Gene Dalton | The Roanoke Times

Dot Quiesenberry double checks addresses on all the mail to make sure she doesn't give someone the wrong mail.

Dot Quesenberry’s career

• When it started: 1966
• How it started: Quesenberry began as a substitute carrier for Earl Gallimore. After his retirement, she made a bid for the route and became a U.S. Postal Service contract carrier.
• Annual working hours: 1,700
• Annual mileage: 14,729
• Mailboxes on route: 163
• Funniest job incident: “Me and Terri got stuck going down a hill. We finally dug it out. I had a shovel.”
• How it has changed: “The volume of our mail right now is the highest it’s ever been. We’ve had junk mail as long as I can remember — but not as much. Used to be once a month. Now it’s two or three times a week.”

It’s hard for Dot Quesenberry to keep her truck clean when a good part of her route is along dirt and gravel roads.

Dot Quesenberry talks with Patricia Damron, who was waiting at the mailbox for her mail.

Dot Quiesenberry stretches across her truck to close a mailbox.

With her Ford Ranger full of mail, Dot Quiesenberry heads out Virginia 693.

HIWASSEE -- Dot Quesenberry's Ford Ranger is covered with dust.

The dust forms patterns on the red paint that circle back and forth around the cab.

The passenger seat is piled with boxes, envelopes, magazines and letters. A Sierra Mist sweats in the console.

Quesenberry slips the key into the ignition and the pickup roars to life.

Off she goes, steering the Ranger out of the Hiwassee Post Office parking lot and onto Julia Simpkins Road.

Winding, curving, snaking past Claytor Lake, past trailers and cabins and houses on stilts, Quesenberry brakes, stops, stretches her arm out the passenger window, snaps open a mailbox, pops in the mail, steps on the gas.

Over and over. Stop, start. Stop, start.

Oops -- an overturned trash can. Swerve, straighten, stop, start.

Into Allisonia, the little Pulaski County community where U.S. flags fly from poles and white churches pose for a picturesque scene.

Here waits J.C. Hendrix in his blue jeans and boots. A plastic hearing aid peeps from his ear. He wears a blue cap.

Spying the dust cloud surrounding Quesenberry's Ranger, Hendrix marches toward his mailbox, shoulders forward.

"You going on vacation?" Quesenberry hollers over the purr of the engine as she hands Hendrix his mail.

The man explains that he's going to visit a friend in Florida.

"He used to live behind us in Dugspur," he says.

Quesenberry smiles, wishes Hendrix a good trip and hits the gas again.

For the past 41 years, this 71-year-old grandmother has battled the elements to make sure Pulaski County's rural residents get their fashion catalogs, their electric bills, their tax returns, their birthday greetings.

On March 31, she decided it was time to quit.

"I figured at 71 years old if I was ever going to stay at home, I needed to," she reasoned. "But I'm not going to sit down."

"I can't."

End of an era

Sandra Farris is 51 now and lives on the Carroll County side of Quesenberry's route.

But she still remembers the summers of her childhood when she would leave the hubbub of Chesapeake and ascend the hills of Southwest Virginia. Extended visits to her grandparents' country house etched tranquil images in her memory.

Most days, Farris recalled, Quesenberry was the only visitor to the house.

"Being a city girl, I wasn't used to the quiet. She was the highlight of my day when she would roll up to that mailbox," Farris said. "She was always kind to me, and she would always toot the horn as she went back down the road."

Farris' aunt, Willow Dean Zschernig, called Quesenberry's retirement "an end of an era."

"I'll be sad to see it come to an end," said Zschernig, explaining that Quesenberry's attitude about her work was reminiscent of "the olden days."

Quesenberry, who lives in Allisonia with the man she married 54 years ago, has a reputation as a good Samaritan.

"Over the years, she has helped a lot of people -- from taking groceries to elderly patrons to paying that few extra cents for a letter to go through," said her daughter Denna Snead. Snead and her older sister, Rhoda Quesenberry, have tried for years to get their mother to retire.

"She continued to work six days a week until about a year ago," Snead explained. "This is in addition to being the primary caretaker of my father, who has been ill for several years."

"Well, I do a lot," Quesenberry admitted, acknowledging that her husband, Sanford, is confined to a wheelchair because of heart problems.

"I take care of my old people," she added. "That's the only thing I hate about retiring."

Head of the Hiwassee post office, Terri Bradley, said she often has to chastise Quesenberry for rushing out of the house before she's put together.

"She's always early. I used to have to comb her hair when she came to work. I'd have to tie her shoes."

Bradley said she has never scolded Quesenberry for bringing in food, though.

"Oh, my god, she can cook! I think I have chocolate cupcakes over there now. ... The best is bologna sandwiches. Nobody makes them like Dot. I don't even like bologna, but I like Dot's. It's just her touch."

Bradley still hasn't been able to convince Quesenberry that it's not part of her job to take money from her own purse to cover "postage due." As a contract carrier, Quesenberry doesn't earn as much money as U.S. Postal Service employees, nor does she enjoy the same benefits.

"But she'd rather do that than tell people they owed money," Bradley said of Quesenberry's beneficence.

The mail must go on

Rain, snow, sleet and hail never stopped Quesenberry from delivering the mail. Being stuck between two collapsed bridges did.

On April 22, 1992, heavy rains washed out one of the bridges crossing Big Reed Island Creek into Allisonia. Quesenberry loaded her mail and mapped out a detour around a mountain so she could deliver to customers on the other side of the bridge.

Midway through her shift, however, she had to phone the office.

"The bridge at Reno's store fell in with a C&P Telephone truck on it," she informed Bradley. "No one is hurt, but I'm stuck between the two collapsed bridges."

Fortunately, Quesenberry's house was stuck between the bridges, too. She called it a day, went home and resumed delivery the next day.

Because of temporary repairs to the first bridge, she was able to forge ahead.

But it took a year to replace the second bridge.

Despite the 1992 incident and literally thousands of days of crawling from a warm bed to scrape ice from a windshield, of grinding through snow and slush and mud, of swatting sweat bees and mosquitoes in the glaring sun, Quesenberry said she has no regrets about her life as a mail carrier.

"No, I've enjoyed working all the time," she said. "I really have."

When she started her route, a postage stamp was less than a nickel.

"It's 39 cents now. First of May, it'll be 41 cents," she said. "That's why I don't send cards. I just call."

When she started her route, she also packed some heat.

"I've seen a lot of snakes -- copperheads, rattlesnakes. I killed a lot of them but then they stopped us from carrying guns. I could take a pistol and shoot a snake's head off. But I couldn't shoot the side of a barn now."

At 71, Quesenberry said it's time to let someone else pop the flashing red light on top of her truck, twine her way up Rockhouse Hill's precipitous path and dodge snakes, deer, 'possums and dogs.

"I've never been dog bit," she said with just a hint of smugness.

But Quesenberry makes no bones about it. There are some things she will miss.

A warm spring day. The water shimmering in Little Reed Creek. Horses grazing in fields framed by majestic mountains. An old, arthritic dog rising to greet the cloud of dust stirred by a red Ford Ranger with a sign on its rear:

"Frequent Stops. U.S. Mail."