1.
Who will sustain these frail splayed
assemblages, with their knobs,
arches, tender soles,
their toes like droll noses
poking their little ways into the future?
Who will swaddle them against the cold,
brace them, gird them for the world of work,
and shield them from the errant ax?
Ah,
let there be boots.
Let them lurk in our sheds,
our vestibules, under our beds,
their mute tongues lolling,
their laces unstrung like Victorian corsets
wanting only to be worn.
May there be eros in our entries,
as the burrowing of moles more
snugly into earth.
And the lacing up:
let it be brisk, each cross
tugging the previous criss
taut. Then,
with our soles supported and our ankles hugged,
let them carry us – andiamo! –
out the door and up the ridge.
After work we would sit around in the old farmhouse where we lodged, drinking beer, playing cards, shooting the shit, smoking, and dubbining our boots. We’d each bought a pair – Grebs or Kingtreads – to mark this rite of passage into the working life and out of the silly sneakers of youth. The dubbin restored grease to the leather, making it more waterproof and suppler; it coaxed the animal partly back to life. Surely concubines in harems were not massaged more thoroughly, the toes, the insteps, the high uppers, the secret, tucked-away tongues. Surely these pieces of hide were no more cherished, or water repellent, when they’d been worn by cows. Yes, the absence of girlfriends may have played a part in the ritual, as our profane banter (“Looks like Danny’s getting to second base with his boots”) did not fail to make explicit. But it also involved the proud hands’ homage to the humble feet, who were proving to be far more sensitive, and important, than we’d ever imagined back in the city.
Probably we were also trying to make our boots look more worn than they really were, disguising their lack of nicks and scratches – although these would accumulate soon enough. Each time I pulled mine on (Grebs, light brown), I immediately wanted to live up to them, the way an inexperienced rider wants to be worthy of his horse. Their weight meant that each step was swung, and the swing made momentum and the momentum returned the foot to the ground, where it belonged, with some energy left over for the next. They were like and unlike the hiking boots I’ve worn in recent years, as a fiddle is like and unlike a violin.
In memory this occurs about three beats before the entry of women and ambition as major themes. Manhood fully loaded but aimless, innocent as a tornado or forest fire. When we walked up the road to Tassé’s for meals, our boots waited with the dogs on the porch, a loose platoon, a pack, ready for work but equally open to suggestions. These generally meant pranks, which were elaborate and drastic, borrowing from the traditions of commedia dell’arte and vendetta, a daisy chain of linked reprisals featuring ambush, defenestration, and sudden buckets of water or paint. One found its dénouement in Emergency, followed by an epilogue delivered by the Director, the gist of which was the prank’s exclusion, as a genre, of Mature Judgment, an element that could only enhance the quality and length of our as yet undistinguished existences. Words to that effect. He did not ask, as I do now, where we found the energy, after a day chopping and hauling brush, for spontaneous theatre. It was as though the very force that wore us out in work was winding up the mainspring of mischief, like the complementary spinning gyres in Yeats’s cosmology.
While our boots waited outside, we’d have beans, boiled potatoes, sausages with maple syrup, tourtières on Sunday, Réjeanne bustling between the stove and the table, Julien presiding at its head as genially as he did on the job. After supper we’d spend long minutes sitting on the steps getting our boots back on, amicably arguing. Would we paddle up the creek to check on the beaver dam, or walk to the tavern in town? Each option plump with possibility, the birches reflected in the lake, the laces snubbed up tight, the Shadow just a shadow swelling under the trees.