An era has ended: The Cima, California Post Office — Zip Code 92323 — has closed down permanently.
The Cima PO was established in 1904, mainly to serve the railroad workers and ranchers in the area. It was about the funkiest public service buiilding I’ve ever been in, and I used to live in Buffalo. Last year the temporary postmistress — after finding out that I wasn’t going to apply for her job, though she’d urged me to — showed The Raven and me some of the conditions there. Previous staff had been less than aggressive in cleaning and maintaining the place, and desk drawers were filled to overflowing with rodentially chewed paper and, well, other evidence of decades-long nesting. You could see the hantavirus coming off the stuff in waves.
Further, there were no sanitary facilities there for postal workers’ use. (Unlike packrats, USPS staff are forbidden to use desk drawers for that purpose.) And so in January or so, the USPS closed the Post Office there on a temporary basis while they rehabbed the building, with open hours limited to two hours on Tuesday and two more on Friday.
As you might imagine, this posed some inconvenience to boxholders who had to come in from Los Angeles to pick up their mail. Fortunately, they held the accumulating contents of P.O. Box 43 and shipped everything to me last week with an explanatory note, which is how I found out.
I’m not sure what prompted the decision to make the closure permanent, whether it was reflection on the declining local population or increased costs or unanticipated difficulties in rehabilitating the building. Locals who can prove they’re locals will get mailboxes along the road somewhere nearby. In January, I spoke with the new owners of the adjacent General Store, and at that point they seemed enthusiastic about improving the place. A lot can happen in six months, though. I don’t know.
The roads that converge on Cima weren’t paved until the 1970s. Former Postmaster — and local conservative gadfly — Bob Ausmus campaigned hard to get phone lines run to town, repeating to anyone who’d listen that public safety was at issue. He proved his own point, dying of a heart attack in the Cima Store in 1990, a few months before phone service reached Cima. His widow Irene, another postmaster, was the first local I met thereabouts, and was unfailingly polite and gracious despite our marked political differences. (She’d been a key figure in opposing the establishment of the Mojave National Preserve, for example.)
I spent a lot of time in the 1990s and early 2000s imagining myself with a Cima, CA address. I rented a P.O. box there almost exactly a year ago. My driver’s license reads “P.O. Box 43, Cima CA 92323,” and it will until 2015, so that’s some consolation.
I am going to miss picking my mail up there, though, if only for the local color.
1 comment on "Cima Post Office, RIP"
aw.