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.
In this episode, Bootstuck checks off another major cultural milestone after finally finishing Who’s the Boss—though it takes some time to determine whether the title refers to the vacuum man, the working woman, or the elderly authority figure who “likes a lot of sex and tells everybody what to do.” Confident they’ve solved it, the group prepares to move on to Perfect Strangers, pluralized for safety.
The conversation shifts to springtime and snow removal, which in Bootstuck does not involve shovels, blowers, or common sense. Instead, Caleb has been personally eliminating the snow by warming it in his hands and blowing on it until it turns to water. This method is defended as both scientific and superior, since shovels only relocate snow and create “bigger piles,” which solves nothing.
From there, the episode detours into one of Bootstuck’s most important information systems: the social media flyer. Rather than being printed locally, the flyer simply blows into town—preferably as a double-pager—and is mounted on Bill’s board for communal reading. Its contents are loosely interpreted, sometimes invented, and then loudly explained to anyone nearby. This is how Bootstuck learns about hardware sales, global weather events, rumored Britney Spears concerts, and—most urgently—the approaching blueberry season.
As the interviewer slowly realizes these flyers may just be newspapers drifting in from Somewhere Else, distance itself becomes questionable, measured not in miles but in “sixteen songs and a cigarette.” By the end of the tape, Bootstuck remains proudly informed, wildly inaccurate, and fully dependent on the wind to keep them up to date.
www.bootstuck.com

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