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The Unorganized Township of Bootstuck
The Unorganized Township of Bootstuck is a documentary-style audio descent into a place that shouldn't exist—but very much insists that it does.
Once a forgotten military outpost in the depths of Northern Ontario, Bootstuck has taken on a life of its own. Discovered only through a pile of mislabeled cassette tapes at a Sudbury garage sale, the story of Bootstuck slowly unravels through scattered interviews, cryptic clues, and increasingly bizarre residents. The deeper you listen, the more you realize — this isn't just a town. It's a puzzle. And somewhere in that puzzle?
A plane crash that changed everything.
Somewhere between folklore, found audio, and fever dream, Bootstuck blurs the line between documentary and delusion—offering listeners a place to get lost in, over and over again.
The Unorganized Township of Bootstuck
TAPE 48 - Dave Needs Peanuts
The recording begins with confusion over who’s actually speaking—Dave has stepped away to rescue yet another burned pot of porridge, leaving the conversation in the hands of Hat Guy. What follows is an increasingly unhelpful brainstorming session about Post-it notes. Dave has been scattering them across fields, hoping the mysterious “Dropbox guy” might deliver peanuts. Suggestions arise that maybe, instead of begging for legumes, they could use the notes to ask where they actually are. Caleb is promptly assigned to line up the stickies into a giant field-wide message.
From there, matters only worsen. The townsfolk proudly explain their method of bottling water in the well itself, forcing anyone thirsty to rappel forty feet down. A basket-and-rope system is dismissed outright as too complicated. The sheds of Bootstuck also come under discussion: there’s the “two by four” shed (literally two feet by four feet), the massive hangar-like shed, and, of course, the “shed shed”—a shed specifically designed to store other sheds, mostly to keep the squirrels out.
By the end of the tape, the documenteur audibly falters, questioning the point of it all. The patience that once carried him through tales of waving systems and porridge disasters is beginning to fray. Bootstuck, it seems, is not just an archive of absurdity—it’s a test of endurance.
www.bootstuck.com
What? Sorry, hang on, you're cut. Yep. There you are.
Speaker 02:Hang on.
Speaker 00:Am I in here now? Who am I telling is was that Dave?
Speaker 02:Yep, he's gone. Dave's gone. He's gotta go put on another pot of porridge because he burned the last one.
Speaker 00:I see. How did oh okay, so I'm talking to Hack Guy. All right.
Speaker 02:You're talking to me. I'm talking to you. Yep. That's the way the conversation works.
Speaker 00:Now, I wanted to talk to you about hang on, I'm speaking.
Speaker 02:Smack smack. Dave needs peanuts. We got a little yellow post it note. You know about them? There's like maybe a hundred or fifty or a hundred and fifty or so like that. Many, many, many more than ten. And you got a sticky side and you got a righty side. But you can also write on the other side, because the sticky side's only on the top.
Speaker 00:I'm familiar with that.
Speaker 02:Uh oh, okay. Well then I shouldn't have told you all about it. Well, what Dave does is he writes on them and then he puts them out in the field, hoping the Dropbox guy will see them. This one says, send more peanuts, and this one says, I don't mind window curtains or blinds. I'm not sure what that one's about, but to send peanuts make sense. We don't have any.
Speaker 00:Have you ever thought to ask them to maybe give you some information on where exactly you are?
Speaker 02:Well, yeah, how do you do that? With a post note, we could build a sign paper airplane, make it tiny enough that you can throw it high in the sky, join the air show, whoops, whoops, get it up there, maybe they'll I just know what do you think?
Speaker 00:Well, I don't if you can write a giant note that says Dave needs peanuts, you can write a giant note that says, hey, where are we?
Speaker 02:Oh, giant note, yeah. We should use all the stickies and lay them out, Caleb!
Speaker 01:We're gonna need you to lay out the stickies. No, line them up. Line them up. Yeah, line them up. And then just keep doing it, yeah. Okay.
Speaker 02:Caleb's on it. Good idea.
Speaker 00:Oh my god.
Speaker 02:We take suggestions, I guess.
Speaker 00:Not well.
Speaker 02:We decided what we were gonna do is we're gonna bottle all the water in the well and then leave the bottles in the well to stay cold, and then if you need a bottle of water, you just gotta repel 40 feet.
Speaker 00:You repel 40 feet? Why don't you put the bottles in a basket that you can then hoist to the top?
Speaker 01:Line them up. Line them up.
Speaker 02:Well, then you gotta put the basket, then someone's gotta go all the way down and put the basket back there, and then someone's gotta go all the way down and put a water in the basket. That's not gonna work.
Speaker 00:For you? No, it won't. You're right. It won't.
Speaker 02:We might. So they've got some of this old school rope cable like sheathing, you see. Ain't nothing really going on inside it.
Speaker 00:You mean a hose?
Speaker 02:Get that we have a thing, Dave found. Oh. Yeah. He found it. Don't worry about it. There was a lot of clatter because Caleb had to go into the this and that shed and find the thing that Dave had. Well, how big are these sheds? Well, that one's a two by four shed. Yeah. Made out of two by fours, two feet by four feet. Okay. It's a smaller shed. Yeah.
Speaker 00:It's got one door. It sounded the size of an aircraft hangar.
Speaker 02:Well, that's the big shed. That's our shed shed. We gotta keep most of our sheds within a shed because otherwise the squirrels come around and they try to go through the cracks.
Speaker 00:You have a shed shed?
Speaker 02:No, pardon me.
Speaker 00:You have a shed shed?
Speaker 02:That's right. Where do you keep your shed?
Speaker 01:I don't have a shed.
Speaker 02:That's alright. We got one for you. Which one would you We'll put one together for you if you come up to see us and then you can stay there.
Speaker 00:What is that sound time hearing?
Speaker 02:That's none of your business.
