BY DAVE JAMIESON
ILLUSTRATION BY OLIVER MUNDAY
THE POST
OFFICE
in Syria, Va., is pretty easy to miss,
but then so is the village of Syria
itself. Lying in the eastern foothills of the Shenandoah mountains,
about 90 miles from Washington,
DC, Syria has just a few hundred
residents, mostly natives and recent retirees. The village has no
stop lights and one general store, the Syria Mercantile Company,
which serves as a grocer, a hunting-and-fishing outfitter and a
meeting ground for town gossip. ¶ Inside, near the cash register
up front, a single employee of the U.S.Postal Service helms a tiny,
wood-paneled office about the size of a generous walk-in closet.
Except for when it was briefly
displaced after a pair of long-ago
fires, the post office has occupied
this same spot inside the general
store since 1898, according to Jim
Graves, the general store’s owner.
In a village where many residents
still don’t have internet access, the
Syria post office — like so many
post offices around the country —
remains not only one of the few
fixtures in town, but also a primary
link to the outside world.
So it came as a great shock
when the postal service told residents of Syria last year that the
small outpost would soon be clos-
ing, the victim of budget cuts emanating from Washington.
“The rural area has no say-so,”
says Graves, whose family has for
generations run Syria Mercantile
as well as Graves Mountain Lodge,
a resort that’s the largest business
in town. “When you get up there
to D.C., those people up there
have no concept of what’s in a rural area... They have no idea.”
At all levels of government, budget cuts are hacking at core services that we’ve long took for granted,
from fire departments to public
transportation, and the postal service is no different. The agency has
been struggling to get its budget in
order and climb out of the red. It
is currently facing a crisis, having