I see improvement in my writing from my week at Wildbranch. I hope the reader just sees good writing.
I idolized my cousin, Laurie, and worshipped the ground she walked
on-usually barefoot. She was almost
exclusively barefoot from the earliest days of summer through the last waning
of the season. She was a connoisseur of
that great summertime freedom of going barefoot. I vividly recall her freckled
calves terminating at stubby feet pocked with rankling blisters: poison oak,
sumac and ivy grew abundantly in the southern Adirondacks where we lived. The
soles of Laurie’s feet were calloused from her sojourns and approximated the
shade of tar used on the road in front of our grandmother’s house.
Going barefoot is often associated with poverty, a paucity of manners and
hygiene. Relegated to an indulgence of youth.
As a species we embarked on the road to bi-pedalism around 6 million
years ago, completing the transition to full upright mobility about 4 million
years later. Distinct advantages to this
new- fangled posture included appearing physically larger and more
intimidating, more freedom to use hands to pick fruit and to carry babies,
weapons and tools, economy of energy and ease of movement. Two million more
years would pass before a hominoid foot would be shod.
Upright locomotion generates
physiological issues. Backs, hips, knees
and feet are the most common sites of affliction. To this I can attest. I am a Crossfitter:
A sometimes skeptical, but committed
member of a growing fanatical fringe espousing all things innately functional, natural and paleo from diet
and exercise to work and sleep. Function became dysfunctional as my knees
rebelled, cried out and succumbed to the price paid for the luxury of being a
two -legged animal. Sitting, driving, standing, lying in bed became agonizing. The Crossfit remedy for my suffering includes
going barefoot (for the foot phobic- minimalist footwear). A Crossfit promise
is: We will teach you to walk like a
human being. A very, very old human
being I’ll point out. Paleo’s party line states: natural movement patterns
improve the quality of everyday life. Twenty-
six bones encouraged to go naked.
I hear my mother chortle seismically from her grave. My family raised
and raced sled dogs, Siberian Huskies. At one point we had upwards of twenty dogs. On
occasion, I’d venture barefoot into the dog yard. Being discovered shoeless by my mother brought
a lecture, complete with graphic illustrations from the 1976 World Book Encyclopedia of the
atrocities instigated by Necator
americanus-hookworm. If she were in
a rarified storm of parasitic doom, she would also use my father’s veterinary
books to augment my lesson. My mortality
was more at risk using the two-seater outhouse because it was not a long drop
of four feet, a depth recommended by the Rockefeller Sanitary Commission for the Eradication of
Hookworm Disease of 1910. Yet she
had probably ingested Cestoda, as tapeworm was a rumored ingredient
in several diet aids of the day.
My mother would be quite surprised to learn that going barefoot now has
it’s own term: earthing. Although my mother fretted, scientific studies
are unearthing many health benefits associated with bare- footedness, such as increases in antioxidants, reduced
inflammation, and improved sleep. It seems the electrons in the earth and our
bodies play off one another to our benefit. Grounding to the earth may change
the electrical activity in the brain, reduce blood viscosity, improve skin
conductivity, moderate heart rate, and regulate glucose, the endocrine and
nervous systems.
I would relish the opportunity to tread the old familiar game trails and
dirt roads with my cousin, shovel a wheel barrow load of dog dung, endure my
mother’s hygiene madness and sit in the blessedly cool, cobwebbed confines of
the old outhouse. Regrettably, my cousin was not rewarded with longevity. She died, mysteriously, in her 40s. My mother
succumbed to lung cancer. The dogs went
the way of all good animals and the new owners of my childhood home tore down
the outhouse.
I still like to hang ten terrestrially speaking. And now, climbing down
from the family tree, come new members in need of introduction to the freedom
of two bare feet unrepentantly caressing the earth.
