This Week on Commerce Street
Provisions for the Journey
This is a big week for Commerce Street Books.
By week’s end (if all goes well), the once-bare walls of the Gallery will be adorned with big, beautiful bookcases. This is a big step in moving towards opening day (which we’re calling Day One), and we couldn’t be more excited to see the space come together. To wit, please add two dates to your calendar.
Summer Reading Kickoff / Pop-Up: Saturday, June 7, from 10:00 - 2:00
Day One: Saturday June 28th
More information will be forthcoming, of course, but the basic headline is this: We’ll host a Pop-Up with a great selection of summer reading for all ages on Saturday June 7, and then get ourselves ready for an official opening of the store on Saturday June 28th.
Feel free to keep an eye on our snazzy website for more information (and to sign up for memberships!), and tell a friend about the modern bookshop Charlottesville deserves.
And now, for the second installment in the “What I Think I’m Doing” series …
r/ultralight
That’s the name of the corner of Reddit I visited most frequently this time last year. Typically reserved for hikers sharing insights about extremely light camping gear, r/ultralight is full of tips and hacks for folks embracing minimalism more generally. There are extensively detailed spreadsheets chronicling the exact weights of different sleep systems (tents are too heavy, obviously) and extensive discussion of the precise ways merino wool t-shirts do or do not retain water in the rain. Would be minimalists subject their packlists to the crowd, asking for ways to cut weight and, in the process, opening themselves up to all kinds of criticism. Are you seriously considering more than two pairs of underwear for a ten-day trip, bro?
Quickly I came to see an obsession and absurdity at the center of the r/ultralight world. While there was lots to learn from these folks, some of the r/ultralight types seemed to think that the goal of backpacking was not being in nature but, rather, winning the competition of carrying as little as possible through nature. They seemed like the traveler who returns from Paris and can’t say anything more about their trip than “the plane arrived on time.” Except the ultralight folks only had half a toothbrush.
I came across this community for a very good reason. For the first time in our life together, Lisa and I were soon to drop our three (wonderful) children off at an overnight summer camp at the same time, leaving us with nearly two weeks to fill.
And so, about this time last year, just after dropping the kiddos off, we found ourselves hightailing it to Dulles to catch an overnight flight to Lisbon, where we walked around for a couple hours before catching a train to Porto, slept a bit, and then set out on a 10 day pilgrimage on the Camino de Santiago.
It was a marvelous journey, in large part because it was so different to anything we’d done before. Carrying all our stuff on our backs (hence the r/ultralight interest), each day had a single objective: stay on the way.
All we had to do was follow the golden arrows. From town to town, through eucalyptus forests and along country roads, across Roman bridges and into modern cities with medieval walls, we walked. And walked.
Somehow each day was both eerily similar to the one before (wake up, pack up, eat, walk, arrive, nap, eat again, sleep) and unique in its own right. There was sometimes rain and sometimes sun, lots of churches and even more cobblestone, periods of conversation and plenty of silence, times we walked side by side on the trail and times we walked alone.
But slowly and surely (and with a daily dose of Waxahatchee’s amazing record, Tigers Blood, in my ears) we walked on. Aside from one “big” day, we went at a relatively reasonable pace, averaging, I think, about 12 or 13 miles a day. After a few days at that pace we crossed over from Portugal into Spain, and about five days after that, we arrived at the main Cathedral in Santiago de Compostela, the church millions of pilgrims have visited since it became an official pilgrimage site in the 9th century. And then we sat.
Provisions for the Way
There are a great many things to say about the Camino, and more than a few books about this kind of pilgrimage, some of which we may carry in the store. But one of the most personally significant experiences on the Camino was that of encountering the varied and remarkable infrastructure that has been built over the centuries to support pilgrims along the way.
Everyone has a sense of what they’ll need before setting out to walk the Camino, and there are a million guidebooks to give recommendations to the modern traveler. But one of the big lessons of the Camino is that we are rarely capable of accurately assessing our own needs. For even the most well-read and prepared pilgrim, a big part of the journey is learning first-hand how very dependent you are upon the hospitality of others.
I could not have known how valuable it would be to find a “cafe” that was little more than a rogue espresso machine in the back of a family farm just when we needed a fix, or how fun it would be to see a Swedish family push a stroller up a mountain with aplomb, or how much I would need a conversation with an elderly Spanish man who had once hiked the Blue Ridge, or how delicious a local vino verde could be at the end of a long day. All these things were unanticipated gifts. And they were made possible by an ancient infrastructure committed to providing people just like me with the provisions they needed to do the seemingly simple task of walking from one place to another.
The Provisions of Commerce Street Books
A few days into the Camino I decided to seriously consider opening the bookshop that is now Commerce Street Books. This wasn’t, as I’ve said elsewhere, out of the blue. I’ve always loved books and bookshops, and have been inspired by friends opening new independent bookstores throughout the country. But it was on the Camino that I realized the unique power of local institutions to support all kinds of people as they walk along the way. And that’s exactly what Commerce Street Books is setting out to do.
As I’ve said elsewhere, I believe in the practice of reading. And like other great bookshops, Commerce Street Books is a support structure for that practice. In a very real sense we want, like the multiple and varied institutions that dot the Camino, to provide the provisions to Charlottesville’s readers need to move on down the road.
We’ll have board books and bean bags in which your kinds can find some rest. And coffee for their parents.
We’ll have all kinds of good books and plenty of space for middle schoolers to keep their reading habits going. (Just this week I learned a whole lot about the world of YA graphic novels and ordered more than a few.)
We’ll put great books in your hands that can help you survive your family vacation this summer. We’ll support “adults” who want to be kids again by reading the Classics or the latest Romantasy novel.
When the time is right, we’ll host serious discussions about our fragile democracy and the challenges we all face. Every so often we’ll make suggestions of things to read just for fun. We’ll have evenings with bubbles and books where you might make a new friend or listen to poetry. And we’ll have silence too.
All this and more — these are the provisions on the way. And we can’t wait to see how we can help you keep going.
SAVE THE DATES:
Saturday June 7: 10-2PM Summer Reading Pop-Up
Saturday June 28: Day One!