Back to Gravel

Sometime in late November or early December of 1987, I got a UPS truck stuck in Flannery O’Connor’s front yard.

That sounds more literary than it was.

At the time, I didn’t know jack about Flannery O’Connor. I knew the O’Connor name meant something in Baldwin County (Georgia). There was an O’Connor Road somewhere else in the county, and Andalusia had a historic marker, so I understood I was on important ground. But important ground is still ground, and that night it had been raining for a couple of days.

The yard was sodden. It was early dark, that winter kind of Georgia dark that feels like it has been waiting all afternoon to drop. I was twenty-two years old, driving one of the little UPS P400 delivery “cars”, circa 1962. A small brown box on wheels, built out of sheet metal, plywood, angle iron, and haste.

I pulled down the drive, started turning around before making the delivery, and the whole vehicle sludged in.

Not stuck at first. Sludged. The truck eased down into the soaked earth as if the dirt was giving it a hug.

I got out and made the delivery anyway.

There was no porch light. Just dim lights inside. I don’t remember whether anyone was home. I left the package, knocked, walked back through the wet dark, and looked at the truck.

It was slumped in on the driver’s side. The back tires spun and ate mud.

I tried revving it. Tried rocking it. Nothing. It was stuuuck.

There was no radio in the truck. No phone nearby. This was 1987, way before cellphones. I was way out in Baldwin County at night, alone, in the rain, with a sunken UPS truck and the rest of the route still waiting.

That had been my operating system for a long time.

I was the youngest of three kids, youngest by eight and ten years. By the time I came along, my parents were ready to enjoy their life after my brother and sister had left the house. Starting when I was around nine years old, they trusted me to keep the house when they traveled.

Nowadays, I suppose that might be called abandonment. I thrived.

It felt normal. I liked it. I wasn’t stranded. My grandparents were half an hour away if anything went sideways, and there were neighbors I could reach out to if I had to. But the default was simple: handle your business.

Meals. School. Catching the bus. Coming home. TV. Playing. Tooling around in my dad’s shop.

It wasn’t really a shop. It was a general fix-it utility room off the carport, more of a big closet with a bench, tools, a toolbox, and whatever useful junk had accumulated there. I accidentally called it a “genial” fix-it room once, and that may be the better word. It did have a personality.

When I was real little, my dad raised crickets in there for fishing bait. I can still smell that cricket stink. Ugh.

Dad would bring home parts and pieces of machines from work and let me tear them down. I made dumb, fun things out of them. Once I built a jetpack out of the chassis of a check-signing machine, a tank, some funnels, and seatbelts. If that lawnmower gas tank had had fuel in it, I might have blown myself to bits.

I have always loved tinkering and taking things apart.

That little room taught me something before I knew I was being taught. Things had purposes, but they were not trapped inside those purposes. A machine could become parts. Parts could become something else. A thing under your hand could be promoted.

UPS gave that instinct a uniform and a clock.

The job taught me an incredible work ethic. It did not make me self-reliant. I already had that. UPS gave self-reliance a route, weather, darkness, deadlines, dogs, and consequences.

Late-night country delivery could be downright scary. In daylight, you were the UPS man. At night, in a sparsely populated area, you were first and foremost a stranger in the dark.

You learned to manage it. Flashlights. Horns. Talking loud. Singing loud. Anything to announce yourself before somebody got surprised and decided you were a problem. If you startled the wrong person, it could get ugly.

Or worse, you could startle the wrong dog.

That night at Andalusia, there were no dogs. No peacocks. No dramatic Southern Gothic witnesses.

Just dark, rain, and me.

After rocking the truck failed, I started taking inventory.

I had packages. Documents. Shipping tape. Not much else.

Cardboard came to mind first, but I knew that was a stupid last resort. Wet cardboard in Georgia mud was just desperation before it turned to paper-mâché.

I looked around the place, but that came with its own risks. Late-night UPS delivery in the country was always problematic, and wandering around somebody’s property in the dark was a good way to be misunderstood. I didn’t want to get caught snooping. I also didn’t want anyone inside that dimly lit house to decide to shoot first and ask UPS-related questions later.

So I looked back at the truck.

The P400 had floor mats. Not little rubber mats like you’d buy at Kmart. These were tough as fuck, as old as the vehicle, made from tire tread and woven steel. Heavy, filthy, crusted into the floor by years of aluminum dust, wet cardboard grit, dirt, rust, and whatever else had been ground into that truck since Kennedy was president.

The mat was the solution, but it was not waiting politely.

I had to empty the floor around it and fight that big ol’ bitch loose. It probably weighed 120 pounds. Maybe that’s memory exaggerating, but not by much. It had to be shimmied out through the little P400 door like a giant steel taco while everything was wet and cramped and muddy.

By the time I got it out, I had already fought the truck once.

Then I put the mat between the tire and the mud and slowly spun the tire up onto it.

It worked.

Not in some clean, movie way. It worked like labor works. A little at a time. Tire onto mat. Pull the mat out of the mud. Move it forward. Tire onto mat again. Pull it out again. Move it forward again.

I had to leapfrog that mat about twenty feet until the truck finally climbed back onto the surfaced drive.

Once I was on stable gravel, I got out, pulled the mat free, shook the mud off as best I could, shoved it back into the truck, reloaded everything, and went back to delivering in the country at night.

It was a long night. Usually, after my last delivery, I still had a forty-five-minute drive back to the UPS center.

Years later, the Flannery O’Connor part would make the story funnier. I would learn who she was. I would understand Andalusia as more than a historic marker and a wet driveway. I would come to appreciate the absurdity of getting a brown UPS truck stuck in the front yard of a writer whose work so often involved proud people discovering they were not as in control as they thought.

But that is the later version.

That night, I was twenty-two, wet, muddy, tired, and still on the clock.

Nobody saw it. Nobody applauded. Nobody cared. The route didn’t care. UPS didn’t care. The mud certainly didn’t care.

I got it back to gravel.

Then I shoved the mat back into the truck, reloaded the floor, and went on with the route.

Usually, after my last delivery, I still had a forty-five-minute drive back to the UPS center.

That was the job.

Years later, I can dress the story up with Flannery O’Connor and Andalusia and Southern literary irony, but none of that was available to me then. At the time, it was just a stuck truck, bad weather, a floor mat that weighed too much, and the plain fact that I needed to keep moving.

Sometimes you are alone with a problem.

Sometimes you figure it out.

Sometimes you still have to drag it out.