Lost Soles

Have you ever been curious about a shoe you saw on the freeway? Or why shoes are thrown over street wires? Or who hung the boots on the fence posts on the way to Ellensburg?

These are questions I ask myself. I wonder what the story is behind the shoes. I've taken photos of shoes while on vacation in and out of the U.S. that are in strange places. I'm very curious about it.

Last year while in Mexico, some local surfers gave us directions to a locals surf beach. It was dank, muddy and a long swampy trail. We waded across the swamp in one spot. Yuk. Probably, not smart. Along this trail there were the usual flip flops, but there were also dress shoes and tennis shoes, big shoes and baby shoes, and lots of them. I toyed with the idea that these "lost soles" belonged to those other tourists who were sent in search of this surf beach. We were now entering the swamp domain of a rogue crocodile.

Everyone else laughed it off, but a week later we found out there were crocodiles in that swamp.

Yesterday, morning my curiosity was once again sparked while driving into work on Mount Baker Highway.  The picture looked like this: a man's brown leather slip-on shoe in the middle of the road. From two diagonal points from the shoe, on the side of the road there was a very large dead deer and a foam dumbbell water weight for swimming. What could have happened here?

I would love to have had my camera to take a picture of that scene. My mind has been constructing different stories that tie those three items together and how the man lost his shoe while wrestling with the deer and how does that dumbbell weight figure in. Great fodder for thought.


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