19, December 2024 Iclic Vermer's Great Idea

Iclic got an idea one winter as he procrastinated starting his cold car to go to his mailbox a half mile away to get his mail. In mild weather he would walk there just to get some exercise, but during the bitterly cold months, the idea of bundling himself up and walking that tortuous stretch across the Palmville tundra made him weary even before he started. He began thinking of any easier way to get his mail short of hiring someone to deliver it.

There were only two days of decent weather every year; the day just after the last snowdrift melted and the day just before all the mosquitoes hatched desperate for the taste of blood: often being the same day. Clothing-wise, he was just as bundled up in March as he was in January, except all his fleshy parts were slathered with a high concentration of Deet to stave off the gnats and no-seeums, as there just was no defense against mosquitos. A person got used to all the raised welts and rashes over time, but winter was an entirely different story.

He had often wondered about how the Inuit Nunangat in the far north learned to survive arctic weather (similar to Palmville’s although milder). He’d come to the conclusion that they simply didn’t go outdoors if they didn’t have to unless it was something extremely dire--like running out of chewing tobacco or breath mints. There was no reason to risk life and limb by going outdoors to start the pickup, no matter if they could just point the remote start at the garage to do it, they had nothing to prove; it was those stupid non-Inuits who had put them on the Ultimate Survivor pedestal.

Iclic figured that those people who had lived for centuries in that arctic cold environment had obviously created adaptive techniques to make their lives easier and one of them just had to have been a method to retrieve their mail from a far distant mailbox, say on the Arctic Circle Mail Route, and not have to leave the house. 

He pondered this for a long time, occasionally taking breaks from his deliberations by reading a book, eating a bit of lunch, or contemplating watching birds at a feeder; some of his deep thought was conducted while he was on the toilet or playing a game of cards with his wife. He thought about his dilemma while on a ride through a raging blizzard with his friends. And as he raked snow from roof tops of his house and tool shed. It plagued him as he slept, when he made the morning coffee, and when he sneezed for the third time for no reason when suddenly, the solution came to him like a thunderclap as when the house cracked during a severe temperature plunge at night.

"THAT’S IT! I GOT IT!"

And he shot out of his LazyMan recliner like a Heimlich-hug projectile from an obstructed air passage, careful not to trip on a rug or fall down the basement steps in his eagerness to write down his phenomenal idea of ideas. What he needed was  . . . a pneumatic transport tube!

Why hadn’t he thought of that before? The Reed River Bank uses them! They shoot your deposits through a tube from your car into the bank and back in no time flat, (if the teller ain’t sleeping.)

Iclic was too excited to speak--or type -- finally getting so irritated at his Spell-Check alarm that he swept off the top of his computer desk with his arm and continued scribbling frantic notes using a pen and paper. He drew detailed plans complete with measurements, specialty tools, and materials, anything he thought was required on huge sheets of paper he had left from another project. 

Iclic's previous project was this potato gun.

 

He searched the net for installation instructions, contacted contractors, talked to engineers. He taped alternative plans to the walls of his office. He used post-it notes on his bathroom mirror where he could ponder them night or day. He figured he’d run a half-mile route of twenty-four-inch, thick-walled PVC pipe from his mailbox out on the county road, through the ditch, then parallel to the underground electric cable the local coop had installed a year before, with alternately accessible sections of padded drop boxes from where he could retrieve books, boxes or bottles of wine and spirits. His excitement never left him. He hadn’t felt this energized for years, hooyah!

Installation completed, Testing Day arrived at long last. He put three business-sized envelopes of electric, telephone, and car insurance-bill weights into his P.P.T.M.T.S. (Palmville Pneumatic Mail Tube System), closed and locked its bigger-than-a bread box cylindrical container, then  pushed the green Send button. Whoosh! went the container!

Driving hurriedly to his house, he burst through the front door and leaped up the three stairs to the kitchen receiving unit station to awaited his test mail. ”Jiggle, jiggle, swish, swish--phwoot!” The test mail swept into the receiver with hardly a slap against the end of the tube. 

Iclic was elated, leaping high-kneed about the kitchen with his bewildered wife, who followed his lead although unsure of the music. “Looky here, M’darling! Looky here!” he sang with the high girly-guy voice of an English choir boy in the Exeter Cathedral. “Now we never have to start our cold cars, sit on cold car seats, dress in all our cold weather gear just to get the stinkin’ mail! Hooyah!’

Ethel looked at Iclic with grave concern, bordering on combustion in her attempt to kindly hold her emotion all in. Creating halting leakage in her lower extremities, her eyes bulged, her cheeks reddened, her toes splayed for traction against the kitchen linoleum floor, and her string-tied apron sagging to her knees she took a deep breath--then helplessly roared happy tears that burst from her eyes as from dozens of overhead water sprinklers.

“You ..  are ..  something ..  else!” she wheezed, pinching the bridge of her nose then spreading the fingers of her hand apart to wipe away the tears. “You, Iclic Vermer ..,” she moaned, as she hunched over the kitchen sink, both hands to her face, her apron now around her ankles. “Oh .. Ah .. you!”

Her body kept shaking with laughter from deep within as she tried to right herself. Massaging her forehead, wiping the tears from her cheeks, she stepped out of her apron before she tripped over it, and looked at astonished Iclic standing there silent with his mouth open. “Oh, this tops it all, I’m afraid. It’ll be off to the old folks home with you ... sooner than you know.”

Iclic turned mechanically toward her, the test mail gripped in his reddish-knuckled hands. 

“But, this?” he gestured with a tip of his head, his mouth winched to one side as though he wasn’t sure which plane of consciousness he was in, then he squeaked out, “You got mail.”

“I wondered what your big project was, Iclic,” Ethel said, hanging a dish towel on the refrigerator door handle, a smile still upon her lips as though she had finally seen it all. She shook her head, her gaze rising to the ceiling so she wouldn’t look at him and lapse into another laughing fit and said, 

“I thought it was a water diversion ditch you were running to the river, eh, all this huge pipe, these materials, all this time . . . An’ here it was so you didn’t have to start the car these cold mornings to go outside and get the mail, when I go to work every morning six days a week, cold, rain, snow or high water, and stop at the mailbox every night! 

"Good grief! You worry me...”