It’s a mysterious and inviting aroma, difficult to place. Follow the scent, and it will lead you to a cozy little hole-in-the-wall on Third Street in Smithers, where it mingles with the coffee, incense, and aged paper.
First Nations art prints by John Madamare on the walls. Handmade jewellery on display; journals and notebooks with artisan woodburn and sculpted bicycle-parts on their covers. Mortars, pestles, and glass jars filled with varieties of dried teas and herbs are on display like an apothecary out of a medieval fantasy novel. Newspaper clippings in the windows. Music played over speakers and, on some days, from a guitar taken down from the wall. Shelves stuffed with books on the inside, tables full of paperbacks on the outside.
This is Mountain Eagle Books: A small coffeeshop and used bookstore owned and operated by friendly woman named Janet Walford. A woman who, after 30 years running the place, is looking to sell it and retire.
“Everybody says ‘it won’t be the same.’ And neither it will and neither it should be because it’s mine and me as long as I am here, and after that it’s somebody else’s and they’ll make it theirs,” Janet tells me. “I really believe that it needs new, younger creative energy. I’m great at the status quo in lots of ways. I’m like a pair of old slippers: pretty comfortable for most folks, boring for others. I’m slowing down. I’ll be 70 in the spring. That’s a good time to be finished with working.”
“I’m hopeful. I love it, but I’m tiring. I hope having found the right future owner that I will be happy to hand it over and become a regular patron of this place. This will be my coffeeshop to come to for coffee. Serves the best coffee in town. The only place you can get good, good chai is here.”
It all started in October of 1987. When Janet and her then-husband Dave borrowed some money from Dave’s father and used it to buy a used book business on Broadway in Smithers. Over the years, Mountain Eagle Books has moved from location to location throughout Smithers until finally arriving at its fifth and current location on Third Street in June of 1998.
“Part of the motivation for moving here too was that it had a kitchen, and in order to serve a simple cup of coffee there’s bureaucratic hoops to jump through so we were unable to do that legitimately, so we didn’t until we came here and then ‘coffee’ became ‘coffee and desserts’ which became ‘coffee and desserts and soups’ and then ‘coffee and deserts and soups and wraps.’ All in a very short space of time.”
Janet and her ex-husband parted ways amicably in 2001, with her becoming the sole proprietor of the store while Dave pursued his career as a chef elsewhere. It was Dave who devised Mountain Eagle’s special recipe for their chai, which involves an elixir derived from boiling whole spices with raw ginger for most of a day before straining it — a process that gives the bookstore it’s unique and inviting scent.
“You can smell it for blocks on the days that I do it because I have to exhaust as much steam as I can or else it gets too overpowering in here,” Janet tells me. “But it doesn’t take it all out because wherever I go when I’ve been making chai I get, ‘Oh I love the way you smell.’ And I say ‘what’s that about?’ And they say, ‘you smell like the chai in your store,’ because it permeates everything.”
Walford is known for her support of local art and music, not just in her store, but from her involvement with community events like the Smithers Midsummer Music Festival.
“So for 30 years I’ve worked on the festival in some way: Selling tickets, working on the gate, working on PR, being an information distribution hub. Festival presence downtown has been at Mountain Eagle Books for the whole time that I’ve been doing this. It just made sense to have some place where people could drop in and ask questions, especially before the internet. There’s more possibility to distribute information and tickets through that medium now, but for years this was the only means of selling tickets, to have them ‘hands-on’ in a place.”
“I have hundreds of CDs, most of which are local or regional. I started selling CDs and cassettes when Mark Perry put out his first cassette in maybe 1990. I think that’s when Dreams of the Highway came out,” she says, motioning first towards a collection of CDs by the till, then towards an extensive, shelved collection on a wall across the room. “It started out just to be supportive of the local guys. And then it’s grown to be the largest collection of independent artists’ CDs — I’m told — outside the city. Nobody sells CDs anymore.”
“Then I started picking up music from visiting performers, whether it was with the BVSMF (Bulkley Valley Skeena Music Festival) which we used to do more of, or the [Bulkley Valley] Concert Association. Anybody who is visiting, even the professional and commercial gigs. When Ian Tyson showed up here or Terry Clark. Brett Kessel will be here this year in November. You know, that sort of thing.”
This is a place of memories for Janet. She tells me about how Alex Cuba would frequent the coffeeshop, often in the winter months when he isn’t travelling as much. She remembers meeting the parents of Alex Cuba, Valentin and Berea Puentes.
“The first time they came here, they all came in and Alexis [Alex Cuba] and Sara [his wife] had invited a bunch of people that they knew here who spoke Spanish to come for coffee. The next thing I know we have this jam session going on. There’s Alexis playing drums, his dad playing guitar, I had a guitar. And people singing and playing music most of the morning. That was my introduction to his parents, and it was just delightful. I realized at that point that Alexis didn’t have a classical guitar [in the shop to use]. They came for several months on that occasion, so I lent Valentin my classical guitar.”
“It’s actually a Spanish guitar. I picked it up from a local luthier.”
She shows it to me.
“It’s got a real nice special tone that comes from being loved and played not mostly by me, but by someone who happens to be an exceptionally good guitarist — which happens to be the first owner — and then both father and son Puentes have played it a lot.”
As her time with the store draws to an end, Walford reflects on the future of the store.
“People are very accustomed to me and how I’ve done it now for 20 years by myself with just a little help here and there, sometimes a lot of help if I’ve been not well. But my style has been maintained when I haven’t been able to be here. And I think that there’s a little anxiety that somehow that will change. I think that people need to be reassured that they have as much to do with that atmosphere and feeling as I do,” she says. “They all have some degree of faith and a big hope that it will retain most of its character as a community meeting place with a welcome for everybody, certainly anybody I’ve talked to about it. I stress that that’s an important feature, that there’s room for everybody. You don’t have to be a certain sort of interest or from a certain background to come and be welcome.”
“The thing that’s always been important to me … is that I’ve always wanted to be involved in helping build healthy community, and I that’s what this place has, I think, enabled me to do for many years now. That’s the biggest identity I think this place has in this town. “
Janet Walford wants Smithers to know how much she appreciates all the support she has received in the 30 years she has worked at Mountain Eagle Books.
“They brought heart and soul to this business and they’ll keep it going when I’m not here. Thank-you, everybody.”
