Somewhere in "Eastern" Maine

Just where in the hell is Eastern Maine? Now, before anyone writes in to say it’s just to the right of Western Maine when you are standing and staring to the north, let me say that place, not direction, is my problem.

You see, in the last week or so, the U.S. Postal Service opened a new high-tech mail-handling center in Hermon or Hampden or somewhere north of here that begins with an “H.”

It used to be that in the old days each and every post office cancelled mail individually. Looking at a postmark before opening a letter was half the fun. “Oh, look, it’s from East Overshoe. Must be from Cousin Edweena.” You catch my drift.

A few years back, some bright star in the nighttime decided that all mail from these parts would be sent to Bangor (44 miles north) to be postmarked and sorted before redistribution. Bar Harbor mail for delivery to Bar Harbor, even to someone down the block, went to Bangor first.

Residents of Down East, Maine, a place which for the record is not so much a quasi-official geographic area as it is a state of mind, just shook their heads. It didn’t make much sense to folks to try and improve mail service by loading it into a truck, hauling it to Bangor, and then carting it back here before having someone walk 20 feet across the post office from the “IN” slot to put it in a post office box. Common sense apparently went south as our mail headed north.

The move ranked right up there with making the cost of a first-class stamp 29 cents or some other God-awful odd number, whereby understanding Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity seems child’s play compared to the job of figuring the total for multiple stamp purchases.

Rerouting messages the long way may be fine for long-distance telephone calls where sometimes it is faster to go from point A to point B via Pittsburgh. That medium runs at the speed of light. However, this (insert cheap shot here) is the U.S. Postal Service we are talking about.

Still, despite this foolishness, at least the postmark we got was for a real place. Most of us have been to Bangor, if not out of some primordial need to patronize stores full of gimcracks and thingamabobs we don’t need and really can’t afford, at least as a pit stop on the way to or from somewhere else.

There was at least some comfort in knowing, “Hey, that’s where my mail is sleeping tonight.”

Now what we have instead are the words “Eastern Maine” and one of those funky little computer-generated bar codes across the bottom of the envelope. This insures that no human being will actually read the address and understand where the letter is headed. Now the new, near-fully automated mail-handling facility located somewhere in “Eastern Maine” will continue to send you someone else’s mail by mistake even when you write, “Return to sender” or “Wrong box” on it. It will never reach the rightful owner until you scratch the hell out of the bar code with a crayola crayon, which forces the machine to kick it out and holler for a low-tech human attendant.

Now, remember, this is not the fault of your local, hardworking post office employees and postmasters. They are not any happier about having to follow this screwball system than anyone else.

What I want to know is why, with all these high-tech gizmos, can’t we have a more personalized approach to the mail instead of the cold, impersonal designation of “Eastern Maine”?

Try addressing a letter to “Joe Anybody” in “Eastern Maine” and see how fast the post office rejects it. There is in fact no such place as “Eastern Maine.” In truth, the new service center is on the “west” side of the Penobscot River and not even actually in “Eastern Maine” — if we knew for sure where that was.

The rest of Maine, I’m told, gets mail stamped “Western Maine.” See, it just goes to prove there are two Maines, separate and yet apparently equal in the geographically insensitive eyes of the U.S. Postal Service.

Ultimately, we haven’t made mail service any better by spending these millions of dollars; we’ve barely arrested it from getting progressively worse. And, along the way, we’ve lost a real measure of community identity. What’s that worth?

It just goes to show you that, if you give the government the latest in computers, millions of dollars, and some multiple of 44-cent stamps, that, and a trip to Bangor and back, will get you a first-class letter delivered to and from somewhere in “Eastern Maine.”