TAKE ’EM off, we’re going on a thermal walk.’ Shoes and socks were reluctantly discarded by the base of the old beech tree. As the foot attire was taken off, frowns and puzzled expressions were put on. I was leading a family nature walk and earlier one of the mums had confided to me that she thought that me walking barefoot was an irresponsible example to set on account of it being dangerous, and about the same time on the walk one of the kids had made some comment about not being allowed in the mud as he needed to keep his shoes clean for school.
I decided they were ready; this stretch of the woodland ride didn’t have much in the way of holly, whose prickles, very much like the thistle’s, have a habit of defeating the objective of a beginners’ barefoot walk.
As the group padded along behind it didn’t take them very long before they began to respond, and within minutes they began to really feel. I could tell by the rise in excited noise that they were instantly enjoying a walk with a different dimension. Just minutes before, the younger members of the party were shuffling along, kicking their heels, scuffing the ground. If there wasn’t a bird, beetle or lizard to hold their attention, they seemed bored, lacking in stimulation. Their feet, as most of us make a habit of in the Western world, were bound up in sensible boots and shoes. ‘Bring stout and sturdy footwear,’ it had said on the course description, and they had. But now their feet were as feet are supposed to be: out, liberated not only from the cramped confines of a shoe or boot, but also from the monotony of being a modern foot. The sensitive sole of the foot suddenly had something more than the ever-constant insole, just another bit of manmade consistency.
Now, not only were all the bones, muscles and connective infrastructure of the foot having to move around and work together, compensating for the uneven ground, the stones, the tree stumps and fallen boughs, but the skin itself was rejoicing.
Proprioceptors, thermoreceptors, mechanoreceptors and, I’ll admit, the occasional pain receptor, were all firing off simultaneously, where before, little was getting through the armoured wall of rubber, leather and Cordura nylon.
Everyone was interacting differently; there were reactions to the ground, its texture, questions as to whether to avoid the mud or the gravel, how cold was the water in the puddle and with it all, an acute awareness of the environment was suddenly born. No lesson, no teachings, just a boots-off experience. The reluctance to take the shoes off at the beginning of the walk had now become a reluctance to put them back on.
This is just one of the many lessons in how we can use our biggest organ and the largest sensory interface we have at our disposal: our skin. While barefoot is best, many of us have to mix it up in the artificial world that we’ve constructed for ourselves, so although I’m not seriously suggesting you walk barefoot all the time, the downside of the occasional barefooted experience is that the soles of your feet don’t toughen up to the point that you don’t feel the thistles and thorns.
From the perspective of a naturalist, another part of modern life that creates a barrier to experience is our clothing. We constantly walk about wrapped in a glove, swaddled in fabric that stifles this particular sense. The reason we think of our fingers and hands when we talk about the sense of touch is because these are the only parts of our bodies except our faces that our modern domesticated selves, or, as I’ve heard us described, Homo domesticofragilis, have left exposed.
At this point I am reminded of the homunculus I saw on a school trip to the Natural History Museum in London. This grotesque cartoon-proportioned human model caused great hilarity and much sniggering behind cupped hands among a slightly puerile school class. The fact that it had massive feet and hands, Jagger-esque lips and swollen genitals made it look funny and the serious point it was illustrating was no doubt lost on me at that particular moment in time. This was that the sizes of the body parts, the distortion of the form of this visual representation, were in proportion to the number of sensory receptors each region of the skin typically had. After our lips, those big hands are the best-endowed parts of our bodies when it comes to sensitivity to touch. But what strikes me is our feet: they are not far behind our hands on our unbalanced homunculus. In our bipedal way of life, our feet are for the most part the only direct physical point of contact with the earth, and we go and put them in boots.
The full solution is to become a naked naturalist – or naturist naturalist, just to confuse the already perplexed. Only by exposing all of our organs of touch are we able to release our full potential as regards sense. However, let’s add a dash of pragmatism to this thought: it’s not going to happen, we love our clothes, our shoes, boots, fashion, far too much for this to be a serious consideration.
Many times, in many parts of the world, I’ve got caught up in the joy of the moment and with ill-considered bravado I’ve tossed aside my shoes and socks and stepped out of the mud hut with the well-meaning intention of emulating my barefoot local guides. Inevitably, while they stride on, I’m left hobbling and hopping and humiliated in their wake, stopping frequently to remove plant spines, chiggers, ticks and dislodging sharp stones from between my toes; it’s frustrating. I’ve even deliberately shadowed these earth walkers, treading only where they tread, and I still end up being hobbled by the experience. While my local friends might stop to draw the odd serious offender – a palm spine or questing tick that’s got a foothold – for the most part they’re on the move.
Feet fresh out of boots are pale and soft, the skin moist and a little too vulnerable; they’ve also been cramped up, toes are piled on top of each other, creating an irritating niche for debris to catch in – a healthy, wide foot, unfettered by footwear, has less of an inclination to do this. However, choose your moments and you’ll find you gain a lot from the experience. Stalking wildlife, moving through the environment, assuming you don’t blow your cover and scream when you put your foot flat on a rosette of thistle leaves, is a dream, you can really feel the ground. Not just the twigs that might snap, although with a little practice you can tell a green springy twig from one that is dry and likely to create an explosive failure and you can sweep leaves out of your path with your toes. Walking barefoot allows you to move as quietly as if you were floating; it takes field craft to another level.
If you are new to the world of ‘bare-footing’, one of the sensations that you’ll be aware of once the novelty of feeling mud between your toes has worn off are the thermal qualities and the variation in the temperatures of the terrain. It was and still is one of the more subtle pleasures, a sensation from which your thermoreceptors have been insulated. Feel the difference between the cool grass at the edge of the path, which effectively is a forest in miniature complete with its shade, and the mud. Shadow the water-cooled blades of grass absorbing any of the sun’s insolation and hiding it, and then feel the hard, barren tracks of the cracked mud. The answers to questions you might have regarding the places that lizards bask and tiger beetles scurry and glitter are right there under your toes. I once even stumbled upon an adder acting oddly. It was coiled up on the edge of the path, not in the sun patch, no more than a few centimetres away, which would have been more typical but in the shade. It was close to a complex of roots and I assumed that it was on its way either in or out of its hiding place.
As soon as I had spotted her, I froze and then, centimetre by centimetre, I crept closer and closer. It took the best part of fifteen minutes, and by performing the sort of posture control that my Yiquan teacher would have been proud of, I found myself just centimetres from her glorious gargoyle face. This act was helped considerably, as it often is, by being barefoot. What puzzled me, and anyone who has spent time with these shy reptiles will understand this, is why she stayed. She had formed a flat coil of her body and if the sun was on her I would have made the assumption that she was basking, absorbing the solar energies for her own internal purpose. But here she was, neither in the sun nor under cover – very un-adder-like.
Eventually, and I like to think it was naturally, and not because of my presence, she became animated. A twitch of the head and some surreptitious tongue flicking, and she took her voluptuous, tessellated form off and threaded herself back into the tangles of the nearby roots. I got up, but before I moved off, a thought came wandering into my head, an unformed question, stimulated by what I was feeling in my feet. Rather than bend down and use my hands, I slid my foot to where she had been. The question was answered. My adder had been sitting on a hot spot created earlier when the sun had been bearing down on this section of the path. The ground was still warm, despite being in the shade when I stumbled into the scene. In the adder’s world, why track the sun and leave the safety of your bolt-hole, if you can take second-hand from the earth what the sun left behind: it was a mystery solved with my feet.
We might think that by putting shoes on our feet we’re taking a cultural step up the progress ladder. Underneath it all our feet are very well endowed, something we have left over from our tree-living primate ancestors.
Imagine a normal working day, cutting the bread, making a cup of tea, driving to work, typing or operating a machine, but the only difference being that your hands are in socks – not only would it be difficult to manipulate anything but you would also be missing out on many sensations that you simply take for granted every day. This is, effectively, what you are doing with your feet by putting them in shoes all day.
Most exercises that explore our sense of touch involve our hands. These glabrous and dexterous limbs are very much our go-to feeling organs and a lot of fun we have with them too. I get a lot of simple sensory pleasure touching things, we all do. If we’re close enough, say within an arm’s reach of something, it’s one of the first compulsions any human has – to reach out and touch.
The moment I catch a snake to show to a group, present a small mammal from a live trap, or remove a skull or a shell from a box or pocket – whether the group is composed of school pupils, teachers, families or grey-haired adults with a lifetime of sensory experiences behind them – there will always be someone who reaches out with questing fingers. It’s natural. We live in a world that is forever telling us not to touch, yet it’s such an important faculty at our disposal.
Can you identify a species of tree by touch? Trees are one of the most abundant, accessible forms of natural textures and they show a lot of individual species-specific variance, enough to make a great exercise out of exploring your somatic potential.
A fun, demonstrative game to play with a group of kids or adults is to give them a few moments to find a tree they like the feel of and leave them to their own explorations, drawing attention to the way the bark is textured. The topography of the bark is related to how specific trees grow and twist; get them to feel the scars, the scales, the lenticels: the micro and the macro landscapes. I imagine I’m the size of a bark louse, an adventurer, a ‘Cortez of the cortex’, and I’m trekking across the bark’s mountains and valleys. I then get the group to identify the tree and then, one by one, I take the blindfolded individual to a number of trees and get them to repeat the journey but on several different species of tree, a few minutes each. They have to identify, as soon as they are sure, the type of tree that they first chose. It’s quite revealing how good we are at it. When we focus on our somatic senses we are super-sensitive, able to decipher the Braille that life surrounds us with, right down to details of 0.2 millimetres, if we simply touch, but if we track – that is, slide our fingers, something called dynamic touch – we can improve on that resolution and perceive texture irregularities on the surface as small as 13 nanometres or the size of a large molecule! While not quite as sensitive as our lips, our fingertips still pack in over 2,500 touch receptors for every square centimetre, and our feet are not far behind.
The world of feeling and touching is so vast. Everything we’ve talked about so far is wrapped up in this one sense; it is omnipresent and all-encapsulating. Your skin is your biggest interface with the world around you. It is loaded with millions of receptors that relay information to your brain all the time. Its influence on everything we do is so vast that pinning it down to specifics is beyond the realistic realm of what we are trying to achieve here. But, needless to say, those five million or more touch receptors are pretty useful tools, whether it’s feeling the tiny, gripping jaws of nematocysts as you pull your finger through the tentacles of a sea anemone, feeling the sun on your back, detecting the thermoclines when you dive down to the sea floor, testing a branch, feeling a tree, or stroking a bird’s wing. Those two square metres of skin that we all possess as adults are never to be ignored or underestimated. Like so many of the senses, if we are consciously aware of our natural abilities in this area it can only help us to derive more from our explorations.