boots

I wore my hiking boots today. It wasn't snowing or anything, I just decided that they needed a trial run so that my feet get used to them before I have to wear them every day. When I opened the cupboard to take them out, I caught a glimpse of my other boots-my old ones.

I got the old boots the summer I was 13 because I was hiking the West Coast Trail with my mum and some of her friends. The shop that we bought them from isn't open anymore, but it was on the main street in downtown Kelowna, and the process of finding the right fit was close to buying pointe shoes: take an hour or two, try on everything in your size in stock, make about 50 'practice walks' around the store, finally, once your brain is numbed to the differences between pairs, choose something that you think makes your feet look cool. My boots were grey with purple accents (this was 1995!) and they cost about $250, which I thought was astronomical, and was suprised when my normally budget-conscious father didn't get annoyed when paying for them. He said they were a good investment.

I hiked the West Coast Trail and canoed the interior of BC with those boots. They were staples of my wardrobe during several summers of camp counsellor employment, and I wore them every day for eight weeks working on a landscaping crew the summer I was 16. They also were the boots I wore while riding on the back of my dad's motercycle all over New Zealand, and on a grade nine trip to Europe. In between adventures, I wore them to and from highschool, the movies, dance class...When I moved to Wales, the boots went too, and then to Lebanon, accross the Middle East and now Montreal.

I only had blisters the first hike; somewhere there is a snapshot of me sitting on driftwood at a campsite near Tsusiat Falls cradling a moleskin covered foot, the boots discarded in front of me.

The purple is indistinguishable now, they are a fairly uniform shade of grey, and there are holes where the stitching has disintegrated. There are cracks in the leather by the joints of my big toe and little toe where the boots bent with every step I took in them. The treads are completely worn down, and when they stand on their own the boots look like my feet are still in them. The laces are ratty, with at least two knots for mending purposes. There is a white line of dried salt around them from the roads in Montreal in the winter-looks a bit like a high water mark... These are not sexy boots.

Last December I left them on top of the radiator over night, trying to dry them off. The rubber soles, having had enough of my abuse, separated from the bottom of the rest of the boot and only stayed attached at the heel. I didn't even try to superglue them back together, somehow I just knew they were finished.

My parents bought me the new boots for Christmas last year. They are really nice-they make my feet look dainty, and they are a tasteful brown. They don't fit right though. Like rebounding from a relationship, I jumped on the "new boots" bandwagon, willfully disregarding the small pinching of my toes and the blisters growing on my heels.
"You just need time to break them in," I told myself, "You haven't had new boots in so long, you don't know what to expect. Give them a chance."

I spent the rest of the winter with pinched toes and bloody heels.

The new boots are better now. I have broken them in as much as possible. Nine years down the line, they may have history too. They just won't have the same history...my teenage years are in those boots, quietly sitting in the cupboard under the stairs, waiting for me to figure out how to deal with them.