Left: Bari in the wee Tll.aal Tlell Post Office | PC: Carol Bulford / Right: Bari and her dog Rona at the Misty Meadows Campground longhouse | PC: Shellene Patience

Only for a week. That’s how long Bari Williams agreed, on a whim, to work as postmistress in Tll.aal Tlell back in 1989. She didn’t know a thing about mail sorting, but she was good with people and she had management skills. She did the job so well, in fact, that the week became a month, and then a year, and finally a third of a century until her retirement this spring.

“I got three half-days training and I was left on my own,” she says, “and I wound up staying for 33 years.”

For Bari, the job became much more than just handling mail and parcels. She became the social nexus of the community. A visit to the post office became a special event. “Picking up mail was always about a short visit,” said one of Bari’s customers, Kris Leach. “Living in Tlell, sometimes she was the only person you’d talk to all day and she never failed to make me feel good.”

No service was too small or unimportant. Veronika Higlister remembers how Bari gave her colourful paperclips to brighten up her letters to her now-husband.

In theory, the advent of social media - Facebook, Twitter, Instagram - was supposed to lighten the workload on the people who work as mail handlers. After all, who writes letters anymore? But for Bari, things only got busier. She started with 62 mailboxes and that number grew to 112 over the years. Her work week swelled from 15 to 22 hours. Occasionally, the flow of parcels threatened to overwhelm the small workspace – one of the smallest post offices in BC.

In the process, she says of her customers, “I spoiled them terribly.”

She called people to come and pick up their live plants before they wilted. “And half the people would forget their mailbox keys.” And there were those awkward bulky items, like tires and fencing that she had to remind people to collect.

It is interesting to note that in the time Bari has been the postmistress, the little Tlellian post office has moved five times. It started where the Crow’s Nest Café and Country Store is now, but it was situated at the end of the building looking over the highway. Then it moved to the entrance of Mackay’s Riverworks Farm. After that it called the Tlell Fire Hall home. Then, back to the Crow’s Nest where it is now (at the time of writing) and soon it will move to the new, improved and much larger, separate building behind the store.

And then there were Bari’s extracurricular activities, like after-hours childcare. Which had its own challenges. Like the time the two Leach boys knocked over a bird cage and released the pet cockatiel, and Bari clambered over furniture to rescue it. “They were impressed when it bit her and she didn’t let go,” recalls their mom.

Another mom, Andrea Robyn Barker, remembers how “Bari didn’t just babysit Grey from age two to five; she took them on adventures, beach walks and helped teach compassion and love for animals.”

Bari moved to Haida Gwaii from the mainland village of Kispiox in the early ‘80s. Her cousin and his wife lived here, and after a short visit with them, she went home, picked up her truck and her dog, and moved to Tll.aal Tlell. “It just smelled the way home should smell . . . the tidal waters, and it felt like I belonged. And I love it, it’s so beautiful.”

Her first “home” was the beach. “It was quite an adventure,” Bari shares. “I lived in a 20-foot trailer on the beach in Tlell for a while. There was a little community of us . . . three little trailers and a bus. It was great. I just felt I fit in here.”

It didn’t take long for Bari to begin playing an active role in the community. For one thing, she joined the Tll.aal Tlell’s Volunteer Firemen’s Association. There were no fires to fight, but she served as the Executive Director and did all their bookkeeping and management. She held that firehall job for about 25 years, and it overlapped with her position as postmistress.

It’s an indication of her closeness to the community that during those early years she knew everybody by only their first names. “I didn’t know anybody’s last name until I started at the post office!” she says with a laugh.

Bari is grateful for all the support, emotional and financial, she received from the community during hard times. Some years ago, while childcaring, she slipped on some wet wood and shattered her leg. “As there was nobody around, I had to strap the little girl I was caring for into the car seat of my car and then drive to a friend’s place with a broken leg. I did more damage doing that.”

Three operations later, doctors fused her ankle. Friends and neighbors were a great help during her convalescence.

“I have a little problem with walking very far but . . . I go out to Misty Meadows to the longhouse there and walk out to the beach.” Her companion is a still-energetic 13-year-old dog named Rona who makes her laugh with her antics.

Bari plans a quiet restful retirement — baking, cooking, daily walks and catching up on her reading. “I’m a really big homebody. I love to be home.” She also says she was happy to retire at the start of the gardening season. When asked what she will miss most from her postmistress years, she answers without hesitation: “The people.”