The Unorganized Township of Bootstuck
The Unorganized Township of Bootstuck
Podcast Description
An old box of randomly labelled cassette tapes is liberated from a garage sale and into the hands of a journalist who begins sifting through the contents and discovers random interviews with the citizens of a remote town known only as Bootstuck, a distant former military base in Ontario's northernmost region. The characters that occupy this abandoned outpost are colourful to be polite, unstable, unpredictable, or erratic to be direct but have all bypassed their obvious intellectual shortcomings to suss out an existence in this wild and challenging place.
Podcast Insights
Content Themes
Focuses on the quirky narratives and daily lives of Bootstuck's residents, highlighting topics like local governance, weather measurement systems, and culinary customs with episode examples such as the ongoing discussion of frozen food habits and the development of local businesses like 'Eater Way' restaurant.
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.
This tape begins as an attempt to discuss traffic conditions in Bootstuck and immediately collapses into a strange meditation on Dave’s “back 40,” which turns out not to be land at all, but a graveyard of empty bottles and 14 immobile cars. Before the conversation can gain any structure, Jonathan Frakes drunkenly bursts into the recording, mutters something unintelligible, and disappears—an event the Bootstuck resident barely acknowledges before resuming his ramble. From there, the narrator is dragged through a baffling tour of Bootstuck infrastructure: snow-rubbing for warmth, a DIY sewage system powered by four milkshake straws, and a workforce consisting almost entirely of one overburdened and exploding Caleb. The transcript ends on a chillingly casual promise that another plane crash would really help boost local commerce.
www.bootstuck.com
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