Hopes of a New Letter Carrier Were Crushed on a Rural Road

Mark Feest knew it was a step in the right direction when he took a temporary job last spring as a rural postal carrier in Encinitas.

Sure, it wasn’t a real job just yet--he wouldn’t receive any benefits until he was hired on full time. But it was a way out of the bartending business, the long hours on his feet with little or no job security.

And, since his wife, Cecilia, was pregnant with their first child, Feest knew he needed to make some bold stroke as family provider.

Road Was So Narrow His Wife Was Worried

So he was excited that Sunday morning as he took his wife on a tour of his first official assignment: the route he would work as a vacation replacement, part of which stretched along a busy section of Rancho Santa Fe Road in Olivenhain.

The scene, however, made Cecilia Feest uncomfortable.

“I was really nervous,” she recalled. “I was very pregnant, and I didn’t like the way people were driving too fast.

“We were in our own car, but the road was so narrow I could imagine how Mark would have to hug the curb in that postal Jeep to avoid getting hit.”

On April 11--his second day on the route and only six weeks after he started as a mailman--Feest was rammed from behind by a pickup as he sat in his vehicle in the 900 block of North Rancho Santa Fe Road.

Feest, 35, never knew what hit him. He remained unconscious for days before waking up in a hospital intensive care unit.

It was the first morning of his new life. The impact, Feest learned, had shattered the vertebrae in his back, paralyzing him from the chest down.

On Tuesday--four months after the accident--Feest left Sharp Memorial Hospital’s rehabilitation center.

Now he and his family face an abyss of uncertainty, along with the problems posed to a man in a wheelchair looking to provide for his 7-week-old daughter.

The family is living in a hotel until they find a suitable apartment, one without steps or severe turns so Feest can negotiate his wheelchair.

After looking at more than 100 places, Cecilia finally found one in Encinitas last weekend. But, when the owner learned of Feest’s wheelchair, he became concerned about the couple’s earning power and insisted on a month-to-month lease. So, the day after moving in, Cecilia moved the baby, Jenna, and their belongings back out.

“This is my worst nightmare come true,” Feest said. “I knew delivering mail was no walk in the park. But I never thought I would break a leg, much less all of this.”

Feest, a soft-spoken man with an easy smile, has hired an attorney and filed a claim against the city of Encinitas, contending that the road that robbed him of his legs is a dangerous place. The couple is also considering a suit against the driver of the pickup.

“The cars just move too quickly on that road,” Feest said. “And there’s not much shoulder room where I have to pull over, especially in that stretch of town.”

Built Decades Ago

The incident highlights a persistent problem in many North County communities: Older two-lane roads, some built decades ago with only rural vehicles in mind, cannot support today’s suburban traffic--the cars, buses, pickups, campers and postal vehicles.

In cities such as Encinitas, residents claim, the reluctance to widen existing roads stems from a fear that increased traffic from suburban shortcutters and Sunday drivers would mar the city’s small-town feel and pose a hazard to residents.

“There’s a few pockets of people who, for one reason or another, want to keep the area rural. And, to them, rural means winding country roads,” said Gerald Bode, an Olivenhain resident who has written letters to community boards about the problem. “There are a few roads out here, let me tell you, that are disasters waiting to happen.”

Bode says Rancho Santa Fe Road is one of them.

“It’s too narrow in many areas, and there’s no left-turn lanes,” he said. “It’s basically the same road as when I moved here 16 years ago. And I’m willing to bet it carries 10 to 20 times as much traffic as it did then. But, other than put up a couple of stop signs, little has been done.”

Big Question of the Day

Bill Dominguez, an executive assistant to former county Supervisor Lee Taylor, said Encinitas has had opportunities to improve its older roads.

“It was one of the big questions of the day when I left in 1979,” he said. “But there’s been such an accelerated evolution there with incorporation and such.

“The people who opposed the roads then are now the elected representatives of the area. So you can imagine why not much has been done.”

The city’s new general plan, adopted this year, precludes the building of Highway 680, which would connect Interstates 5 and 15. Encinitas has since been sued by residents in Rancho Santa Fe for the decision.

Although plans have been made to extend Leucadia Boulevard between I-5 and El Camino Real, providing another east-west artery, other streets have been declared private drives and closed off by gates, residents say.

Problem Will Get Worse

Last year, a woman sued the city after one such gate temporarily failed to open for paramedics trying to reach her injured husband, who subsequently died.

The problem will get worse. A study by the city’s general-plan consultants concludes that traffic will increase 81% by the year 2010.

City Manager Warren Shafer said the issue is that of keeping through traffic from residential areas.

“I’m sure there are roads in the community that are seeing a lot more traffic than they have in the past,” he said. “That raises people’s concerns that widening those roads would only bring more traffic.

“And you have to answer the question, ‘What volume of traffic do you want on them?’ ”

The stretch of Rancho Santa Fe Road through Olivenhain, where Feest’s accident occurred, doesn’t seem to be a problem, Shafer said.

Traveling Too Fast?

“The traffic there isn’t beyond the service capabilities of the road, and that’s what traffic engineers look for,” he said. “It sounds to me like there were other factors involved in the accident.”

Police say the pickup was traveling too fast for road conditions.

Feest says that, since the accident, at least two mailboxes near the scene have been moved back from the road.

Ken Boyd, a spokesman for the U.S. Postal Service in San Diego, said the agency has embarked on a nationwide program to relocate dangerous mailboxes in rural areas.

Between October, 1987, and October, 1988, 11 postal carriers died nationwide out of a total of 18,315 accidents involving postal vehicles. During that time, mailmen drove more than 548 million miles, Boyd said.

“In some cases, what can you do?” he said. “We have driver training courses and supervisors on the street who surreptitiously observe workers to see if they’re following the rules. But what can you do about the other guy?”

Accident Hit Home

Since the accident, friends and co-workers of Mark and Cecilia Feest have raised thousands of dollars through collections at work and benefits at local bars.

Although much of Feest’s $250,000 hospital bill has been covered by worker’s compensation, the Feests have no long-term insurance policy through the Postal Service.

“The accident really hit everyone here, and we’ve tried to show our support,” said Kristy Kremer, acting postmaster in Encinitas. “Everyone in the post office has been a carrier and has been exposed to the dangers. So they can relate to what happened to Mark. Because it could have been them.”

Feest has given up asking himself why it happened to him.

“It’s such a futile question; it can never be answered,” he said. “I can’t come to accept it. I just have to deal with it. But I still tell myself that, if I’d just left a little bit sooner that day--or even later--I wouldn’t have been there when that truck went by.”

Lucky to Be Alive

Doctors tell him he’s lucky to be alive. For a while, though, he didn’t think so.

Since he has little control of his trunk muscles--which would allow him to lean forward without falling--he wonders whether he’ll ever be able to return to even an office job.

“I’ve seen a lot of people in the hospital worse off than I am,” he said. “It’s a sad consequence, but it keeps me going. I still have my arms and I can hold Jenna and hug Ceci. And that means a lot.”

Other wheelchair patients have offered Feest inspiration. And, since his daughter was born at Sharp, Feest was able to be in the delivery room during her birth, holding his wife’s hand.

“After Jenna was born, Mark and his friends from the rehab center would wheel down every day to see her and hold her,” Cecilia said. “I know it meant a lot to him.”

“The toughest thing for me is Jenna,” Feest said, tears in his eyes as he held his daughter. “How can I help out? . . . What kind of father am I going to be?”