"I'm really worried about what that will do to our hours and what that will mean for accurately sorting mail," said Selness as he reads each address on envelopes he pulls from a large sack and quickly turns from side to side, sliding the mail into racks of cubbyholes. "People get can get real mad about that sort of stuff, about their mail."
How the mail gets to the post office and into mailboxes might be a collection of minor details to most folks, but to many rural mail carriers, their duties are in keeping with history and a tradition of rural living.
"If we weren't out here doing this," said Bob Garvin, 77, who has delivered rural mail near Elroy, Wis., for nearly 60 years, "people would have locked boxes downtown. We are keeping a tradition going."
Garvin drives a 100-mile route past cemeteries, abandoned farmhouses and cornfields. He said he plans to retire next year.
It is easy to drive country roads, he said, but it is tiring stretching across his car from the driver's seat and out the window to reach the mailboxes at each of his 200 stops.
In Spring Grove, Selness, whose father was a clerk in the same post office in the 1970s, started delivering mail 25 years ago and has no plans to stop soon. Selness has one of the best-paying jobs that come with full benefits; he earns about $50,000 a year.
Each morning, Selness spends two hours sorting and packing mail into his pickup truck. He sets a pile of mail next to him. Packages go behind his seat or between his legs.
For hours, he speeds along gravel and dirt roads that are usually only as wide as one car. But 15 miles out from the nearest town, in cow country, driving around can be an adventure.
Although city carriers are known for battling dogs, rain and sleet to deliver letters, Selness and other rural carriers pride themselves in fighting all that, plus snowdrifts and cow crossings.
Selness has dug himself -- and other carriers -- out of deep snow and mud several times along his 102-mile route. (The nation's longest route is about 175 miles in Lamont, Okla.) "I once was in mud so deep, it was up my leg, and we couldn't get the jack under the truck," he said. "But I tell you, I'd rather be driving in this stuff and on ice than walking it like they do in the cities."
Selness's partner, Ford Brevig, 56, covers 94 miles of rugged roads, not counting the three extra miles he has had to drive this year to bypass a broken bridge.
For 15 years, Brevig worked as a part-time carrier, earning about $20,000 a year, while he juggled jobs as a farm service agent and raising cattle. Even though he became a full-time carrier in August and his salary was doubled, he still runs a small karaoke business on the side.
Carriers can stay on rural routes for years, and it is not unusual to find some who stay for decades. Over time, they all gather stories about country murders, hermits, car crashes and messy housekeepers and share them, sometimes with a bit of hyperbole.
But occasionally the stories are true and more personal, such as the time Brevig found a woman lying in her yard here as he delivered mail. "I was just driving by, and I saw her there; you could barely see her," he said. "I just stopped to check it out."
She had a broken hip, he suspected, and he called for help, got her a blanket and continued on his route after paramedics arrived.
Now, sometimes she leaves treats for him in her mailbox: chocolate or something else sweet. "There's just nothing that can pay me like the post office does," Brevig said, "but, I guess, more than that, I just like being able to serve."
In other cases, it is the carrier's quirky character that ends up becoming stories.
In Elroy, all carriers -- and many residents -- know about Bernard Shaker, now retired from the postal service.
A dozen years ago, he uprooted more than 200 mailboxes on his route and used his own money to plant freshly painted posts and new mailboxes, all set level with his passenger-side window.
So the story goes, Shaker told people that in all his years he never minded driving in snow or on ice -- he just did not like that each mailbox was a different height.
