a rope tied through the clamp pulled the auger and a few small boulders out of the hole. A $25 C clamp was destroyed in the retrieval of the $15 auger.
It was also about this time I stepped back to bask in the wonderfulness of the auger extraction achievement, forgetting I was standing with my back to a steep grade, and fell flat on my back into the roadside leaf and tick covered drainage ditch. Looking up to the road, all I could see were the toes of my boots in beautiful contrast to the setting sun. Living in Maine where such occurrences are not rare, sparse traffic drove on by without pause, while I laughed at my clumsiness, and maybe swore once or twice.
With a little help from my friends
The tubular steel base pipe that resides in the ground and supports the rest of the post and mailbox, is supposed to be driven into the ground. A base driver, steel cap is placed in the base to protect the base tubing, then the base is sledgehammered into place, mostly straight up and down but with a 5° tilt away from the road.
Even if I could drive the base through rocks and gravel, it would not remain upright for long under mailbox load and it would not locate as precisely as required. Hence the post hole. Since the post hole digger would not… post hole, and the auger was not going to get the job done, I called a guy I know who owns a digging bar; a long, heavy steel bar with a point on the end that carries a good deal of kinetic energy when slammed into a post hole. It loosens packed dirt and large and small rocks.
Once the hole was dug, instead of using quick setting concrete, I went with SikaMix-In-The-Bag Expanding Polyurethane Post-Setting Foam. Easy to use, stable from -22°F to 130°F and impervious to water. Set is 3 – 5 minutes with a 2 hour cure. The product package is only 33 ounces and it has a year of shelf life.
The Swing Clear sells wooden bases that secure the box to the boom attached to the post for a few bucks, but I could not resist spending a couple of hours making a laminated hardwood mailbox platform that holds the box at six points and locates it to the post boom with two large carriage bolts. What would life be without overkill?
A lot of words and a lot of unnecessary work for a simple mailbox
Spec height and distance to the road, the mailman likes it. The old mailbox was too small to hold all but the smallest Amazon packages, so the mailman would have to drive 100 yards up the driveway to drop packages on the porch, or in wet snow, or at the unused side door, or in the rain. Now, as long as the plow truck doesn’t see the new box as an enticing target, the mail situation should be under control… for a bit.