Being a Man by Robert Twigger

Author:Robert Twigger [Twigger, Robert]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780297863908
Publisher: Orion
Published: 2010-06-03T00:00:00+00:00

The Wall

Walking in crippling boots with a heavy pack in high mountains is not fun. Every step requires an act of will. Every stop is marred by knowing that one will have to start walking again, all too soon. Even the magnificent views seem poisoned, inked over with agony, seen through bleary spectacles of pain.

And passersby, fellow walkers one might have greeted, are ignored, hardly noticed by the trudging, limping hunchback, unmanned by every step he takes, his posture broken.

Napoleon was wrong: an army marches on its feet, not its stomach.

It was all my own fault. Having extolled the virtues of real boots, for a real walk, as worn, no doubt, by real men like Hemingway and me, I had failed to discover their true nature in the short time I had taken to break the boots in properly. Now they were exacting revenge with a cruel bastinado reminiscent of the finest inventions of a Persian Court torturer.

Breaking boots in is a mysterious process. One school believes that boots are never broken in. Instead it is one’s feet, far softer and more malleable than leather and rubber, which are broken in to fit the unyielding boot.

The leather does stretch, creases do form in the upper, so something is going on. For some reason, though, if the boot is worn for an extended period of walking too soon (real boots, I’m talking here) something goes hideously wrong. The gentle period of acclimatisation is replaced by a chain reaction: the boot wears the foot in one place and when there is no reprieve it just gets worse and worse.

The problem was not blisters or pinching. This was far more serious: the back of the boot was biting into my Achilles tendon.

I tried wearing another pair of socks, cutting insoles made of karrimat material to raise my feet above the tendon-cutting heel. I tried even more layers of socks, then, in desperation, only one thin pair, leaving the boots loose. This was dangerous, given that I was carrying a high heavy load and the path was often narrow and above a great fall, but I did not care, I was past caring, limping into a half-hell where personal safety is just not a concern.

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