The Brackendale General Store, Post Office and café have long been the heart of Brackendale.
But it's people like Joyce Berg that make that heart beat.
Berg, 63, retired from the Brackendale Post Office Tuesday (Aug. 31) after nearly 27 years. But for her, the small-town feel of the Post Office represents more than a job - it's been home, literally and figuratively, for her and her family for nearly three decades.
Until last year, she and her husband Bill owned the historic building, home of Brackendale's commercial centre.
In that time, she's seen her little post office grow from 150 boxes to more than 500 and they've seen the community triple in size along the way.
But through it all, one thing has remained: her love for her community.
"I'll never move," she says. "They'll take me out in a box."
Joyce and Bill came to Squamish from Port Coquitlam, where they worked together at a bag-making factory.
Like so many, they started as tourists, coming up from the city to go camping in Lillooet.
"Every time we passed by, Bill would say 'This is such a fine place. We should buy a little store up here'," she recalls. "Every year he'd say that and I finally told him he should get off the pot or"
They first looked at stores in Pemberton before discovering the Brackendale store/café/ post office combination and buying it from Mr. Spence.
Saying they'd love to run a little store was a lot different from doing it - especially for two people with no retail experience whatsoever.
The couple worked long hours, with Joyce finishing a shift at the post office and moving to the café or store for a second shift. They had to learn the ropes by trial and error and slept in the back of the store for more than a year while they waited for one of the suites above the store to become available.
"We can laugh at it now, but it wasn't funny then," Joyce says.
The warm welcome of the close-knit community was a help. Joyce recalls that the Squamish Nation people from the Squamish Valley and Axen Road reserves were "just amazing".
When they first came, the post office was actually part of the store itself, while the café contained Brackendale's only laundromat. A feed lot for the community's remaining farmers and horse enthusiasts outside completed the complex.
The feed lot was the first to go when one day Joyce found her exhausted husband lying outside beside the feed after trying to handle a particularly large shipment.
The café's primary clientele at the time were truckers along Government Road, which at the time was the Sea to Sky Highway. The logging trucks would place their orders by honking their horns on their way up. Joyce got to know the individual sounds of their horns and would have their orders ready to pick up by the time they arrived.
While they were "very glad" to see the new highway come in, they did miss the truckers, some of who would still come off the main highway to grab their favourite burger.
The café was also home to the local decision-makers, naturally.
"We used to have what we'd call 'Fossil Hour' where all the fossil would line up at this long table, have coffee and fix all the problems in Brackendale," she says dryly.
Joyce's familiarity with the faces in her community developed over time into a makeshift emergency warning system. If one of her regular older customers didn't show up for a few days, she would call to check on them.
She recalls one customer who lived right across from the post office who would check her mail twice a day. When she didn't show up for a couple of days, Joyce knocked on the door, but got no answer. She called the police, who tracked the woman down at her son's house in Victoria.
"She was mad, but her son was relieved I was looking out for her," says Joyce.
"Now she tells the girls 'Now you tell Joyce I'm going away or she'll call the police'."
Naturally, Joyce was also at the forefront of the many struggles to keep her community's post office alive.
"I don't know how many petitions we started," she says. "I almost got fired, but we kept our post office."
Joyce says above all, she will miss being at the centre of her community and a part of their lives.
"I will miss everyone so much," she says. "There's The Whistler - that's Red Grant. I know it's him before he hits the box. And Mr. Douglas - he calls everyone 'Cuz' because he doesn't know their name. Especially I'm going to miss the rogue - Thor, I mean - even though I see him all the time.
"Tell 'em thanks a million for being there and I'm gonna miss 'em bunches."
