Postal worker rescues injured woman on road

Cay Dee Reynolds sees a lot of unusual things on her daily route as a mail carrier.

She’s seen bear, elk, moose — all kinds of critters in 15 years of doing her rural route on the outskirts of Bigfork. She doesn’t often rescue people.

But that’s what she did when she recently found a 70-year-old woman lying in the road near the woman’s mailbox on Bear Creek. The woman had fallen and broken her ankle and could not walk. “She was just sitting there waving when I found her,” Reynolds said. The woman had tried crawling back to her house, but couldn’t make it.  Reynolds put her coat on the woman, who was nearly hypothermic, and warmed her up.

It’s not often that being late is a good thing for a mail carrier, but on this day, it was. If Reynolds had been earlier on the route, she might not have found the woman, who was alone on a quiet stretch of dirt road. “Thank God, or I would have missed her,” Reynolds said. “She was so cold.” The woman had been on the ground for two hours when Reynolds found her. 

“You never know what you’re going to see,” she added. “But I didn’t expect to see a little old lady lying on the ground with her dog.”

For people who live in remote, rural areas, mail carriers are sometimes peoples’ only human link to the outside world. Mail had begun to stack up in one man’s mailbox, and it was Reynolds who alerted authorities. They found the man deceased. “I get to know their routines,” she said.

Most mailboxes in rural Bigfork are away from peoples’ homes. Reynolds said if this woman had had her phone, she could have called emergency personnel. “People need to take their phones with them when they go to the mailbox,” Reynolds said.