Thoughts about shoe tossing.

Does this look familiar? It is the work of shoe tossing artists.

There are shoe trees, and there are shoes in trees. I am sure you have seen them: pairs of shoes hanging by their tied laces from elms, maples, oaks, and chestnuts. Shoe tossing has taken on an art form similar to Christo and Jeanne-Claude's fabric drapery, except it is more like festooning than drapery. A tree festooned with shoes is a happier tree, or so advocates of shoe tossing might assert. They are a youthful group, it takes arm power to toss a shoe forty feet or more in the air. I have tossed a shoe or two in my time. I imagine that it takes more than one toss to get the shoe in the right position, whether it is a branch the shoe artist is aiming at or a wire. Shoes, because of their rubber, probably insulate the trees from lightning strikes. If you see a shoe smoldering on a tree or wire after an electrical storm, this theory will have been proven scientifically. 


Opponents of shoe tossing rightfully argue that shoe tossing is nothing more than very specific littering. I believe there may be a link between those who toss shoes in trees to the novels of J.R.R. Tolkien, and his Ents, because when a tree has shoes, the artist is saying to the tree, "Walk!" I have not seen trees walk before, but apparently banana trees do have the capacity to walk up to 15 centimeters per year. Which explains why runners and walkers eat bananas like nobody's business. If some fish can walk, why not a tree? To test this theory, toss a pair of tennis shoes in a banana tree. If the tree puts the shoes on, then we will know with certainty that it is aware of its newfound improved ability to walk. Paint a circle around the base of the tree. Dare it to perform. But most trees do not walk, they only dream of walking. Rigid oaks will send their mighty roots through your foundation looking for a pair of Air Jordan's. I am of the school of thought that plants are in the know about what is going on around them. They are sensitive souls. Trees are among the most artistic of the plant kingdom. One day it is a tree and the next it is your dining room table or your clogs. If a tree branch overlaps another tree branch they can grow together to form all sort of things. Wood is the most wonderful thing the Creator of the Universe thought of. Axel Erlandson agreed with the Creator in that respect. He shaped trees for years. He formed living trees into chairs, ladders, tables, and other things. http://atlasobscura.com/place/gilroy-gardens-dt  I do not know how those trees felt about his tinkerings. I imagine they were fine with it. People in India had been doing it for a thousand years. Trees still whisper about the bridges they made from tree roots. If you are ever in California, you should swing by Erlandson's legacy. There are plenty of chairs to rest in, (they are made out of living trees). As far as I know, shoe tossers do not go there to toss their shoes. It would be like adding something to a Henry Moore or Alexander Calder sculpture.


I  knew a woman who, for eighteen years, had a thing for shoes. She wasn't Imelda Marcos, she was my wife. When we married she brought with her fifteen boxes of mint condition high heels. They were her only possessions at the time. She had sold shoes for the previous ten years in a tiny shoe store in Rock Springs, Wyoming. She had also had a fling with the married shoe store owner, and as far as I know the owner's wife never threw one shoe at her for that indiscretion, though high heels do make formidable weapons in the hands of an angry jealous woman. However, high heels are not the type of shoe professional shoe tossing artists use. It would be like painting with peanut butter. Eventually, my wife, now my ex-wife due to her using her small stylist feet to find other men to play footsie with, gave her shoes to Goodwill. High heels weren't good for working in the garden, and she didn't like to dance, so the shoes found happier feet. I was walking today and saw a pair of plain black dress shoes sitting side by side on the muddy ground near the sidewalk. They had soles but they were lonely, or they had only just met, and one shoe saw the other across the street and voila! it was love. You have to be a brave shoe to cross some of the streets near me. I had the urge to read the thoughts of those shoes, and to toss them over a tree branch, but I let sleeping shoes lie. Eventually someone will come along and put those shoes on and the adventure will continue.


If shoes could talk, what stories they would tell. I do not know how a person could chronicle the story of a pair of shoes. As Nancy Sinatra sang "Those boots are made for walkin' and that's just what they'll do. One of these days these boots are gonna walk all over you." http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yRkovnss7sg This is one of the all-time favorite songs of shoe tossers. Or it should be. For the record, I intend to be cremated, I won't need shoes where I am going. Which makes me wonder why people who are dead need to be wearing shoes in a casket, unless the people who put the shoes on them believe those stories of the walking dead. (There may be shoe fetish people whose lights just went on, who are planning to dig up shoe magnates in cemeteries across the nation.)


I recently bought two pairs of Italian dress shoes from Goodwill. They are in mint condition. I assume the owner died. What business was he in? Did he leave his wife and go back to Italy? Was he knocked out of his shoes when he was hit by a bus? Was he a member of the mob? These are the sorts of questions I have when I look at shoes, especially discarded shoes. Yesterday, while riding a metro bus I sat opposite a man who looked like he came from Northern Africa, possibly from the Ethiopia or Sudan. He was dressed impeccably, and I paid particular attention to his brand new stylish black shoes. You can tell a lot about a person by their shoes. Their shoes tell you whether they are rebels or Republicans. 


Someone did toss a pair of shoes at George Bush http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0125Qrn24EQ Apparently they mistook him for a tree. Bush ducked really well for an old guy. He made a joke about it, by saying that he wanted to let other shoe throwers know he took a Size 10 shoe. It was really big shoe the guy threw. Big shoes can do serious damage. Boot tossing has been popular in New Zealand for many years. There they prefer trees. These people descend from the Scots who are very into tossing things, like stones and the trunks of trees. Scotland may be the ancestral home of many shoe tossers, but no study has been done that I know of. 


The practice of tossing shoes over power lines is called "shoefiti." This may be somehow linked to aficionados of tossing  toilet paper over trees. The thing about that is that at some point the tissue will break down and become part of the environment. You can hose toilet paper off of trees or wait for it to rain. Or leave it up for Halloween. Shoes. however, can festoon a power line or tree for hundreds of years. There may be city departments worldwide devoted to taking shoes out of trees and off power and telephone lines. Shoes were one of the first things primitive man crafted. Sandals woven from sagebrush have been found in a cave in the Summer Lake area of Southeastern Oregon which are over 14,000 years old. Oh, if only those sandals could talk! I do not know if shoe tossing was popular then, but I imagine that it happened by accident one time, and soon there was a fad that swept ancient North America. Mastodons' tusks were a favorite target. A person with lots of shoes was rich. Later the shoes would lose their luster when horses were domesticated. Then shoeing a horse became the thing to do. Perhaps shoes were once tossed onto the backs of horses. But eventually that fell out of favor, and trees became the norm, because horses and mastodons are often moving.


But we'll never know now. But that's the sort of thing I think of when I think of shoes.