41 at Midnight - Part I

I once owned the world’s greatest pair of hiking boots. They were dark green, my favorite color. The uppers were suede that hugged my feet but were never tight. They were streamlined, not bulky. The soles had great grip. They didn’t slip on wet rocks. They didn’t slip off of my mountain bike pedals either. And, even with the mid-thickness soles, they were light and never weighed me down.

I wore them for nearly seven years on every cycle-slash-hiking trip I made. On many of those trips, I had to pack my bike on my shoulder while my shoes carried me safely across rocks and through swift water until I could re-mount and ride on dry ground again. I climbed over and rock-hopped boulders in the James River, never slipping. Once I squatted in them, half a mile from Hawksbill Summit in the Blue Ridge Mountains and slid all the way down a loose graveled path nearly to the bottom of the trail. At the bottom of the trail, my amazing boots were dusty, but undamaged.

And then came the heart breaking moment when I noticed a crack in the sole of each boot. They had broken all the way through, right along the line of the part that got bent every time I stepped. My next day off from work, I showed up at the cobbler’s shop in Fort Branch, Indiana, hoping he would be able to fix them.

I set the boots on the counter. The cobbler picked them up, turned each one upside down, had a look at the soles and started shaking his head back and forth. It was not the response I wanted to see. He set my boots back down and told me they couldn’t be repaired. “Can’t you just re-sole them?” He reiterated a definite “no.” He insisted they were beyond hope, and there was nothing he could do. His shop had been recommended, and he maintained a busy business. I took a few moments to consider this epic catastrophe; the wheels in my head were turning and burning. I examined every corner I could find in my imagination for a solution. It seemed a whole lot of other folks also had shoes or boots they didn’t want to give up on yet either, but he’d deemed theirs fixable. But, mine he insisted had “given up the ghost.”

I decided I didn’t like the cobbler, and that he couldn’t possibly know everything. If he couldn’t help, I’d have to help myself. I picked up a big tube of Shoe Goo from a nearby rack and laid it on his counter. While I was digging out money to pay the bill, the cobbler told me that using it would make a bubbled ridge along the bottom of my boots. He advised they’d be uncomfortable and it would only hold together for another week or two. I thanked him for the warning, gave him a big semi-sarcastic smile, and then walked out the door with the Shoe Goo and my boots. My boots weren’t dead. With a little dab of creative attention, they’d be just fine.

As soon as I got home, I opened the Shoe Goo, and began saturating the cracks with the stuff. After they dried, I tried them on, and grimaced when I realized the cobbler had been right. My dislike for the man jumped another couple of notches. The Goo made a bumpy ridge along the bottom that I could feel when I walked but, I wanted to at least try to wear them a little longer. Something important could be coming up that I might need them for, like a cycle trip, or a formal dinner.

Two weeks later, my sister and I made arrangements to travel about two hours north to Terre Haute, Indiana. We planned to help our friend Tay (Tammy Prien Franklin since her marriage of a few months ago). Tay was moving from a small upstairs apartment, to another upstairs apartment in another part of the city. There would be lots of climbing and carrying of heavy stuff. I was so happy I’d saved my boots!

The morning of the move, Alicia (my sister) and I were up before dawn. By sunrise we were showered, dressed, Terre Haute bound and hyped after several cups of strong coffee. Other friends met us at Tay’s, and once we were all assembled, with instructions of what to pack where, the moving party was in full swing.

By 2 p.m., my legs were feeling like rubber. By five p.m., I was ready to lie down on the pavement at the foot of the new apartment’s staircase and let the others just step over me. The ridges in my boots from the Shoe Goo had worn blisters on the bottom of my feet. I was miserable. I was also ready to admit that the cobbler might have been right.

When Tay’s furniture and deco was finally squared away, it was late in the evening and we decided to break for food before leaving town. We were just in time to make it to a mall restaurant for dinner with our friends before everyone parted ways.

It was nearing midnight when we left Terre Haute, and within half an hour’s drive from the city, we were in the dark, other than what the car’s headlights provided. Alicia and I talked while we travelled, and we both agreed that although it’d been a whole lot of sweating and hauling, and we both had sore backs, sore arms and sore feet, the trip had been worth it. We’d gotten to spend the whole day with close friends, and it’d been a nice break from a recently boring stretch with nothing adventurous going on in our neck of the woods. Fifteen more minutes of driving down Highway 41 in the dark, and we were suddenly stuck with more adventure than either of us wanted and certainly not the sort we’d wished for.

Alicia was driving and noticed the headlights suddenly dimming. The car slowed as well, and she steered us to the right, onto the shoulder about the time all of the power went out and the engine stopped. Thankfully the outside lane was wide, and a field lay beyond it. Alicia turned the key, trying twice to bring the engine to life, but … nothing.

We were stuck with a dead vehicle in a desolate area. This was in the late nineties when few of us had mobile phones. It was the middle of the night. It was cold. We had no phone. We were very tired. Our feet had had it, and only God knew how far we were going to have to walk to get help. I can’t begin to describe how happy we were, and how much we were looking forward to this late night unexpected addition to the adventure that had started before sunrise the morning before.