The tunnel back

The faerie realm is a jumpin’ these nights under the stars and moon, mimicking the sounds and lights of farm equipment working in the dark. This morning, signs of mischief are everywhere: acre upon acre are set like gigantic board games with hundreds of games pieces—tidy ingots of hay—plunked down with exactness onto playing fields.

Crows roam freely over the Dijon-stained landscape of the Old Danforth as I climb down a roadside embankment. I’ve stopped to take a look at something of curiosity; it’s a humble affair, a worn-out rural mailbox.

When new, the hump back box would have shone on the land, guarding the entrance of a farm laneway. Over the seasons, homemade repairs seem to have been done a hundred times over most likely after winter visitations from the snowplow. Like a bowling pin, it seems that the box was persuaded to stand upright again and again; reset with one more wood screw or nail or anything at hand to tack it onto a beat-up cedar post.

The red metal flag that announced ‘mail in’ or ‘mail to go out’ has left. Hanging on its corrugated belly like a set of saddle-bags are small, make-shift wooden panels that once mentioned a family name. The mailbox’s factory- pressed hinge was replaced years ago with fine hardware that likely gave up after three Christmas catalogue deliveries. From there on it looks like binder twine, fence wire and duct tape stitched things together until the day came, after a half century of loyalty, the box keeled over into the ditch where I find it.

The metal box holds the dimensions of the ones we see everyday. You know the ones that hang about the crossroads like neighbours standing at even height; or the ones that wait alone against fields of corn; or those that march in silent procession; that lean and stagger and swagger through the days of the side roads. The home-grown flair of many boxes can bring a smile to a passerby.

A car passes, kicking dust all over; deerflies snap at my ankles making it hard to imagine why I’m here. I flip the box over and see written underneath: ‘Manufactured by St. Thomas Metal Signs Ltd. 1959’.

The archives of Elgin County in southwestern Ontario has a circa 1930s photo of the factory that stood at Stanley and Talbot streets in St. Thomas. The place specialized in stamped metal and enameled work that is valued to this day. Some may remember down at the corner store, when you reached into a cooler of refrigerated water for a bottle of Coca Cola. Good chance the cooler was the Vendo 216 model. It held 216 glass bottles at a time and was made by the company between 1952 and 1959.

In addition to mailboxes and coolers, the manufacturer produced volumes of embossed tin signs that advertised just about everything. There were dual sided signs in French and English; there were street signs and signs for Robin Hood Flour; Shell Oil; Peerless Gasolene; DeKalb Hybrid Corn; Orange Crush; Massey Ferguson; Pontiac Sales and Service; and specialty ones like Stillicious the Chocolate Drink and Teddy Chocolate Drink Renfrew Ontario.

The metal sign company was handy to the grand two-storey station of the then Canada Southern Railway. The rail line operated a direct route from Chicago to New York, running through the southernmost tip of Canada, tunneling under the St. Clair River and bridging Niagara Falls. The St. Thomas station, one of the busiest in the country, offered ready access to huge markets. The St. Thomas Metal Signs outfit boomed from the 1920s until it quit a few years after sending off what is now a County roadside relic.

The design of the rural mailbox dates to 1915 when Roy Jaroleman, a U.S. Postal service employee, found a solution to satisfy the postal institution; a dry, durable container with a latching door and semaphore or signal flag mounted on an attached arm to indicate when mail was delivered or ready for pickup. The objective was to standardize the system and replace the hodgepodge of containers—bushel baskets, empty grease cans, and wooden boxes—that rural mail customers were using and making the postal deliverers crazy. The Jaroleman invention, called the ‘Tunnel Top’, was available in No. 1, 2 or 3 size models. Key to standardizing the mailbox was choosing not to patent it, therefore encouraging its widespread manufacture and use. The rural mailbox is acclaimed to be a functional industrial design classic by some; others see it as a Quonset hut on a stick.

Driving home from my culvert expedition, I work on a response in case asked by anyone (read ‘the missus’) why I have a decrepit mailbox riding in the back seat. Hard to explain: maybe I’ll talk up the 1959 part; or impress the fact that it’s a No.3 model; then again the ‘Stillicious Chocolate’ connection ought to work! In the end I figure it best to be straight up and admit to being held captive by the faerie realm. That one she’ll have no trouble believing.