Wednesday, May 15, 2013

Shoes, in our society, are ubiquitous.  Not only do we have shoes; we have lots of shoes.  Between hand-me-downs and gifts and too-cute-not-to-buy, even babies have multiple pairs that they outgrow in a few months.  As a child, I had a series of high-top tennis shoes that I wore the tops out of and a pair of Sunday shoes that I outgrew.  I actually didn’t wear shoes during the warm months except to school, so it is a wonder that I would wear out my shoes before I outgrew them.  I probably had boots as a little kid, but my Dad bought me my first pair of real boots to go hunting with.  Tennis shoes just were not cactus resistant enough, so it was Yates Army Navy Store to the rescue.  Dad wore boots every day.  He was a welder and so his were steel-toed boots.  He cut flaps of leather to go over the laces so that sparks and slag wouldn’t burn through the tongue and the sock and the foot.  I have scars on my own feet from that very thing.  In high school with Viet Nam raging, I bought a pair of Army Jungle Boots and wore them a long time for hiking.  With almost no padding or support, it was only the resilience of youth that allowed me to wear them down the Grand Canyon more than once.  I also had a pair of black leather motorcycle boots that I wore riding my bike. In college I added to my collection of boots when I worked in an underground copper mine.  Steel-toed boots with metatarsal arch protection were required and I was grateful for them more than once.  In dental school, I bought a pair of alpine-style hiking boots with the bright red laces and wore them for years, but it wasn’t until I was in the Army that my boot collection began to proliferate.  Combat boots were required wear of course, and then while visiting Korea, I had a pair of Cowboy boots made.  They were and are still uncomfortable and I wonder how people wear Cowboy boots preferentially.  In Alaska, my unit decided we needed special cold-weather Combat boots, and so bought us low-end Danner boots with felt insoles.  They also gave us Bunny Boots for real cold-weather operations.  Sorrels were required for civilian cold weather wear and then several pairs of tennis-shoe hikers made their way through my collection.  In preparation for a long hike over the Chilkoot trail, I bought a pair of the most comfortable Danners I have ever seen.  They are waterproof, insulated and feel like putting your foot into a snug feather bed.  They are also a bit heavy, and when my wife saw a lighter pair at Costco, she couldn’t resist buying me a pair.   Meanwhile, winter hiking with crampons required a special boot which I acquired.  Now this is just my boot history.  We’ll leave the shoe history for another day, but the dirty secret is that adults’ feet don’t really grow much, so unless you wear a shoe out or throw it out, it just adds to the clutter in your closet.  I have worn some shoes out and thrown some out, but the quantity of boots, let alone shoes, is embarrassing.  I have traveled enough to have seen areas of the world where people have only one or two pairs of shoes, and yet for us they are as common as…well….shoes.