My Father vs. Wisteria Drive

Once upon a time, I lived on a street called Wisteria Drive. (Long before the Housewives ever got Desperate) It was sort of curvy, emptying out into a long straightaway. The curve reached sharpest right around our mailbox. And a couple of times a year, some lousy driver would come along and wipe out the mailbox. The annoying thing is that they never came to the door and offered to make amends, they just kept going.

And this injustice became a point of pride for my father.

The first few mailboxes were generic things of wood and plastic. Virtually any car could knock them over with minimal damage. So we began putting the mailboxes on stronger posts. Much stronger posts...

One of the earliest "car resistant" designs involved putting the post in a concrete base. This was good. Instead of merely scratching someone's bumper, we were now collecting parking lights.

But it wasn't enough.

Dad wanted a car. He wanted the whole car. He wanted the driver to have to come to the door and beg for mercy. He wanted the bumper stuffed and mounted over the fireplace.

So we pulled out the cement. It wasn't providing enough resistance, and it was making replacing the post much more difficult.

Instead, we went from traditional 4x4 lumber to pressure treated 8x8 timbers. It's twice as thick, and weighs a ton. It's not unlike hitting a full grown tree. Now were were getting whole headlight assemblies. And this was good. But still not victory.

So Dad went in an entirely different direction, and took a page from the army. Yes, we became the owners of the world's first (and only) mailbox post/tank trap. (You can take Dad out of the military, but you can't take the military out of the Dad.)

The idea was that when a car hit the mailbox post, the impact would lever up an underground arm on either side of the mailbox. The arm would rise out of the ground like an undead claw and grab the car's transmission. It was the mailbox equivalent of punching the car in the groin. A car can keep going without headlights, even without a bumper, but not without a transmission.

Constructing it took a day. Installing it took another day. Testing it was impossible. A successful test would have cost us a car. We would just have to wait. And wait we did. And wait. And another car never hit the mailbox. It was like they knew about the trap.

Eventually my family moved. And years later I drove by the house again. And the tank trap post was gone. I'm curious if it ever bagged a car or not. But I'm not about to ask the current residents, "Hey, did your mailbox ever destroy a passing car?"

LM

PS. Believe it or not, had the tank trap post failed, the next one was going to be a steel I beam (think construction girder) in a wood sheath.