My hiking boots are dead. I killed them. I killed them with trails and mountains and forests and rocky beaches. For 8 years they clung to life, never once getting holey or allowing injury to my toes. Fitting it was that they died on Mt. Hino, oft touted as Fukui's Mt. Fuji. It was a hard hike that ended with their death rattle.
I bought the boots in 2014 when "Words from the Road," a short-lived attempt at being a travel blogger came into the world. I ran a successful crowd-funding campaign meant to bear a book about hiking the Camino de Santiago in Spain. The project failed, but in preparation I bought this pair of Vasque boots at an Eastern Mountain Sports in Rochester, NY. I feel as though I've forgotten my best friend's name after their passing, but I think the boots are $220 Valus XT's, or at least some older version of them.
It's a good rule to not get too attached to stuff. A cup is a vessel for drinking; a dry bag for protection; boots for safety, comfort, and mobility. Attachment isn't good, but valuing something is. I have to admit of all the items ever to break or reach the end of their purpose, these Vasque boots are the only one I can remember(*1) really making me feel sad.
There is a sort of companionship that comes with something you rely on to keep you safe. While the boots never bathed in the dust of El Camino de Santiago, they tasted the mud of the Nakasendo Trunk Road, the Tokaido Road, the Kinki Nature Trail, and a variety of others. They took step after step on countless mountains. I am grateful for their existence.
I truly valued my boots, but what is value? In a conservative estimate, they walked 1,200 kilometers (750 miles). If value is monetary, I paid 18 cents per mile or $27.50 per year. They were a really excellent investment.
The thing is...who thinks about that? I am concerned about something different. 200 of those miles worked into my boots were with a close friend who lives 9,500 kilometers away over weeks and liters of sweat. The boots sat on my feet as I looked over cities around my adopted home and pondered on the choices I'd made and hadn't yet. They stood tough as I took my new family up a local mountain for the first time. They're imbued, enchanted. They seem more than leather and an array of synthetic fiber.
The thing with those Vasque boots, though, is not anything corporeal. I don't care for their appearance, didn't even when they were freshly hatched from the factory. A boot to me, so long as it fits and does its job, is like any other. Yet the remains of those boots have sat in a bag in my office for five months. I think about throwing them out every week when I'm getting garbage ready and there they sit.
I confess I moved on quickly. The Vasque boots parted with their right sole in September 2022. Their replacement, a cheap $60 of Vision Peaks, took their first steps up a local mountain with me in December. It's a good rule not to get attached to stuff. It breaks. It fulfills its purpose.
I don't mourn the boots. I treasure the memory of everything they've seen. Perhaps it's a weird effect of nearing what is concretely middle-age, but I worry that these new boots won't see as much. I worry that the next eight years of miles won't grant me friendships or sights so astonishing that they appear in my dreams and in sudden daydreams years later.
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*1: Almost certainly I've had other experiences, but none as an adult. I'm starting to recall a childhood incident involving my mother and a broken Spider-man action figure as I write this.
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