The Auction Laughed at the $15 He Paid for a Surveyor's Soldered Shut Mailbox. He Melted It Open

On Saturday the twenty first of May, 2016, at the spring consignment auction on the Tamarack County fairgrounds in Wisconsin, lot two hundred and twelve was a mailbox. A big black steel rural mailbox, still bolted to its cedar post, the post still standing in its concrete, set upright on the wet grass with four sawn oak blocks round it. Its red flag was up. It had been up for thirty four years. And the door did not open. Somebody had run a seam of solder all the way round it. A retired mail carrier who had driven past that flag for eleven and a half years priced it out loud for the crowd. A new box was nineteen dollars. The concrete would cost twenty five at the rubble pit. Fifteen and twenty five is forty, more than twice a new box, and the new box had a door. Then he told them what was in it. Mice, a seed catalog and wet. A plumber named Russell Wojahn paid fifteen dollars, because he could read solder, and because the loader had cracked the seam across the top of the door that morning and there was waxed paper in the gap. He melted it open that evening with a propane torch, a heat shield and a wet rag, with thirty degrees between melting the solder and setting fire to whatever was behind it. Inside were forty four pocket books, and a tag in pencil that said who they were for. This is the story of a county surveyor who dug for more than twelve hundred corners and wrote down every one, of the county that refused his books for nothing, of a lawsuit over two grain bins and a fence that had stood since 1911, and of a cold October morning at a gravel crossroads when a surveyor left his instruments in the truck, two steel tapes crossed over a single spot, and a spade rang on stone thirty four inches down.