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Honolulu Lite
NEITHER rain, sleet, hail nor snow can keep Hawaii mail carriers from making their appointed rounds, mainly because there's no sleet, hail or snow to speak of and the rain, though wet, is pretty warm. Leapin’ lizards!
Our poor postmenBut there is one hazard our fearless mailmen and mailwomen face daily that their mainland counterparts do not: the gecko. And in it's way, the gecko is much harder on the mail carriers because of the extreme psychological trauma they inflict.
Briefly put, geckos view mailboxes as sort of roomy condominiums. The boxes are clean, dry and cat-proof, but the mailbox door is like a guillotine, too often cutting off little gecko arms, legs and tails during mail delivery.
It's nerve-wracking for both geckos and mail carriers. I talked to Cheri Quaid, a letter carrier for the past 22 years who filled me in on this dark side of mail delivery.
"Most people don't know that each mailbox has at least one gecko or gecko family living inside," she said. "Damaging them is so awful."
Not that the carriers intentionally hurt the little reptiles. It's just that, when the carrier opens the mailbox door, it startles the gecko, who usually leaps out of the darkness, which scares the bejesus out of the carrier. In the mail business, it's called "mutual fright." In its zeal to escape, the gecko will sometimes try to squeeze through the gap at the bottom of the door resulting in, well, it's not pretty.
It's a part of mail delivery that has never been talked about opening before. Hundreds of mail carriers are out there every day being terrorized by leaping lizards and the leaping lizards are being equally terrified. And yet, the carriers carry this additional burden bravely and quietly, like the professionals that they are.
BUT truth be told, the gecko situation breaks their hearts every day. "Many times, there's nothing you can do," said Cheri, who delivers mail to about 375 families in the Lanikai area daily.
It's one of those sad ironies of life that mailboxes make such wonderful habitats for geckos but can become little death traps. Even if the creatures survive the door opening and shutting, the geckos also have to dodge newspapers and packages being jammed into the box.
I pushed Cheri to tell me about any other hazards of her job. She was reluctant. Spilling the beans on geckos was humiliating enough. She finally broke down. Carriers also have to deal with ants.
"Ants can tell when it's going to rain," she confided. "Before a big rain, they'll go inside the mailbox. Sometimes there'll be a whole nest in there."
And mail carriers still talk about the time some heartless kids who live along the shore in Kailua decided to stick a live crab in one of the mailboxes. Sure, they thought it was just a prank. They had no idea how horrifying it can be to a letter carrier, anyone actually, to open a mail box and be confronted with a heavily-armed crustacean. I'm fairly sure that putting a crab in a mailbox is a federal offense, unless the crab has a stamp on it.
So, next time you are checking your mail and a gecko jumps out at your face causing you to fall over on your driveway, remember letter carriers face the same danger several hundred times a day. Neither rain, sleet, hail, snow, ants, crabs or geckos can keep the Cheri Quaids of the world from doing their duty. But if the geckos would at least quit jumping around, the job would be a lot less stressful.
Charles Memminger, winner of
National Society of Newspaper Columnists
awards in 1994 and 1992, writes "Honolulu Lite"
Monday, Wednesday and Friday.
Write to him at the Honolulu Star-Bulletin,
P.O. Box 3080, Honolulu, 96802
or send E-mail to cmemminger@starbulletin.com.
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