By S.S.
April 3, 2023
Learning to Live barefoot
I grew into living barefoot in small steps. I am on the autism spectrum and as a child I did not like the stimulation of being outside barefoot. I never went outside without shoes. Eventually I became a long distance hiker, spending a lot of time alone in the wilderness because the stimulation of human company was unpleasant to me. In those days I was wearing a style of Redwing boots similar to the current 606 style with excellent ankle and arch support. I would have the soles removed and replaced with Vibram Lug 100 soles, which were more flexible than the original sole and provided amazing traction. I wore (and wore out) several pairs of these boots over several seasons and over literally thousands of miles. I was on my third or fourth pair when one day in the middle of nowhere they began to eat my feet. I was days away from civilization and the boots I had come to depend on to protect me from the wilderness were suddenly unwearable. I was developing large and painful blisters and I had no way to deal with this. I had quite the panic attack…
After considering all my options, I remembered that my old friend Jerry – who was a Vietnam Veteran – told me that he didn’t wear boots while serving in Vietnam, but instead wore several pairs of thick socks. I used to think this was just Jerry telling one of his wild war stories, but now I started thinking of it as a possible solution. With the boots unwearable, I put on all four pairs of wool socks I had with me and began to self rescue. My expectation that wearing nothing but socks would end in disaster proved false. Walking in socks was actually quite pleasant and I managed to walk several dozen miles without difficulty in this way. Jerry was quite amused when I told him about this. He insisted that he did, in fact, stalk around in the jungle in just socks, and now I believed him.
Walking in socks was the tipping point for me into another mode of thinking. It was the half-step to something I had been thinking about for awhile. For at least a decade before this I was questioning the idea of ‘ankle support’, and had noticed that most hikers who broke their ankles did so while wearing heavy hiking boots with lots of ankle support. In the early days of BBS chat rooms and groups I proposed the hypothesis that ‘ankle support’ was the fulcrum on which hikers broke their ankles. Nobody in these early groups disagreed with the hypothesis, but most were insistent that ‘ankle support’ was an absolute necessity – even if they couldn’t exactly articulate why. It was well known by all of us that stiff hiking boots were essential for backcountry travel even if we had no actual evidence for this ‘fact’. Despite my hypothesis proving true over and over again, I continued wearing hiking boots myself.
At the time of this incident, I was working for a shoe & luggage repair shop as the manager. We had orthopedists on staff that built custom shoes and orthotics, and I worked with these people and their patients daily, and did quite a bit of work on such shoes myself. Over time I began to question the entire practice of this branch of ‘medicine’. It was quite obvious to me that we were treating patients who had been mangled by their daily footwear…by putting them into different footwear… This struck me as not being an evidence based solution because none of these patients ever improved or returned to health. This problem was not as acute in men as in women. Some of the ladies had feet that could only be described as ‘mutilated’, and it was abundantly obvious that this was from wearing the high heels and pointed-toed shoes dictated by ladies’ fashion. I had almost daily conversations with my boss and the other orthopedists about this, and I formulated the opinion that tight shoes were the devil, and that ladies’ fashion shoes were designed by Satan himself. The orthopedists all actually agreed with me, but their solution was still ‘better’ shoes. The general population seemed to ignore the fact that shoes were literally crippling them, and continued to come into our shop for a solution. I pondered this paradox for several years while the orthopedists and the customers insisted that shoes were absolutely necessary for human feet, and sometimes made believable arguments in support of that idea. I remember asking my boss at some point, “What did people do before supportive shoes were invented?” His answer was, “Their feet wore out before they were 30.” I did not, at the time, think to question why no other animal’s feet wore out so early.
Even so, I had questions, and the local library wasn’t much help. All the orthopedic books insisted that human feet needed “proper support” to function in the real world without any real evidence in support of that assertion. The internet was too new to contain much information on the subject. It seemed to me that orthopedists only examined and treated unhealthy feet, so their trained opinions were biased by this. Unhealthy feet did perhaps need support, but the insistence that healthy feet did as well seemed suspicious to me. This was in late 2003, and I started hiking in socks regularly while always thinking about the problem. While it may seem obvious to all of us now, going barefoot wasn’t something I seriously considered. Despite often contemplating the question, “What does it mean to be a natural animal in my natural habitat?”, I just couldn’t see it. Despite all my doubt, I had been conditioned to believe that shoes were absolutely necessary for human feet in the same way that most people have been conditioned to believe that clothing is absolutely necessary for human bodies. I tried various other alternatives to hiking boots: Hiking in sneakers. Hiking in sandals. I did like the sandals, but hiking in multiple pairs of socks was somehow more dynamic. Then the October 2004 issue of National Geographic Adventure Magazine arrived. In the article “Jungle Apprentice” (about a visit among the Huaorani Indians) by Jim Thorton, he wrote, “The Huaorani, for their part, continue to glide effortlessly forward on broad bare feet, as cool and natural in their nakedness as I am sweltering and ridiculous in my Crocodile Hunter ensemble and borrowed army boots.”
Something in my head clicked. How could the Huaorani move naked and barefoot in the jungle while Mr. Thorton suffered and stumbled? The entire article seemed to be a lesson in this. Maybe the basic theorem was wrong: maybe shoes were not absolutely necessary for human feet. This was the connection I was missing. I read that sentence over and over again. And again. I had long been a naturist, but I had never connected naturism to being barefoot. This is a shortsightedness that plagues naturists still, and plagues most textiles in an absolute way. Suddenly this disconnect was plain to me. I had been missing something simple and elemental. Being connected to the environment was more than just sun and air on my skin; it also needed to be about the earth under my feet. Being a natural animal in my natural habitat would have to mean losing the civilizing, insulating, and isolating effect of footwear.
Peter Matthiessen’s words were apt in that moment: “Soon the child’s clear eye is clouded over by ideas and opinions, preconceptions, and abstractions. Simple free being becomes encrusted with the burdensome armor of the ego. Not until years later does an instinct come that a vital sense of mystery has been withdrawn. The sun glints through the pines and the heart is pierced in a moment of beauty and strange pain, like a memory of paradise. After that day, we become seekers.”
Jim Thorton’s report about the Huaorani made me a seeker, and that next weekend I drove out to the Black Creek Wilderness area and for the first time did not wear socks. I stepped boldly barefoot onto the trail with a pregnant expectation of a wondrous discovery.
Unfortunately, it totally sucked.
Like being blinded by the sunlight after being underground too long, my feet were too tender for real wilderness walking. My autism wasn’t keen on it either. I had an internal battle between giving up and forging ahead. For better or for worse, Mahatma Gandhi’s words kept admonishing me: “To believe in something, and not to live it, is dishonest.” After many months of slowly conditioning, untaming, and rewilding, my feet were wild enough to endure the trail. After many more months I had made enough peace with the autism (and associated sensory processing problems) that it was quiet. (Later the autism would switch sides and rebel completely against having anything on my feet at all.) In this time barefooting was a physiological and mental experiment that proved largely successful. On strong and able feet I could walk across almost any surface that was not actively destructive. I thought that I ought to be able to hike long distances completely barefoot on dirt trails.
In order to test my working hypothesis I had a friend drop me off early one morning in Black Creek. There is a little-used trail that runs through the wilderness area that’s about 18 miles long. I had a practice at that time of having him drop me off and then pick me up at the other end of the trial at a designated time – anywhere from a few hours to a few days depending on my free time. In this case I wasn’t sure of my pace, so I told him to pick me up at sundown which would give me plenty of time if my experiment didn’t go well. He dropped me off with nothing but my emergency sarong, and I started walking. It was a beautiful day, and so I decided to try a little running – and then it happened.
As I ran I felt a peculiar feeling; a peculiar connection to the planet and the forest around me. As I fell into a rhythm I made my feet light and RAN. The shaman in me reached out and borrowed the gray wolf’s skin and I ran great leaping strides through the forest. The Zen monk in me contemplated the Universal Mind. The Christian in me was born again and perceived the perfection of creation. In this place where past and future were gathered, as I ran full-tilt while dodging rocks and roots, I experienced a perfect silence and a perfect stillness. I was no longer in the wilderness; I was the wilderness itself. As I meditated in motion, I had a mental, physical, emotional, and spiritual enlightenment. I suddenly knew what the Huaorani knew. I covered the 18 miles in just under four hours.
Guru Gandhi’s lesson kept ringing in my head. “To believe in something, and not to live it, is dishonest.” Walking barefoot in the wilderness developed into walking barefoot in the world of men. What had been a physiological and mental experiment had transitioned into an emotional and spiritual experience. This experience became a religious practice, and soon became a psychological and sociological experiment as I challenged the cherished beliefs and institutions of footwear. All of these ideas matured over time. Going about barefoot became a deep seated and contemplative religious practice. I came to appreciate that, in a very real way, there is a scripture written on the world that can only be read with your naked feet.
Eventually the internet matured and groups like the SBL appeared and informed me that I was not the only person to come to some of my experiences and conclusions. That’s a comfort of sorts because it means I’m not the only freak in the circus. I find the study of the legal, psychological, and sociological aspects of barefooting among my fellow humans absolutely fascinating. You’d think that such a simple thing would be of no consequence, but it is. Being a natural person in human society is apparently unnatural.
Somewhere along the way I stopped taking my shoes off; I just don’t bother to put them on in the first place.