I bought these boots for a trip West in 2000. They are still the most expensive footwear I own. I was recently divorced and for that time it was an extravagant expenditure, fuck, eating was extravagant that year. My "story" is patchworked throughout here, too much of it at once is, well, just too much. Suffice it to say Y2k was a year of transition for me, coming off being very ill and a one year reenactment of the union that was a war quite uncivil with X2. She has since confided that she loves to hate me and even more, hates to love me.
I remember my son, upon hearing runnng water, peeking into the bathroom of the dump ass apartment we lived in at the time and seeing me standing in the bathtub in shorts and my new boots. He didn't say a word, he knew it was a difficult time for me and erratic behavior was the norm. I was fitting them to my feet. I tracked squishy footprints for the next few hours and turned them into gloves for my feet. The cool way to do it is in a river but we lived on the second floor overlooking a parking lot.
September of 2000 was my second major trip out West and I was accompanied by someone I had no business being with and who had even less business being with me. I thought I wanted a good girl and she thought I was just bad enough. We were both wrong. I talked during sex while she wasn't listening and I eventually moved her to the tears she bored me to. It was my fault (a worrisome trend) and we eventually parted ways. It was a wonderful trip though, when vertical we did have much in common and she did teach me many things; I'm not sure I taught her any. My boots were easier to break in than she was, maybe I should have stood her in water.
We were still together, however, in 2001 and our trip scheduled for that September went the way of so many things that month, awry. Non refundable airline tickets weren't enough to keep us together so in the fall of 2002 I had an expiring ticket for me and another non transferable one for someone who had transferred out. Hence, my first wandering, hiking gadabout trip alone to the canyons and rivers and mountains of Utah. I drove over a thousand miles that week, September is a hauntingly beautiful time of year in the West, and I hiked scores more and discovered the peaceful, joyuous beauty of being alone in the desert.
I have since returned many times, with and without traveling companions, once with my daughters, once with my son and nephew, once with a US Treasury Special Agent who was packing heat in a fanny pack everywhere we went. She smiled and told me I was just fierce enough in a motel in Taos, NM and having been somewhat reserved to that point I took that as a portent of things that weren't to cum come. Our parting (worrisome trend) was congenial as I was unarmed and we did have a wonderful time. She has since hiked the entire Appalachian Trail alone, quite an amazing feat. She did it without the gun, even more amazing. Twelve hundred miles of bear and Deliverance country must have appeared safer to her than I did. Just fierce enough.
So the boots, skinned and scuffed and caked in red dusty dirt, oiled, not polished, dulled, not shined. I was thinking, they have been in the Colorado, Rio Grande, Freemont, San Juan, Virgin, Dolores and Green and many other unnamed streams and muddy mucks. They have heel toed a few hundred miles, been slept in and sat next to a fire to dry. They've been on mountain tops, among Indian ruins, in slot canyons, and scrambled and scrabbled up and down rocky tumbles of a dozen shades of red and gold.
It's about time to clack the heels, inhale the red dust and lace them up again.
