If you read our recent New Arrivals email you know why there has been radio silence on our part recently. Life has been busy. Certainly the reasons we gave there are part of it. There is more, though, that wasn’t included in the new arrivals email that’s worth exploring. You might relate. As we mentioned, we spent a good bit up at an off-the-grid cabin on the Bruce Peninsula. This was a beautiful tiny house owned by a friend of ours with a rain-barrel water supply, solar energy, and tin roof (Love Shack) build. It was sublime. The whole bloody thing was sublime. Time reverted to a pre-2000 speed. We are not sentimental about Time. It is just a hidden, beautiful thing now, this old time. There was no cell reception. Our radio fuzzed in and out. We chugged books. We woke up to the sound of the wind in spruce trees.
On the Bruce, a place that has some of the oldest rocks on earth, you’re in Deep Time. Sitting out back on the cabin’s little deck, sipping whiskey, tripping on shrooms, with the wind from Georgian Bay rocking the spruce trees, it is not hard to feel a part of a Very Old Thing. The Bruce is a biosphere unlike any other in Ontario. Despite considering ourselves hip, contemporary folks, we fell into dreams of deeper ghosts, and seemed ourselves from every time in our life. Even our dog changed. She ran through the woods around the cabin, vigilantly chasing off toads and grasshoppers. She ran back and lept onto our laps, tail wagging, letting us know how proud she was for saving us from these awful creatures. She sat by our feet like a frontier hound (it was pathetically cliched) and just STARED out at the forest. It was a beautiful mystery. Everything became a beautiful mystery.
One night it was windy like the Dickens and we went out for one more “perimeter check” before going to bed. Our dog threw herself into the trees and vanished. We called and there was nothing. So, before panicking, we got our flashlights, marked off the places to search, and individually went into the thick woods to try and find her. It was positively Jungian. There are a gazillion stars in the sky up there, and the forests are THICK. The ground is mostly rock, so the roots grow horizontally along the ground. Dead trees create a spongy forest floor, with old trunks reaching out, and who-knows-what layered on top. Imagine it is night, your dog is lost, and you’re in the loudest windstorm with a small flashlight shining a futile beam on Blair Witch branches looking for the world’s smallest dog.
Oh, and you’re HIGH.
It was the best nightmare. We looked for twenty minutes, or maybe it was thirty seconds. Those woods are deep and the wind was so loud we could not hear each other calling, “COOPER! COOPER!” Jason heard what sounded like a dog whimpering and headed to the source only to find out it was a TREE CREAKING! WHAT?!? He almost shit his pants. The only directional mark were the fairy lights from the cabin, run on solar, so they could have gone out, like, any moment. THEY’RE growing faint too as we head deeper into the woods. The sound of animals, the sound of the trees, the sound of IMAGINARY ANIMALS, jacked this experience up to eleven until we saw, shivering against a mossy log, our little puppers, wet-eyed and lost, in the circle of our flashlight. The wind had swept away all the scents and she could not find her way to us. Fortunately, she was, like, 6 feet from the cabin, so we had gone off on our Odyssey in vain, probably just to entertain the Tree Gods, but here she was. We picked her up. We took her back. We gave her snacks. We gave ourselves snacks. We fell asleep and did not dream.
A couple of days we came back to London to our forgotten dirty dishes and air conditioning. We came back to the store, still in disarray from our open mic night. We cracked open a box of books from our travels to find treasures, and are happy to say that we haven’t left all the magic back at the Bruce.
Thank you so much for your patience, friends. We are here again to be your reliable booksellers.
With love,
Jason and Vanessa
