Memories and Hiking Shoes

[ellarien]

There's a batch of photos in the latest scans my mother sent that brings back memories -- more specific, and less happy, than most of the memories that come with those photos.



I was just fifteen, my sister was not quite eleven, and we're sitting among the heather by a small standing stone on a Derbyshire moor, near the beginning of what was supposed to be fairly ambitious hike.

It was a disaster. I had new shoes; before that I'd always hiked in my ordinary school shoes, which is perfectly possible when you're young and light, on the nubbly gritstone rock of the Dark Peak. These shoes, though, were specifically hiking shoes; thick, heavy laceups, with cleated soles and two inches of clumpy heel, and I'd never worn them further than the top of the garden. I was already hurting by the time we got to that first halt, and I was miserable the whole way. We cut it short, I think, at Hathersage; I was recovered enough after tea to go down to town to the Library in my summer sandals, but the whole experience put me off hiking for what seemed like a long time, and it may have been the last long hike I did with my father. (I was a teenager, after all. And I had no idea how few years we had left to do things together.)

We did go out again one time a while later, though, just the two of us, with me in my school shoes again. (Low-heeled slip-ons, with only a lightly textured sole.) I'd always thought it was Grindsbrook, but there's a sequence of photos that makes me question that; the Burbage valley in early April, all glorious golden-brown with dead bracken, with patches of snow among the rocks of the edge, and a shot of me sitting by the triangulation point on Stanage edge, apparently in those shoes. I don't remember the snow; I do remember being with my father, and the rocks under my feet. Perhaps I was concentrating too hard on not slipping to really notice the scenery.

I went away to University a couple of years later, and then my father's health deteriorated. There were still expeditions, but not so many or so far. Nearly a decade later, in the early days of my gainful employment, my mother took me to the Lake District, and for that I found another pair of hiking shoes. I just walked into a shoe shop in Birmingham and bought them; low-heeled brown leather laceups with cleated soles, much lighter and softer than the ill-fated pair, but I was still wearing those this summer, nearly twenty years later. They won't do another summer, though; the heels and soles were breaking down and leaking. We had them resoled, but not with cleats, so I'll have to find something else to wear, the next time my mother and I go walking.

Comments

[kicking-k.livejournal.com]

That was more or less my first experience with hiking boots, too - we had to have them for the school outdoor-activities trip when I was fourteen. I'd worn them on some longish walks, but never all day, and unfortunately they ripped my feet to shreds.

When my sister inherited them two years later, she got on fine with them, which leads me to believe they were a size smaller than they should have been.

At the time, I had Doctor Marten shoes for school, and I now think I'd have been much better off in those (I've since climbed moderate hills in DM boots without a problem). However, we were expressly told that DMs Would Not Do, so boots it was.

I'm contemplating buying some at the moment - it having been fifteen years at least since the last ones.

[ellarien]

I think the major problem with these, apart from the stiffness, was that they came too high up my foot and weren't deep enough there. I never did manage to break them in; we finally threw them out a few years ago, a little scuffed from a school trip down a coal mine but otherwise nearly unworn.

I don't think I'd have been allowed to wear DMs for school, even in the sixth form. (Do they come in brown?)

[kicking-k.livejournal.com]

:) Yes, they do. Ours were black, though. They did contravene the regulation that heels must be less than an inch high, but then some brave souls pointed out that all the male science and technology teachers were wearing them.

I wasn't allowed them until my feet had definitely stopped growing, thus cementing my reputation as Just Not Cool.