At the moment I live on the border of two councils, which means I have two sets of library systems and two library cards. Both library systems are a delight. The Jubilee Library in Brighton is a vast airy place with three light wells in the roof and an upper floor that seems to almost float, unattached to the nearby walls. Then there’s the library on the Lewes side – not Lewes itself because it’s a bit of a slog, but just ten minutes away on the bus. Small and clean with a lovely sort of reading for my daughter to sit in. This tube’s padded surfaces and close curves remind me of the future of space travel as envisioned by Stanley Kubrick. All that’s missing is a Monolith at the check-out desk.
If there was a Monolith I would be in trouble, because if I have a secret talent it’s for running up accidentally gigantic fines at libraries. Now I can run up two fines at once. When I go, every few months, to pay them off, such are the baroque flourishes of the fines I run up, the people I meet at the payment desks seem almost impressed.
Here’s the thing, though. There’s a third library nearby. I heard about it a month ago, via a blurry photograph on my wife’s Facebook post. A “Little Library” as the name has it. I instantly knew I had to visit. But I also felt I had visited before. Hmm.
Last time I visited a little library, it was called Supply Cache 202. It was up by Beartooth Point, to the north, overlooking a little valley so that you could see it as a jaunty point of bright colour on the horizon from some way off. Like all the supply caches in Firewatch, the wind-and-wilderness narrative game from Campo Santo, 202 is painted a sort of yolk, or perhaps turmeric: a mixture of yellow and gold. There are quite a few of these caches scattered about the small world that Firewatch is threaded through. 202 is my favourite.
Firewatch has a number of great qualities, none of which need spoiling here. But the supply caches may be my most cherished aspect of the game – certainly the thing I find myself thinking about the most often. In Firewatch you play a fire spotter, spending the summer in the dreamy wilds, living at the top of a sun-bleached wooden tower and on the look-out for trouble. You’re part of a network, but the network is spread far and wide, and is, in its own way, as rickety and patched-up as your tower. The way the game gets all this across is through the supply caches spread around the landscape, each one given a three-digit number and a little mark on your map.