Most of the places I had been delivering in had a population of a couple thousand, with Helenville on the low side with only about 245 people, and Brookfield literally on the opposite side with a population of 38,626. Occasionally, my routes would have me touch the outskirts of Brookfield, but I never got far into the city itself.

In Helenville, the silence was audible. It was like I could feel the presence of farmers who lived there a century earlier as the atmosphere hadn’t changed heavily since then. Sometimes I felt something strange, like something just wasn’t right, or something sinister was going on. In those wide open spaces that are sparsely populated, who knows what happens there sometimes? There could be a cult that has sacrifices around a bonfire deep in the woods every Thursday night and who would know?

Conversely, there was a Catholic school in Watertown that had completely the opposite atmosphere. Watertown was as far west as any place I had ever delivered to and had only been there a few times. One day they had me deliver about 30 packages to the Catholic school, and all the children there gave off such a pure and innocent energy. Some environments I’ve been in during my life had me feeling like a saint, but this school made me feel like the Devil in comparison. That’s always been the problem with the balance of good and evil. Many people want to live a virtuous life, but sometimes that makes them easy prey to someone who doesn’t abide by that philosophy, which can easily lead to victimhood, manipulation, and corruption.

This school had such a strong concentration of purity that I hadn’t seen anywhere else before, and all it would take would be one bad apple to spoil the whole bunch. A larger city would swallow up such innocence in a hurry like it never existed; someway, somehow. Justice, in its many forms, from human to divine, is the fulcrum between good and evil. It’s how both have managed to exist in this world in equal amounts since the beginning of history, since nothing is truly created nor destroyed. This Catholic school reminded me of all of the flaws of modern society and how it may be slowly contributing to the fall of civilization, just as has happened before in the past. But how to maintain such a puritanical lifestyle without isolating oneself from the rest of the world? That’s my question.

Many drivers cycled in and out of our company, but there were always a few core members. A Milwaukeean named Michael was the number one in charge. His presence was as constant as an oak tree. He was a little bit quiet and emotionally distant, but if he had an issue with someone’s behavior, he’d let them know. Just below him in rank was Dylan. He was from rural Wisconsin and was as laid back of a supervisor as one could possibly find. A person would have to mess up badly to get him heated, which I’ve never seen before. Right after Dylan was Tonya. She was raised on a farm in Florida and had a thick country accent. Tonya was kind of the momma bear of the company. She had everyone’s backs, but she would get on people for messing up equally. She was the one who would talk to everyone about their driving performance when they returned to the office in the evening.

There were a dozen or so other drivers and lead drivers who were pretty constant, but the rest changed out frequently. Some people didn’t want to work in the cold, while some people didn’t want to work in the heat. Once in a while, even some of our longtime veterans would drop out unexpectedly. A 21 year old named Treena who became a lead driver and was always a soldier about working, one day just decided she wasn’t going to come in without warning and never came back. Another girl named Shastina seemed like she was going to be the last woman standing and got injured and then stopped returning calls asking when she’d be back. It was really hard to predict when we were going to lose people, but the managers were constantly hiring.

Not that race and nationality are the most important indicators of who someone is, but some people occasionally make you wonder, especially when you’ve never seen anyone quite like them before. There was one young man probably in his low to mid-twenties who made me curious. If I had to guess, I’d guess he was half German, half Puerto Rican. He had kind of a lone-wolf energy, and it was confirmed when every time I asked him if he wanted help loading boxes inside the warehouse and he’d always politely refuse. He also seemed like someone you didn’t want to mess with. He was probably the most “hood” out of all of us, even though there were some contenders among us. He had the braids, the tattoos, and he even had a silver grill in his mouth sometimes. I wasn’t even in the running, as I was only about 3 percent hood after being out of the game so long. Even at my peak, I was probably only ever about 34 percent hood if even that.

It’s not always easy to learn the names of the other employees because of the high turnover rate, but also because we didn’t have many chances to speak to each other during the week. While the young man projected an independent and “Don’t bother me” kind of energy, he also had a much lighter side to him as well. One night when I finished driving for the evening and came back to turn in my driver’s bag to Tonya, the young man was in line in front of me to talk to her. Since we are all on camera at all times, we are also recorded when the camera detects that we are messing up. Tonya was getting on him about not buckling up his seatbelt and played the video. In the video, you see him holding the seat belt in front of his chest without buckling it as he was driving, looking left and right past the camera that hangs down near the middle of the windshield, bouncing around in his seat. The camera detected he wasn’t wearing his seat belt properly. We all had a big laugh about that. We also had another laugh on a different day when he told us that some drivers, in order to fool the camera when they drive through a red light, spray their windshield wiper fluid to keep the camera from seeing the red light clearly.

It took some adjustment to get used to driving in a city again after being out in the country for a year. There was more construction, more cars driving, and more cars parked. There were also more apartments, which every driver hated because you usually have multiple orders for each stop and sometimes have to deliver to each person’s door. The one good thing was that there wasn’t as much drive time between stops, as the houses were closer together, and I’d usually not have to drive between towns.

One of the main roads I would have to deliver around was Arcadian Avenue, the same road that Annie and Nicole’s bar was on, but on the other side of the city from where they were. In this area, it was under construction, and my route zigzagged on all the crossing streets, so I’d have to take a detour every time I wanted to cross the road, which would add at least an extra 20 minutes to my day. But fortunately, there was always a porta-potty on Arcadian for the construction workers. I, as I’m sure many other drivers, have had some close instances about finding restrooms. Some of our employees have even used bottles, and unfortunately, left them in the vans to be discovered by other drivers at times. “What’s this? Lemonade?” *sniff sniff* I could just imagine the reactions of the drivers who had to experience that, but am grateful I never went through it myself.

Despite being such a relatively small city compared to a place like Madison, there seemed to be some characters in Waukesha. One afternoon I was making a U-turn on a small dead end street, and I was coming close to one of the mailboxes on the street. A small voice inside my head said, “Go ahead and hit it. Who cares?” The other voice, the voice that won, told me to stop. Just as I stopped, I noticed there was writing on the front of the mailbox. I looked closer through the windshield and read what was written.

“Don’t hit my s*** :).”

It was just as vulgar as it was cute, somehow. I couldn’t help feeling called out.

Another day I was delivering to a duplex in a cul de sac and a man was throwing a football with his kids in the driveway at the stop. As I was walking up to the front door with the package the man said, “You’re gonna catch this football before you leave.”

“OK,” I said.