Topic 39: On Going Barefooted

Carol:

Here He Comes Justa Walkin’ Down the Street

My favorite scene in the 1979 movie 10 is the beach segment. Swathed head to toe in a heavy sweatsuit, Dudley Moore imagines himself running in slow motion along a smooth shoreline to embrace a corn-row coiffed Bo Derek running towards him in slow motion, all legs and sexy movement choreographed to the sensuous rhythms of Bolero. Bo is the iconic fantasy woman. Unfortunately, there is a lot more of the goofy Dudley Moore in me than the lithesome Bo Derek. When I run on the beach, the sounds in my head are more rap than rhapsody:  “ooh, ah, it burns; ooh, ah, throw me a towel; ooh, ah, it stings.”
 

Flash forward to the winter of 1989. Swathed in boots, overcoat, mittens and muffler, I make my way along the long, smooth path from Yavapai College to the parking lot. I’m going in slow motion, held back by the gusts of wind swirling snow flakes into my face. I look up, and glimpse a coatless figure coming toward me, all legs and pig-tailed hair. Am I having a retro-vision of 10? As the figure approaches, the image sharpens and I see that it is a man, maybe not a 10 but somewhere up there, and…..he is barefooted. I pull my heavy coat more snugly around me as I prepare to pass, ready for a close encounter with Prescott’s own iconic fantasy man Cody Lundin.

Cody has been a familiar figure around Prescott for more than 20 years. He founded his Aboriginal Living School here in 1991 and teaches popular outdoor survival skills classes at Yavapai College.  Why the bare feet?  “Going barefoot forces me to pay attention to my environment. I see more, I have better focus, I feel a greater connection to the planet; all very valuable survival traits” (source: Cody Lundin homepage). The shorts, long pigtails and bare feet are probably the most superficial evidence of an expertise and philosophy committed to a primitive, back-to-nature lifestyle.

If Cody’s bio sounds familiar, you may be a fan of his Discovery Channel television show Dual Survival. I haven’t seen it myself, but my husband insisted on recording all the episodes and he may someday get around to actually watching the final 6 stored on our TV along with Sons of Anarchy and old Deadwood episodes. 

Lundin celebrated the success of Dual Survival by hosting a screening of the final episode in the Yavapai College Performing Arts Center, joined by an auditorium full of  friends, fans and former students. His television show isn’t the beginning of a public career, just another phase of one that has included a cover story in the October 2003 issue of Backpacker magazine, interviews in The Atlantic magazine (May 2009) and National Geographic Adventure (August/Sept 2009), and countless radio and television spots. His latest? A July 27, 2010 interview with Al Gauthier and Tina Dubois, hosts of The Living Barefoot Show, a Podcast and website dedicated to "exploring the world of, you guessed it, living barefoot” (source: Living Barefoot website).

As for me, I’m all in favor of living a natural lifestyle. And what’s more natural than bare feet?  But, that’s not MY nature. “Ooh, ah, hand me my slippers.”

Sources:
 Cody Lundin
 Dual Survivors
 Living Barefoot
 

Megan:

Musings On Going Barefoot

My little cousins basically live on a farm (with the chickens) and spend most of their time barefoot. I know their parents put them in shoes before sending them out to play, but they don’t keep them on as evidenced by the 5 pairs of little shoes I found within kicking  distance of the swing-set. I was baby-sitting them last week and the little girl had a cold and was in a bad mood. She buried herself in some pillows all the while mumbling that she had a lot of friends but I wasn’t one of them and that she wished her mommy was there. After a couple minutes the grousing gave way to snoring.

                              

Two childhood influences have shaped my preference for going barefooted. The first was Pippi Longstocking, who always wore huge shoes so she could wiggle her toes. I imagine the idea charmed me at first, but it eventually developed into a thing  –  if I can’t wiggle my toes then I get  claustrophobic. As I’ve gotten older and developed a liking for cute shoes, I’ve still never gotten into pointy-toed shoes. Most high heels trap my toes, so I can’t wear them very long, but I’ve discovered that if I can see my toes – like with peep-toe shoes  – even if I can’t move them, I’m ok.

( I would not be okay if I was already barefooted, but unable to move my toes. )

The second demonstrates the effect my friends had on me. I must have been about 4, when I came home from the babysitter and solemnly informed my father that my friend Crystal didn’t like Jews. “What do you mean?” cried Dad, aghast.
“Everyday,” I continued, “Crystal comes home and takes off her socks and her Jews.”
Eventually, I grew out my lisp, but not the habit of kicking off my shoes the second I walk in the door.

(My parents stopped using that babysitter after it turned out that my brother’s frequent mispronunciation of the word “truck” was not, in fact, a mispronunciation but echolalia.)

Anyway, I go barefoot whenever I can. When I was studying Spanish in Mexico, this horrified my host lady’s grandson. He was about 5 and whenever he saw me wandering the house without shoes, he would point at my feet and scream. His mother explained to me that she broke him of the same habit with stories of scorpions and broken glass and that maybe she’d gone a little far.

Speaking of broken glass, last summer I was in a wedding. The night of the rehearsal dinner carried on in merriment and drinking long after Kelly, the bride-to-be, had gone to bed. Someone dropped a glass and it shattered on the kitchen floor, and the groom-to-be asked us to be sure to clean up every shard because “Kelly likes to go barefoot, and I don’t want her to get hurt.” That’s when I knew for sure that I liked him. 

It's starting to get too cold to go barefoot around the house now, but I'm holding out as long as I can.