Kevin Lungren thought it was pretty funny when a car decided to drive itself into the mailbox outside his office in Freeland.

“It was like a jousting match between the car and the mailbox,” said Lungren, who’s a financial adviser at Edward Jones Investment.

And apparently the mailbox won.

“The mailbox basically went into the car,” he said.

The Island County Sheriff’s Office explained that an elderly woman stopped to go shopping at Payless and failed to put her 1997 Honda Accord station wagon in park.

“Gravity took over and it rolled out of the lot and struck the mailbox,” the sheriff’s spokesman explained.

Lungren said he was trying to figure out how someone could have managed to back into his mailbox when he realized nobody was inside the car.

The problem for responders was that nobody was able to locate the car’s owner for about an hour, Lungren said. The little incident snarled traffic pretty good, at least by Freeland standards, he said.

Eventually the woman was found, and she was able to move the car.

Lungren credits his friend John Shinneman with the stoutness of the mailbox; Shinneman has a habit of building things stronger than they need to be.

“’Skookum’ is his word for it,” Lungren said. “He certainly built my mailbox to his skookum standards.”