| THE JOURNEY Driving along Route 6 on Cape Cod, a shoe on the side of the road prompted a conversation between my husband and me that continues to this day: How do the shoes that end up on the side of the road get there? My husband claims to have been a student of the abandoned shoe phenomenon since his days of traveling the country with a glorified Flea Market operation called SuperSales, but it wasn’t until I began nursing the idea of writing a book about these roadside treasures that we dubbed them “Lost Soles.” To the many habits intrinsic to our marriage (like yelling "moo" whenever we see a cow, which frankly, stopped being cute when he started mooing every time I got out of the shower) we've added the involuntary outburst of "Lost Sole" whenever one or both of us spot an abandoned, lost, or runaway shoe on the side of the road. I thought we were onto something original with this whole Lost Sole thing until I shared the book idea with my friend Sharon who informed me that college creative writing professors have been using Lost Soles as fodder for homework assignments for decades. Crushed by the realization that original ideas were beyond the limited scope of my creative ability, I built an urn out of Legos, filled it with the charred remains of my literary dreams and tossed the ashes of Lost Soles into the wind. |
Adidas Impaled Route 130 Brookline, NH
| A few years later, the Lost Soles of Cape Cod were but a distant memory as we feathered our new nest in the rolling hills of Southern New Hampshire and I began working as a newspaper reporter. In a place where the definition of “news” includes stories about milking cows, and where the best way to find “news” to write about is to steal stories from other local “newspapers,” I began to understand the concept of angles. Sure, that other guy may have written a story about milking cows, and sure, I have every intention of stealing it, but I’m going to make the story mine by going at it from a different angle. He wrote about milking cows, but I’m going to mix it up and write about milking cows while drunk. Hah! Now it’s mine! As I honed my stolen story writing skills with articles on drunken cow milking (note: the milkers were drunk, not the cows), it began to occur to me, as it does most people who are incapable of coming up with truly original thoughts and need to find ways to justify their unoriginalitynessism, that I don't have to discard my ideas just because other people had them first. I just have to make those ideas my own. LostSoles.org is the culmination of years of inaction mixed with a few mediocre pictures, and sprinkled with ample evidence that I believe I'm quite clever and funny. There are no other websites exactly like it, though I daresay many come uncomfortably close. |
MeeMaw's Slipper Route 3 Bedford, NH
Over the last few years, I’ve seldom left the house without my trusty camera on the seat beside me just in case a Lost Sole finds me. One summer, my husband and I traveled to Tennessee, partly to attend the Bonnaroo Music Festival, and partly to find Lost Soles. On the trip down, we saw 26 dead deer, 12 bloody raccoons, 1 squished beaver, and 2 dead crows, but not a single shoe. Sometimes Lost Soles just don’t want to be found. Most of the shoes featured on this website revealed themselves to my camera and me when we weren’t looking for them, but I must admit that recently I’ve begun hunting for Lost Soles the way old ladies hunt for yard sales on Saturday morning. There are few things I look forward to more than jumping in my car, rolling back the sunroof, blasting my favorite music, and trolling the streets for abandoned shoes. |
| Who Cares? |
| I suppose not a few people will accidentally land on this website and immediately wonder why any sane person (a pretty silly assumption in and of itself) would spend his or her time looking for abandoned, lost, or runaway shoes. It's a reasonable question, and in my best attempt to answer it, follow me back a few decades to Micajah Pond in Plymouth, Massachusetts. I recall walking down the road on a warm summer night toward the pond, trying to avoid stepping on the squishy remains of poor unfortunate toads who didn't hop across the street fast enough to avoid oncoming cars. On this night, by the light of the slivery moon, my friend and I were engaged in a rare conversation that didn't involve Prince, or roller skating, or the Hanover Mall. As we approached the shores of Big Micajah Pond, I began to wax philosophical in a way only 12-year-olds can, and said, "Wouldn't it be weird if our entire universe was small enough to fit in a speck of dirt under some huge being's fingernail," or something equally profound. I remember, in that moment, becoming acutely aware of my insignificance, and I've never quite shaken that feeling. My friend, on the other hand, simply pushed the thought aside and said, "You think too much." She had better clothes than I and a boyfriend (a seventh grader), so I deferred to her wisdom and tried to stop thinking about things so much. The problem is, people who think too much can't stop thinking too much just because we want to stop thinking too much, or that's what the pink elephant always says, anyway. So we think-too-muchers have to find things to think about so our brains don't implode. |
| Lost Soles give my wandering imagination a direction to travel in. I'm fascinated by the story behind each shoe and by the fact that no matter how wild the scenario I imagine might be, the real reason each shoe ends up on the side of the road could be even wilder. I'm confident that the vast majority of shoes find their way to the roadside in one of two ways: They fall (or are flung) out the window of a car, or their owners put them on the roof of their vehicles, forget about them, and drive off. It happens. I've driven out of a parking lot with a bag of groceries on the roof, and we've all dangled our feet out the car window on a hot summer day. And it's a proven fact that two-year-olds are notorious shoe-chuckers. So where's the mystery? Right here: |
| These ladies were spotted sitting patiently on the side of Route 6 in Sandwich, MA. Because they sat together, it's likely they weren't flung out a window or discarded by accident. This stretch of highway has no shoulder to pull over or walk on, and the nearest rest area or exit is 1/2 mile away. What gives? |
| For several weeks, my friends Dave and Rich drove by these boots on the way to work, and pondered the reason a pair of boots would be sitting, upright, on the side of the road as if waiting for a ride. By the time I got to them, the boots were lying prostrate on the ground as if they'd finally given up and accepted that their ride wasn't going to show. |
| This guy probably should have taken a Mulligan. This golf shoe was found halfway up a steep embankment fifteen feet from the road and about two miles from the nearest golf course. I found no balls in the vicinity, and that's all I say about that. |
| To be honest, I don't want to know the real story behind the Lost Soles I find. I'm quite content with the stories I create and I fear that if I knew the truth, I'd be let down. I don't want to know if Santa's a fraud, I don't want to know who my favorite actor is copulating with, and I really don't want to know what Chicken McNuggets and hotdogs are made from. I like it when a fantasy I create exists in parallel with reality. Never the two shall meet is how that song should go. The real beauty of the Lost Sole, as is the case with all good art, is its ability to become something completely different for each of us. Usually I'm just plain old happy when I find a Lost Sole . It's like getting a present when it's not your birthday, or walking into that little room in the Guggenheim where the works of Kandinski and Marc hide -- my whole body rejoices and I start humming songs about sunshine and little birdies. Other times I see Lost Soles as rebellious kids, running away but not really knowing where they're going. I wish them luck when I leave them and hope they make it to wherever runaway shoes go. I enjoy the thought that, like the sock, the spoon and the can of beans in Tom Robbins' Skinny Legs and All, Lost Soles have a life we can't see and they awaken once the daylight fades to continue their journeys. And sometimes Lost Soles make me angry as they remind me that I'm part of a society that values things above all else yet discards these things so thoughtlessly. As I photograph brand-new pairs of little kid's sneakers laying unclaimed on the roadside, I can't help but think about those little kids in Uganda who walk barefoot 30 miles every night because if they slept, like normal little American kids sleep, they'd be killed the next morning. I also wonder how the men, women and children in China and Taiwan and Indonesia, who spend 12 hours a day stitching and lacing and polishing these shoes we Americans demand, would feel if they knew how casually we discarded their work. Maybe they wouldn't care, or maybe, like me, it would make them mad, but not mad enough to do anything about it. |
Lost Soles
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