April 27 – Midnight
Sixty-two-year-old Nancy Briggs picks up her keys and pats the head of Pirate, her black-and-white dog, and tells him she’ll be back later. Pirate flops down on the floor and returns to sleep almost immediately.
Briggs leaves her dozing Pirate and her quiet Redding house – the one with vintage plates on the wall and embroidered quilts on the couch backs.
She climbs into her road-weary truck parked outside and coaxes the engine to start.
“Come on baby, just four more days,” Briggs says as she pats the steering wheel.
The motor overpowers the frogs and crickets’ sounds and the headlights point through the dark toward the Record Searchlight.
Yes, as a matter of fact, she is counting down: four more days until she retires from her contract newspaper delivery job where she’s responsible for 400 customers in the Igo/Cottonwood area. She’s had this job for 38 years.
Briggs laughs easily and chats up a storm, even though she’s had only three hours sleep tonight – which is typical.
Here’s what I learned about Briggs on that first ride-along a few years back (other than the importance of setting the parking brake on a sloped hillside): She has an opinion on everything, she’s seemingly incapable of filtering a thought and she’s totally up on current events. If this night is like the rest of the ride -alongs, time will pass quickly.
Although most of the north state is asleep, Briggs and the rest of the Record Searchlight’s contract newspaper carriers are just going to work. Usually the carriers will get home to bed between 4:30 to 5:30 a.m. (Basically, contract workers aren’t newspaper employees. No medical benefits, no perks, no invitations to company social events, even. )
For many carriers – especially the younger ones – delivering newspapers is just their first job of the day. After they’ve tossed their last paper in the last driveway or pushed that last paper into an orange tube, they’ll go home, take a shower to remove the soy-based ink, take a quick nap, get dressed, grab something to eat and head to their second job by 8 a.m.
That only works if the newspaper press doesn’t break, because broken presses guarantee delayed newspaper deliveries.
Briggs pulls her tired old pickup, the one with the duct-taped dashboard and floorboards covered in rubber bands – into the Record Searchlight’s east parking lot, past the nearly empty editorial parking lot (most of the editorial folks went home after the paper went to press).
She lets her truck rest in a spot opposite the loading dock – a place all lighted up and alive with people scurrying back and forth.
Voices say, “Mornin” and “Mornin,” again, like the lazy tic-tock of a schoolhouse clock.
To Briggs’ passenger, it still feels very much like night. Once again the passenger is reminded that if it weren’t for these newspaper carriers, people who go to work when almost everyone else is asleep, newspapers would be sunk.
A few carriers stand outside their vehicles in the chilly air, hands in pockets or arms clamped tightly across chests as they shift from one foot to the other and kill time with conversation. They’re waiting for bundles of newspapers to appear on the dock. The sooner that happens, the sooner the carriers can get their papers delivered. The sooner they deliver the papers the sooner they can get home. The sooner they get home the sooner midnight will roll around again and they’ll be standing here again, waiting for papers.
A woman’s voice calls out to Briggs.
How’s it feel to almost be done with this job?
Briggs laughs hard.
Oh, you have no idea. I can hardly believe it myself.
This waiting for the newspapers – this part can last for just a short while, say 10 to 20 minutes. Other times it takes hours. Yet other times, such was when the press breaks, papers are not delivered until later in the day.
Carriers hate when this happens. Customers complain; as if the carriers had any control over breaking presses or breaking news.
There’s a polite order here. No rushing the dock. Wait your turn. Help each other out. You help me, I’ll help you.
Inside a compact car to our right a 20-something man with closed eyes is reclined in his driver’s seat, a blanket draped around his shoulders.
Inside a station wagon to our left a gray-haired woman already has a bundle of papers on her front seat. She quickly rolls papers and slips them inside blue plastic sacks. She doesn’t miss a roll as she speaks to a young child in the back seat.
Go back to sleep. Your mama will be here soon.
I later learn that the child’s mama works nights at WalMart and will arrive at the loading dock parking lot where the newspaper-rolling grandmother will hand over the sleepy boy to his mother. After that, the grandmother will drive until daybreak to deliver newspapers. She’ll do the same thing tomorrow and the next night and the next.
Nancy Briggs is one of the Record Searchlight’s remaining newspaper carriers. She says the numbers are dwindling because for one thing, some carriers lost their jobs when the RS ceased delivery to outlying areas, like Trinity and Siskiyou counties and parts of eastern Shasta County. For another thing, Briggs said others quit when their vehicles crapped out on them. Yet others retired when they got too old, or couldn’t handle yet another new boss or corporate puppet.
Briggs planned for her retirement a long time ago. She arranged a reverse mortgage on her home, and she timed retirement to coincide with her Social Security eligibility.
12:39 a.m.
“If this poor car lasts four more days it’ll be a miracle,” Briggs says with a laugh as she tosses six bundles of newspapers into her truck cab. In she hops. Away we go.
We’re barely onto Interstate 5 heading south when Briggs reaches around to the back seat with one hand, and with the same hand unsnaps one of the plastic bands that holds a bundle together and hauls a stack of papers to the front seat between us.
She talks, rolls, bags and slips a rubber band around the paper, as if she’s done it thousands of times before, which, of course, she has.
But today’s is a Monday paper, and lately these papers are so skinny and lightweight that the carriers joke and say things like maybe management should provide rocks for carriers to include inside the plastic sacks – so the papers won’t fly away.
“Here’s a sample,” Briggs says as she flips a flimsy newspaper my direction. “Isn’t that pathetic? Surely there must be more news than that.”
Even so, she’s not surprised at the shrinking papers, no more than she’s surprised at the drop in subscribers, manifested by entire neighborhoods in which not one house will receive a newspaper. In fact, Briggs says she has about 100 fewer customers this year than the previous year or so.
Normally, Briggs tunes her truck radio to NPR where she’ll listen to the BBC, but tonight – this morning – she has a story to tell, which she starts from the end and works toward the beginning.
Her retirement plans include travel to Europe – Prague, Vienna and Budapest. But first, she and a friend will drive to the coast where Briggs will take a real vacation (she literally can’t remember her last one – “20 – maybe 30 years?”).
Another retirement plan is sleep, and plenty of it.
“Going without sleep will make you goofy,” Briggs says as she tosses a wrapped, bagged, banded skinny newspaper twig to the truck floor with the rest.
Everyone asks how Briggs chose newspaper delivery as her life-time career. The answer goes back to her childhoon, when she joined her father on his newspaper delivery route to the Burney/Hat Creek area, a difficult job since its high elevation often meant snow, exacerbated by narrow, windy roads. He did that for 10 years, which at the time seemed an admirable feat.
His daughter lasted 28 years longer.
Briggs continues to talk, roll, bag, and band newspapers as she talks. She keeps it up until we reach the first neighborhood on her route.
It’s dark, and no other cars are around. Briggs’s truck speeds along – on the wrong side of the road -expertly careening around obstacles: fences, garbage cans, parked cars, boats, trucks, cats, bushes, trees, racoons, skunks, potholes, whatever.
She says there’s no way she could do this in broad daylight, something she knows for sure since sometimes when the paper’s extremely late carriers find themselves out of their comfort zones, delivering in broad daylight. Dark is best. For one thing, drivers are accustomed to how places look in the dark. For another thing, there’s so much traffic during the day that she couldn’t “own” the roads as she does at this hour. Oh sure, she’s been stopped by CHP, police and sheriff, literally more times than she can count. But officers take one look at the inside of Briggs’ truck – stacked with newspapers, plastic bags and rubber bands – and they wave her on.
Usually, Briggs straddles the seat’s center, where, with both front windows wide open so she can toss some papers through the passenger window and other papers through the driver’s window. Back and forth, back and forth. Rain, snow, freezing temperatures and howling winds rush inside the truck to join Nancy.
This is no job for the frail.
Some newspapers Briggs stuffs into tubes, others she flings over fences, and yet others are placed inside funky wooden boxes with hasps and locks that resemble faded wooden chicken coops. Briggs made those wooden boxes over the years for customers whose papers were being habitually stolen.
She puts her ride-along passenger to work.
Put that paper in the tube with the white tape on it.
Don’t put papers in the tubes with black tape.
Reach around to the back seat and stick your hand into the box of dog biscuits … hurry, here comes the house with the dogs. Quick, first toss a biscuit over the fence to the big dog, now to the little one.
Uh, do the owners know she gives dog biscuits to the dogs?
Think so.
As much as she loves her customers, and their pets, as much as loves the solitude and as much as she’ll miss the other carriers, the truth is, Nancy Briggs is tired of delivering newspapers. So tired.
“This job isn’t easy on vehicles, or people,” Briggs says as she accelerates and brakes, accelerates and brakes, accelerates and brakes. It’s a wonder her truck has any brakes at all.
1:30 a.m. Cottonwood
Briggs stops at the same mini-mart where she always stops. It’s her routine. The store clerk asks Briggs how many more days, to which Briggs answers “Four!” over her shoulder as she gets a soda from the self-serve machine and grabs some corn nuts for the road. Snacks will ride on the dashboard.
As Briggs’ purchase is rung up, the women talk about getting together some time. They crack up when they realize they’ve never talked to each other during daytime hours.
Back in the truck, Briggs’ is tossing her rolled newspaper sticks left and right, but it’s not easy because the Monday papers (now just an A and B section) are so light that they barely have enough weight to make them land where Briggs wants.
A few times, when the ride-along passenger accidentally drops a paper from a tube, or when the passenger accidentally misses a driveway, Briggs stops the truck, gets out and places the newspaper in the right location. Shoot, with only four days left, what’s the big deal?
“I still want to do a good job for my customers,” Briggs says.
This is a common theme with Briggs – her customers. We come to a house with a Record Searchlight tube that still contains the Sunday paper. Briggs looks serious.
“Take it out of the tube and we’ll take it up to her house,” she says. “She’s not doing well.”
How does Briggs know?
“We talk on the phone. I can tell she’s having a hard time.”
3 a.m.
Briggs points out places of interest: here’s where a crazy guy and his sons lived, here’s where a skunk sprayed her, here’s where the ex-con jumped into the driver’s side (she was in the middle) and told her to drive to his friend’s house, because people were trying to kill him.
She drove then just like she drives now.
She’s driven through snow storms so thick she had to stop to wipe off the headlights. She’s driven over partially flooded roads and around downed trees. She’s see every kind of critter during her deliveries. She once broke her ankle (doctors weren’t sure she’d walk again) because she stepped in a hole when she’d stepped away from her truck during a delivery.
She once ended up driving a young guy home because he was drunk, and he needed a ride to his mother’s house, since it was on Brigg’s route.
When she reached to the back seat to wake up the guy, he tried to get fresh with her. Just thinking about the absurdity of it strikes her as hilarious now.
“He was pretty funny,” Briggs says with a laugh, shaking her head.
She tosses a paper out her window, and with a practiced flick of her wrist she snaps the paper high over the truck’s roof to the other side – without looking to see where it lands – and she keeps on driving and talking, rolling and bagging and banding.
Of course, the tiny newspaper lands exactly where it’s supposed to land.
And Briggs – after she retires – she’ll land that way, too, in exactly the right spot.
But first, she’ll go home and take a very long nap.
Click on image below to see Nancy Briggs slide show.
Thanks to Bruce Greenberg for audio and slide show assistance.
