These boots
In my traveling shoes, ready to leave for the airport, Chapel Hill, NC, 2021 (photo credit: Cindy Waszak Geary)
Airport security no longer required me to take my laptop out of my backpack, but shoes still have to come off. Even so, I thought taking off my well-worn, too-bulky-to-pack, high-top, lace-up Red Wing leather boots and putting them back on again was worth the trouble to get them to Phoenix, Arizona with me on our recent short trip there.
It was a homecoming of sorts. I bought these boots in Flagstaff, Arizona in the fall of 1977, when I was barely 22 years old. I had just moved there from Raleigh, NC, a year after John and I got married. We lived in Flagstaff for nearly two years. I attended graduate school at Northern Arizona University, and we both worked at Circles Records and Tapes. I wore those boots almost every day I lived there. Flagstaff was all about being outdoors. The local dress code was jeans and flannel shirts—all the time. Hiking boots were the default footwear to negotiate the snow-and-mud-covered ground. I wore them to class, I wore them to work, I wore them to concerts, I wore them to Sedona and Phoenix, and I wore them on frequent hikes in the Grand Canyon. On one trip to the Grand Canyon, we made it all the way down to the Colorado River, where I had to take my boots off to soak my blistered feet. So much downhill walking had shoved the tops of my tender toes into a heretofore unused space in the front end of my boots. The leather in these shoes turned soft and subtle, molded to my feet by the time we left Flagstaff to move back to North Carolina. I assumed I'd wear them until they wore out. What I didn’t expect was to ever wear them again in Arizona.
John and me…and my boots. Oak Creek, Sedona, AZ, 1977 (photo credit: unknown)
I realized when I got back home to North Carolina that hiking boots were not everyday wear here, especially for me as my life was transitioning into more serious adulthood. I became a mother. I got a research job that required office attire. I wore my boots sometimes when John and I walked in the woods with our daughter, Emily, and then our son, Max, but most of the time, these boots stayed in the closet. Then, in the late ‘90s, they reprised their role as my go-to active-wear shoes, in the middle of yet another life transition--a divorce--in my 40s. During that time, I took them back to Arizona on a trip I took with Max to visit my brother, Greg, who was teaching in Tempe. My boots and I got a chance to return to Sedona and the Grand Canyon. Both these places had been through as many changes as I had. Sedona was no longer the sleepy little artist colony where, when we could, John and I escaped Flagstaff's cold for a few hours to relax under a warmer sun in Oak Creek Canyon. And now as we visited the Grand Canyon, we could no longer drive up to its edges to peer into the deep spaces between the luminescent orange and blue layers of sediment—as had been my previous experience. Instead, after a long wait, we were herded onto a bus that dropped us off at the trailhead. I was amazed to see people who were neither dressed nor shod for hiking, walk as far down into the canyon as they did on trails slippery with unmelted snow, with little room to pass others coming the other way. I was grateful for my trustworthy boots.
Max and me and my boots. Grand Canyon, AZ, 1998. (photo credit:Greg Stock)
After this trip, my boots eventually returned to the back of my closet. I bought new hiking shoes, designed to be lighter to make walking easier. I offered my old boots a few times to others, but they were never the right fit. I couldn't just put them in the thrift shop bin, however. If they were to leave me, I needed to know they’d have a good home.
Time passed. Life continued to change. I married Ron. Emily and Max became adults themselves, I left my research work of 30 years. Call it retirement if you like, but I still work. I started writing and re-embraced my identity as an artist. Greg had left Arizona, and nothing else had pulled me back there. But then, Ron’s brother, Tom, and his wife, Karen, moved to Mesa, Arizona to retire, and Ron and I began to travel every year or so to see them. Our trips were about golf, tennis, horse races, and baseball. But I keep believing at some point, Ron and I would take a side trip to Sedona and Flagstaff and do some hiking.
And then, this past pandemic summer, Greg got a job teaching at my Flagstaff alma mater and he and his wife, Jennifer, moved from Colorado Springs to Sedona. Coronavirus kept us from visiting right away, but I happily imagined visiting this place of beauty and memories once it was safe to do so. Also this past pandemic summer, Ron and I found a new place to hike in our own backyard, the White Pine Nature Conservancy Preserve, with trails down and up from the convergence of two rivers. I considered buying a new pair of hiking shoes because the soles were pulling away from the bottom of the trail shoes I’d been wearing. I was also thinking I needed something with more ankle support. As I am getting older, my gait is not as steady as it once was. I looked at shoes on the trail shop walls, but nothing exactly called to me. And when I got back home from shopping, I pulled out my lovely, old brown leather Red Wing high-top boots. All the stitching perfectly intact, still perfectly fitting my feet. I wore them on our next Sunday hike, tight around my ankles, keeping me balanced through the mud and over the rocks. Reunited. And it felt so good.
Ron and I continued our Sunday hikes. We got our covid vaccines, and so did both our brothers and their wives. Ron got a call from Karen asking him to come out to help sort out some medical issues for Tom. We felt it was safe to fly; everyone felt it was safe for us to visit. After we saw Tom and Karen in Mesa, we drove to Sedona--still beautiful and also very much more a tourist destination since the last time I had been there. Two hours after we arrived at my brother's house, we were on a trail less than a mile away from his front door. My boots hit the red rocks, drawing my past and future lives like a magnet to the present moment.
Jennifer, Ron, and me…and though you can only see the tops, my old, leather boots. Sedona, AZ, 2021 (photo credit: Greg Stock)
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Do you have a cherished pair of shoes that has accompanied you on your life’s journeys? Please share your story in the comments section.