Personal Post: The Walking Docs

On the evening of September tenth, 2001, my mother and I walked into the Timberland store to buy a pair of boots. I was fifteen years old and had just completed my first day of my sophomore year of high school. My mom had taken me out shopping to buy school supplies when I remembered – my college-level Metal Arts class was starting tomorrow night in Berkeley and I had been instructed to buy a special pair of shoes for it. They had to be made of leather to protect my feet from falling, molten steel, and the soles had to be made of rubber to protect me from accidents involving electricity and water from the machines. I didn’t tell my mom, but even before we walked into the store I had a specific pair of shoes already in mind. As luck would have it, they also happened to be the perfect shoes for the job.
Classes were set to start at eight in the morning, so in order to take a shower I over compensated and set my alarm for something akin to five-thirty-AM. When I awoke to make my way down the hall to the bathroom, I was shocked to hear the TV on in my parents’ room. My mother had the phone pressed to her ear, watching in muted shock as huge clouds of smoke rose from the remains of the twin towers. I arrived just in time for footage of the second plane hitting to be aired. I asked my mother what was going on, but she didn’t respond, she just stared. I saw the time on the corner of the news screen and knew I had to get ready for school. I would have to figure out why my mother was up at 5am watching gaudy action movies later.
On the train all anyone was talking about was New York City and had they heard and what should they do. I soon realized that what my mother had been watching was not some Bruce Willis blockbuster but actual, real footage. Live feed from NYC. As soon as I found Marina at the train station I asked if she’d heard what was happening. She had no idea what I was talking about, but complimented me on my new boots. In our first period class, History, our teacher Ms. Melvoin warned us she would not be teaching us history – instead she wheeled in a TV from the AV room and soon other classes did the same. By second period all our parents had been called and we were told to go home for the day.
My mother came to pick up my sister and I, then dashed over to the Urban School to pick up my cousins Kate and Sara-Maeve. Their parents were in Ireland with my father to play golf and buy some horses for their stables and my mother wanted them close to family in the hour of crisis. My oldest cousin, Rebecca, had just started her freshman year at Sarah Lawrence. We had no idea where that was except that it was in New York and when we couldn’t get a hold of her, the whole family feared the worst in a brash surge of irrational panic. She had, of course, be perfectly safe on campus but their community had been hit hard.
I wore my boots to my first welding class that night. My grandfather and his wife drove me across the Bay Bridge and back while I sat low in my seat and kept an eye on the sky over the San Francisco bay. It was weird looking over the water and not seeing any planes coming in to the Oakland airport. I wondered how my father was doing in Ireland. My new boots pinched and when I got home all my siblings and cousins were asleep, scattered around the family-room floor with the news on mute.
They say that relationships that start under intense circumstances never last, but this one has. I wore those boots every day for the next eighteen months straight, breaking them in; loving them in the process. To this very day these boots have literally been everywhere I’ve been since I bought them. Mexico to Canada, Italy, Ireland, Switzerland, France and England. I wore them for my Civics final my senior year of high school, hiking from Yosemite Valley to the top of Nevada falls and back – and within the three-hour time limit to pass the test. They helped me climb Plutons to watch six desert sunrises in Joshua Tree, Death Valley, and the Mohave. I wear them so often and love them so obviously they’ve become a defining feature of my personality at my college. My friends and professors have come to call them “The Sisterhood of the Traveling Shoes”, though it’s just my boots and me. They’ve become a part of my art, making appearances and influences on my sculpture, printmaking projects and writing. But they’ve also become a huge part of my life.
Somewhat like the jeans in The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants, by Ann Brashares, this old pair of boots have become so much more than the materials used to create them. They’ve been imbued with all the things they’ve witnessed and withstood. While the ignorant might call this simple anthropomorphizing, those who take the time to look beyond the worn leather and listen know better. They have become a tangible comfort, a friend even. Sharing both the good times and the bad.
When my grandfather died in my senior year, some tiny part of me was glad that my mother was too distracted to notice that I wore the boots with my Armani to the funeral. They were the friend I so desperately needed while my family fell apart with grief. Walking with me through one of the hardest days of my life, silent and constant, with me with every step; a friend who helped bare the burden of grief upon my shoulders, supporting me and not offering up any empty words of solace or well-intended comfort. It only seemed appropriate; Poppie had paid for my welding lessons, always encouraging my artistic inclinations. The old boots might not have matched my suite, but I couldn’t think of anything more respectful or appropriate to wear.
When I lost my grandmother a couple years later, the boots didn’t question my rash, grief-fueled decision to do organic farming in Hawaii for seven weeks. They merely came along, not questioning me, not arguing with me, and accompanying me out into the fields every morning. I had never farmed a day in my life but they didn’t care – I’d never done any kind of manual labor for more than a day or a two at a time, but they never doubted me. They helped me lay manure and drive tractors and take chainsaws to trees, and they got to reap the benefits: views of Maui in an impossibly blue pacific ocean, so close you could almost swim to it, and a snow-capped Mt Kilauea. I saw these things every morning as soon we stumbled out of my tent. We hiked lava beds and climbed down cliff-faces to beaches and lagoons – and I admit, the boots might have been used once or twice to squash the brightly colored but deadly centipedes that conveniently lived under my tent.
Because sometimes that’s the best kind of companion for travel – someone willing to tag along, if only to keep you from feeling less lonely. Bringing the familiarity and all your shared experiences with you, but never using them to point out past mistakes or distract you from the adventures you’re having now. Who can support you rather than burden you, encourages without pushing, and who will never try and talk you out of something (whether it’s a good idea or not) because they can’t talk at all. Dirt and dust have collected under the eyelets and between the laces of my boots over the years, like a testament of their blind devotion, and in return I polish them to a high-gloss shine every couple of months – if only to wear it away again. They have scuffs and scrapes in the leather, the treads on the bottom almost worn away from so much use. I don’t feel old when I look at my face in the mirror, but I know my age when I glance down at my shoes. In seeing their wear I realize how much of a child I was when I bought them, and how old we both are now.
I could say roads are for journeys and not destinations; I could say life is a road we all must walk and our only pleasures are the company we keep, or that the destination isn’t half as important as how you get there. For the past seven years it hasn’t mattered where I was going, just so long as I had a good pair of shoes to get me there.