This was my worst day as a UPS driver. Or was it?

Just before Covid shut the whole world down, I’d made a trip to Houston where my son Judson was living at the time. It was my first visit so he was showing me all the sights around town.

One of Houston’s points of interest is the Johnson Space Center. I’m not a full-on space nerd but I do love historic sites, so I was very impressed by what we saw there.

Easily the highlight of our tour was Mission Control. This modest-sized room housed the terrestrial coordination of all NASA space missions from 1965 to 1998 – truly the entire ‘Space Age.’

All by itself, being inside Mission Control would’ve been worth the price of admission. But it just so happened that we were only a few weeks ahead of the golden anniversary of the ill-fated Apollo 13 mission, made famous in 1995 by Ron Howard’s film starring Tom Hanks. One of the three astronauts on that mission, Fred Haise, was sitting for an interview right there! Behold! He not only returned to earth alive, but he lives to tell the tale 50 years on!

Space exploration is inherently risky. So many things could go wrong, and if anything does go wrong, you’re thousands of miles away from planet earth. Leaving home, facing crisis, and returning home triumphant and transformed is the standard template for the ‘hero’s journey.’ Even so-called ‘failed’ NASA missions like Apollo 13 fit that bill.

Leaving the warehouse with a UPS car filled with packages to deliver is nowhere near as risky as blasting off into outer space, but every shift feels a bit like a hero’s journey, fraught with perils.

Two of the more common perils we UPS drivers regularly face are aggressive (or distracted) vehicles and aggressive animals. But the further out we go – and especially out on extended routes during the bad-weather season – the likeliest peril we face is adverse road conditions.

All through the year, as I was enjoying covering remote rural routes, I kept telling myself, ‘boy, I sure am not looking forward to being out here when the roads are bad!’ And of course that time did come soon enough.

Since I was on an in-town route through most of my first bad-weather season, I hadn’t chained up once in my first few months of driving. Second time around, though, I had no choice. Through trial and error I gradually became an expert in putting chains on my tires and braving the snow and ice on hilly country roads and long driveways, many of which are unpaved.

Tire chains are simple marvels, but they don’t work miracles. UPS drivers must learn what their delivery vehicle is capable of and how to handle that vehicle successfully. It requires finding a delicate balance between caution and courage, and the decision whether or not to attempt delivery is usually a split-second one: a risk assessment based on real-time visual information.

It takes a lot for me to ‘E.C.’ a package – that is, not deliver it due to ‘Emergency Conditions.’ I take great pride in completing as many of my stops as is safely possible. Especially if the stop is at the end of a long, steep driveway covered in snow and ice. And especially if the package is out for a second or even third attempt, because previous drivers had decided (rightly or wrongly, who can say?) not to risk getting stuck. I’m nearly twice the age of most of the other newer drivers, but what I lack in youthful hubris, I more than make up for in courage, caution, and wisdom.

I usually make the right call about whether or not to attempt a delivery, but occasionally I come down on the wrong side of that fine line.

In those cases when I do get stuck, I can often get myself unstuck on my own, or with the help of the customer and/or neighbors who have more tools than I do for such events. I have depended on the kindness of many strangers.

However, not long after I published my last post extolling all the beautiful wildlife I regularly encountered on rural routes, I found myself on a road so remote that I didn’t recognize it, even though I’d had plenty of experience covering this route.

I only take detours when absolutely necessary, since they can add significant mileage to a route that’s already well into triple digits of distance traveled. Regretfully, in this case I should have looked for a detour on a road I recognized.

This unfamiliar road quickly got narrower, and steeper, and slicker as I went. By the time I decided not to proceed any further, not only was gravity preventing me from continuing up the hill, but a slick patch was keeping me from retracing my path back down it. I was truly stuck.

I got out to assess the situation. I walked about 500 yards both up and down the hill: there were no signs of human settlement or activity in either direction. It was a road barely the width of my vehicle, and I had no reason to expect anyone to come along anytime soon.

I had to walk around just to find a spot of cell service. Miraculously I was able to place a call to the building to let them know I was going to need a tow. I couldn’t give them an exact location but they were able to plot me using GPS.

The people in the office told me it would take a while, not only because tows were already being dispatched elsewhere to other stuck drivers across the territory, but because I was more than 50 miles away in an especially remote area. Just like Mission Control, there was nothing more they could do to help me.

Dear reader, there’s probably nothing lonelier than being a UPS driver stuck all alone in the dead of winter on a one-lane country road 50 miles from base. Even Fred Haise had two fellow astronauts to keep him company.

There’s probably nothing lonelier or more boring. Driving for UPS is relentless motion from the beginning to the end of each shift. To not be moving, for even a short time, is excruciating. Now I was facing at least a two-hour wait in which I could not move.

I don’t even remember how I passed the time.

I placed the call at half past noon. Around 3 pm I heard some faint rumbling in the distance, so I started walking in the direction of the noise on the assumption that that was my tow truck come to find me. When I did catch a glimpse of it, I saw that it was moving farther and farther away from me. It neither saw nor heard me. It was heading off in the wrong direction!

In that moment I felt less like Fred Haise and more like Gilligan, stranded haplessly on his island. What if the tow driver gave up and left? Happily he didn’t; he eventually came back my way.

The process of my package car getting towed back down the hill was painstakingly long, slow, and intermittent. It involved the tow truck getting rigged up with chains on both duallys – all four rear tires; then the tow truck slowly backing up the hill to within 75-100 feet of the package car; then my chaining up my front wheels for better steering control; then the tow truck yanking the package car out of the stuck spots, of which there were several, with a tow strap.

Upon freeing me from each stuck spot, the tow driver then drove far enough down the hill that I couldn’t slide into him, and I slowly backed the package car down the hill until I’d get stuck in a different spot. Then he’d connect the tow strap and the cycle would repeat itself again. We did this probably three or four times.

When I wasn’t helping the tow driver connect and disconnect the tow strap, I was in the driver’s seat of my package car. Even though I was completely helpless without the tow, I still had an important and necessary part to play in my own rescue.

The sun had already set when I got to a point in the road that was wide enough for me to turn myself around and proceed forward down the hill without any more assistance from the tow. The total distance hadn’t been more than a few hundred yards, but it wasn’t until about half past five that I was finally on my way again.

That entire afternoon, folks in the office were trying to stay in touch with me. Of course I didn’t know it at the time because I had no cell service. Even if I had known, I’d been too busy – at least after the tow arrived – to respond. The message that finally did come through was, ‘just come on back.’

This was my worst day as a UPS driver. I felt like a complete failure. I had to drive all 50 miles back to the building and write ‘E.C.’ on all the dozens of packages I hadn’t delivered because I was too busy getting stuck and then unstuck.

But that’s the way this job – and life – goes sometimes. You can’t embark on a hero’s journey without leaving home base. Nothing ventured, nothing gained.

And on this particular day, like the Apollo 13 mission, the hero’s journey is successful simply by virtue of returning safely. No damage to the vehicle or other property. No injuries or loss of life. No costs incurred other than the tow and my lost time.

And now here I am. I lived to tell the tale.

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

President Theodore Roosevelt, from a speech titled Citizenship in a Republic, April 23, 1910