They were once black Sketcher boots. Now they were just sketchy. All stitched-on logos and bolted-on metal had been washed loose. The original shoelaces had snapped off; the new laces were thin as speaker wire.
The left boot had a hole gauged out of it near the toe. This was the good shoe. The right shoe had a monstrous hole in the back like a dynamited bank vault. Both shoes had seams busted loose, so you could slip a hand through each shoe from the side. Turning your foot too fast in the right boot led to your pinky toes sticking out entirely.
I first wore these clodhoppers during my senior year of college, 1997-1998. They caused me physical pain to walk for long distances on concrete. The rubber soles were as thick as the bullet proof glass at the bank, and just as comforting.
After I graduated college, I bought two pairs of grown up shoes at Today's Man, and began wearing them to my temp jobs. The black wing tips felt appropriate for work, but they cut my feet when I first wore them. The low top brown boots fit more comfortably, but didn't seem appropriate. Nonetheless, I wore them all the time, since they were the shoes that didn't make me bleed. The Sketchers were cast aside until some theoretical day when I'd have use for shoes I wouldn't mind destroying.
Enter my interest in caving. I was told that most clothes worn into a cave becomes too mud-stained to ever be worn in the surface world again. This included shoes. I had no doubt what shoes to wear on my first trip.
As cave boots, the Sketchers were efficient. The pain of walking for long periods on flat surfaces didn't come into play, except for those big borehole passages in West Virginia. On oddly shaped terrain, the boots became rubber shoeshoes. The big soles bridged smaller gaps, and helped wedge my feet into crevices for chimneying. They wedged my feet into a lot of places I didn't plan on as well, but nothing was an ankle-sprainer.
After my first caving trip, I wore them one more time in the surface world: Woodstock 99. This was held on an old Air Force Base, so the entire thing was concrete. My feet were ready to riot at the end of that (although there were plenty more people who were actually rioting that weekend).
The shoes didn't see much sunlight after that. I wore them on all my cave trips, dunking them in cave streams and mud on a regular basis. The repeated abuse made some of the interior fabric detach, so I stuck in padded soles.
The laces got more tangled with every trip, and harder to untie. Eventually I cut them off during a West Virginia weekend, ran into a Food Lion, and bought a new pair. The new pair had two feet of extra lace per boot, so even after triple knotting them, it looked like they were the back end of someone's home entertainment system.
The wear and tear began working small holes in the leather of the boots. This was an advantage, since my boots now were self-bailing. No more walking around with 48 degree water sloshing up to your ankles. As soon as I stepped out of a stream, my boots poured themselves out.
The holes got bigger, and the shoes got rattier. Other cavers were switching boots on a yearly basis, but I stuck with mine. I'm not someone who dumps a milk carton the second it expires. I'll leave it in the fridge for a good week or so, until it's halfway to yogurt. Then I don't feel bad about throwing out good food. I had similar thoughts about these shoes. Most sane people would already have chucked them. But I wanted mine absolute unredeemable.
They got worse every trip, but never in a dramatic way, never causing me physical pain. I don't know how a deteriorating shoe could have been dramatic, but I would know it when I saw it.
During OTR 2003, I went on a vertical trip with some grotto people, and forgot my black Aqua socks. I stuck my bare feet into these shoes, and saw three pink toes sticking out the side of my right boot. The hole had been there for several trips now, but having black-clad toes stick out disguised it - until now. Hoboes had better shoes than me.
OK, enough was enough. The shoes were dead. They had to go. But for their years of service, they needed a proper Viking funeral. First campfire I found, I was throwing them in.
This took over a year. I completely forgot to do it during the last night of OTR. No problem: I'd just wait for the next occasion to burn them. I'd keep wearing them until that point.
I went to the fall MAR, but it poured rain. I went to last year's Scott Hollow trip, but with the eclipse, I forgot to throw them in the fire. I went to the Thorn Springs campground in March, but we had a cabin so there was no campfire. I didn't make it to any of the spring or fall events, or to the 2004 OTR.
For my big weeklong trip to Mammoth, I broke tradition and left the Sketchers at home. A week of brick Mammoth walkways would feel like Woodstock 99 all over again (only without the arson, hopefully). I instead brought the brown shoes.
The brown shoes would easily be the worst pair of shoes I owned, if not for the Sketchers. I had worn them hard for five years now. Their thin rubber soles had worn away at the balls of my feet, and squeaked when wet. The rubber molding around the sides had become brittle and flaked off, revealing the shoes� layer cake interior. I had pumped super glue in the works to keep them together, which had dried to a crust of boogers around the damage points.
After three days of death marches in Mammoth, the brown shoes were also ready for the fire. I bought a new pair to wear the rest of that week. Too bad our bunkhouse didn't have a fire pit. (The brown shoes were unceremoniously thrown out one day. They were worked to death, but never did anything heroic enough to warrant the Viking funeral.)
My next chance to cave was the 2004 Scott Hollow trip. There would also be a campfire. So long Sketchers!
It was bittersweet wearing them for that one last trip. They got to see the second entrance of Scott Hollow, climb down a rickety ladder over a pit, climb into the Junction Room, and see thousands upon thousands of stalactites on the Root Canal loop. It was like showing them the all-cave version of that nature video you showed suicide cases in Soylent Green.
Toward the end of the trip, however, the boots started hurting me. I was sliding around in them much more than usual. They had stopped being shoes, and become useless hunks of rubber tied to my feet. I wouldn't exactly call it a dramatic change, but it was one well past due.
I said my goodbyes at the campfire, and tossed the Sketchers in. The campfire scent did not improve with the addition of rubber and old feet. The shoes proudly ascended to Valhalla.