BARE FEET
Sandals, like other footwear, are a compromise. The naked foot functions best without them. While bipedalism, as the performance of apprehended drunken drivers trying to walk a straight line suggests, becomes hazardous whenever sensation and balance are compromised, the structure of the foot is not to blame. The foot is one of a complex series of adaptations to bipedal locomotion, and one of the last to achieve its current configuration. It is a masterpiece of 26 bones, 33 joints, 107 ligaments, and 19 muscles that can withstand the repeated forces of up to 600 pounds while running. Yet each square inch of the sole has 1,300 nerve endings to make possible the constant adjustments needed for its role in weight bearing, balancing, and propulsion. The human foot is unique in the animal world for its two arches, transverse (side to side) and longitudinal (lengthwise). These let us stand upright by spreading the weight on the plantar surface (sole) of the foot as broadly as possible and by forming a tripod, absent in other primates. (Chimpanzees and gorillas can walk on their hind legs for a limited distance, but they cannot stand still bipedally on the ground without an object for support.) The first digit of the human foot, the big toe or hallux, has grown to bear the stress of locomotion, and the ball of the foot cushions us and helps us push off. The human foot also retains surprising potential dexterity. People born without normal hands have been known to develop complex manipulative skills in their feet, transferring the brain’s motor control from one set of limbs to the other. A French physician, commenting on the mediocre work of the armless painter César Ducornet (1806–1856), once widely exhibited in provincial museums, noted that the mind that conceived the work was inferior, but that the foot had executed it correctly.3
People in industrial societies may assume that the tender sole would soon be ravaged by its environment without the protection of footwear. In fact, wearing shoes creates this sensitivity. After a week of barefoot living, the foot forms a protective thickened layer that, unlike calluses, does not generally block the pleasurable sensations of contact with the earth. A billion people on earth still go barefoot—some of them in harsh conditions, like the Seri of the Sonoran coast of Mexico, opposite Baja California, whose feet are toughened by the sand until they form a “Seri boot.” In the rough, hilly regions of the Congo, unshod indigenous people developed a keratin coating on their soles so thick that they were able to walk on live coals without feeling pain. Some urban workers have managed without shoes. One investigation of several hundred barefoot rickshaw men of Shanghai, whose work took them over twenty miles of cobblestones and pavement every day, found that arch deformities and foot ailments were rare.4
Even in the industrial West, a surprising number of enthusiasts for barefoot living remain, despite a cultural bias dating from Roman times, when Greek barefoot customs disappeared, sandals represented imperial power, and bare feet became a mark of slavery or the most extreme poverty. In Coptic Christianity and later in some Western monastic orders, abandonment of footwear signified deep humility and poverty. St. Francis embraced the custom as a way of imitating Christ, though the order he founded later turned to sandals. But many other men and women, and especially children, have avoided footwear not to mortify the flesh but to indulge it. Well into the twentieth century, country children often went barefoot, especially in Ireland. So strong was the custom that Friedrich Engels, in The Condition of the Working Class in England, reported that Irish immigrants were spreading it, especially to “the poorer native women and children of the factory towns.” At the turn of the twentieth century, many Irish children still wore no shoes, even in strictly uniformed schools. In fact, some schools barred shoes as ostentatious. To urban Americans of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, John Greenleaf Whittier’s “barefoot boy with cheek of tan” represented rural innocence, and now signifies nostalgia. In the sleepy county seat of Belvidere in northern New Jersey, for example, I have seen a plaque marking the “shoe tree,” where rural children were said to have put on their shoes before entering a nearby church, reversing the injunction to Moses to “put off thy shoes” in Exodus 3:5. (Even in the United States, bare feet are still permitted in some Amish and Hawaiian classrooms.)5
In the early twenty-first century there is a vigorous barefoot hiking movement; one of its most active groups is led by an English-born theology graduate living in Connecticut, Richard Keith Frazine, who literally seeks to tread lightly on the earth. “Walking barefoot, as Nature intended,” he explains, “humans hardly disturb even the most delicate ground cover and can delight in the soft, carpet-like feel of moss in good conscience.” His fascinating book shows how the technique of barefoot walking must be relearned. Months of conditioning may not be necessary, as skeptics believe, but it takes several miles of practice on well-maintained trails a few days a week for two or three weeks to accustom the feet to what was once their natural activity. The rush of new sensations from the environment, while ultimately pleasurable, can at first be overwhelming in their unfamiliarity, as though we had grown up with our ears covered. And barefoot hiking requires learning a somewhat different technique of walking, not just for enjoying contact with the forest floor, but for noticing and avoiding obstructions and poison ivy and dealing with insects. “You must choose each footfall,” Frazine explained to a local reporter as they crossed a stream. “Anticipate each step. If you kick, shuffle or drag your feet, your chance of injury multiplies enormously.” Proper barefoot hiking demands a vertical step in which the foot conforms itself to the forest floor. A Canadian barefoot hiker describes a maneuver for reacting to sharp objects: rolling the foot and rolling off to the side. Even the return to intimacy with nature demands learning technique—and using technology like insect repellent, and lanolin as a foot conditioner.6
SHAPING HEALTHIER FEET?
Despite the still flourishing, innocuous fetishism of the baby shoe, the unshod child’s foot remains an exemplar of the body’s uncorrupted state. Bare feet appear to be safer for children than many shoes, according to one study of injuries seen in the emergency room of the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia in 1988. Falls cause half of all childhood accidents, and the study showed that injuries from loss of footing were more common among children with smooth-soled shoes than among the barefoot.7
Two generations ago, medical and popular opinion recommended children’s shoes not only for safety but to prevent flat feet. The stigma of the flat foot appears to date from nineteenth-century military medicine, preoccupied with foot irregularities as signs of physical and mental degeneration and unfitness for service. (In German-speaking Europe, Jewish feet were especially suspect.) Medical authorities believed in early mechanical intervention for healthy foot development. As late as 1920, a medical text warned that “infants should be taught to creep, and early walking discouraged.” Orthopedists and pediatricians favored stiff shoes with corrective inserts, some still used in special cases and others long forgotten. By the 1930s, no fewer than fifty “doctor’s” shoes and one hundred types of arch support were available in the United Kingdom. Manufacturers in the United States (following the lead of the physician, shoemaker, and master salesman William Mathias Scholl) were equally zealous in producing “corrective” juvenile shoes. As William Rossi later observed, these shoes had no scientific basis. Even now there is no standard for a healthy or unhealthy, high or low arch.8
And at least in the United States, the military itself has changed its stance. For decades, North American army doctors rejected conscripts and volunteers alike for flat feet, even star athletes like Satchel Paige (who thereby enjoyed a lucrative civilian career during World War II) and accomplished hikers like the professional hunter who was turned down after walking two hundred miles to Edmonton to enlist. A 1947 Canadian army survey of foot problems warned that training recruits with low arches was a “useless waste of time, effort and money.” This opinion was challenged only in 1989, when scientists at the U.S. Army Institute of Environmental Medicine in Natick, Massachusetts, found that soldiers
with low arches had half as many foot problems as those with high insteps. High arches may be more rigid and unstable; flat feet, unless they are painfully so, are more flexible and better equipped to absorb the shocks of exercise. One of the study’s investigators told a reporter: “I’ve seen drill sergeants with arches as convex as the bottoms of rocking chairs, who are active and successful.”9
Beginning in the 1970s, medical researchers began to question the value of many corrective shoes prescribed for children. They saw great variation in normal, healthy young feet. A study of the feet of 2,000 children, published in 1971, revealed that of those who were wearing special shoes for flat feet, only 43 percent had true pes valgus (the technical term for an abnormally low longitudinal arch). The “corrective” shoes that these children had been wearing had not had any effect on their arches. In the early 1990s, orthopedists in India examined the static footprints of 2,300 children and found that the incidence of flat feet among those who used footwear, especially closed shoes, was three times higher than among children who were exclusively barefoot, although the longitudinal arches of the great majority of the flat-footed children recovered naturally after the age of eleven. Studies elsewhere found that 80 percent of two- to four-year-old children were beginning to show malformation of the toes as a result of wearing shoes; that nearly three-quarters of children’s shoes are between a half size and 3.6 sizes too small; and that the lasts (wooden or plastic forms on which shoes are built) of children’s shoes differ from the dimensions of normal children’s feet. After a review of the literature, the orthopedist Lynn T. Staheli concluded that the best criterion for children’s shoes is how well they approach the barefoot state, including their spaciousness, lightness, flexibility, and porosity. Except in cases of congenital deformity—some flat feet and other conditions can be painful and do benefit from treatment—the dream of molding ideal feet through stiffly engineered shoes is as dated as the idea of the superiority of formula to mother’s milk.10
Children’s and adults’ feet still need protection, and not just from hostile terrain and climate. The domestication of dogs, for example, has exposed humanity to the risks of the bloodsucking hookworm, endemic in the tropics and subtropics. In the glorious days of shoeless youth in the American South before World War I, there were nearly four million cases of hookworm infection, and even one barefoot enthusiast in Charleston, South Carolina, acknowledged that he needed hospital treatment for it while growing up. Hookworm larvae usually enter the body through exposed toes and multiply in the intestine; the parasite can rob children of up to a quarter of their normal growth and drain the energy of adults. Elsewhere in the world, many of the most dangerous parasites are waterborne, notably the flatworms that cause schistosomiasis (bilharzia), which affects up to 200 million people globally. Footwear can be a barrier against the larvae, which are transmitted by snails spread inadvertently since the nineteenth century by migration, colonization, and irrigation projects. The alternative to covering one’s feet may be chronic damage to internal organs from the massive release of eggs by the females. Next to sanitation, footwear has been such a major theme of antiparasite campaigns that Southern critics of the 1909 (John D.) Rockefeller Sanitary Commission for the Eradication of Hookworm Disease accused the philanthropist of planning to enter shoe manufacturing. These critics were overlooking the drop in the rate of infection once children reached the “shoe age” of fourteen. And during Henry Ford’s unsuccessful attempt to grow rubber in the Brazilian Amazon, the seringueiros (rubber gatherers) balked at the company doctor’s campaign to combat hookworm by replacing their sandals with shoes.11
There are other risks in modern life. Ubiquitous rusty nails can transmit tetanus. Even the original habitat of barefoot hiking, the woodlands of the northeastern United States, are infested by deer ticks bearing Lyme disease. Urban environments present risks as well. In the 1950s, physicians at the University of Hong Kong found the feet of the city’s unshod fishermen and — women more mobile and structurally far healthier than those of a group of their shoe-wearing patients. Impressed as they were with the fishers’ ability to grasp lines and nets with their toes, they also found in their keratinized soles “many minor lacerations due to traumata” and observed that striking stones and other objects on the ground had produced toenails that were “thick, cornified, and short with uneven and jagged edges.” Footwear, then, may not correct but it can protect. Each modification of the environment increases the pace of the technological treadmill. Once we have stepped on it, we have stepped into footwear.12
THE SANDAL: ANCIENT SOPHISTICATION
The simplest solution is the sandal: open footwear, secured by leather, fiber, or other material or, especially in India, grasped by a knob between the first and second toes. Sandals may have appeared independently in widely different societies, or they may have been diffused and elaborated during the thousands of years of migrations by which the earth was peopled One of the first depictions of sandals, on a five-thousand-year-old Egyptian palette, is of the barefoot King Narmer followed by a servant bearing a pair of them. The Egyptians of the Eighteenth Dynasty (1567–1304 B.C.) wore sandals of leather and of woven palm-leaf strips little different in appearance from some of today’s beachwear. By the end of this period, there was a hieroglyph for sandal, a long oval with an inscribed, upside-down V representing the thong, that would be universally recognizable today. We know more about sandals and shoes than about most other items of apparel from prehistory through modern times. Many of the plant fibers used to make the sandals of desert peoples were unappealing to insects, while tannin has prevented the biodegradation of leather deposited in bogs and even in the remains of the Titanic on the North Atlantic seafloor.13
Today sandals evoke primitive simplicity and a return to the natural. And they do affect our feet far less than closed shoes. They may be the most gender-neutral footwear of all, removed from the swagger of boots and the swaying walk of high-heeled shoes—even though recent medical research has suggested that the latter do not have nearly the radical effects on posture that laypeople and professionals alike had supposed. But sandals, while connoting naturalness, are far from simple. They have inspired not only elaborate techniques of manufacture but unexpected changes both in the feet and in the act of walking.14
One of the first memorable descriptions of these differences occurs in Herman Melville’s Typee (1846): the toes of the Marquesas Islanders are “like the radiating lines of the mariner’s compass, pointed to every quarter of the horizon.” Steele F. Stewart, an orthopedist who studied barefoot peoples around the world a century after Melville’s voyage to the South Seas, underscored the differences between these and the shoe-wearing nations. The fourth and fifth toes have a prehensile curl toward the mid-line of the foot, and barefoot peoples grasp things with their toes. Their normal gait is smooth and restful, a rolling motion beginning on the heel, continuing with the outer edge of the foot, and ending with the ball of the foot and the toes, which extend and contract as the foot makes contact, helping give a final push while walking. While Stewart did not believe that sandals interfered with the foot—at least, not if they were cut to the foot’s natural shape—later studies suggest that even the simplest footwear starts to rearrange the bones of those who habitually use it. A team of Japanese medical researchers compared the feet of barefoot East Javanese, sandal-wearing Filipinas, and shoe-wearing Japanese, and discovered that the second were in some ways closer to the third than to the first. In the Filipinas, the ratio of foot breadth to foot length in proportion to their body mass was similar to that of (shod) Japanese women. Sandals also interfere with the roll that Stewart observed. And while they do not deform the small toes as most closed shoes do and preserve and even develop the toes’ natural gripping abilities, thong sandals do increase the separation between the big and second toes of children who grow up wearing them. Japanese authorities, it is said, were able to distinguish assimilated Koreans from ethnic Japanese during World War II by inspect
ing their bare feet, as Koreans generally did not wear zori. On the other hand, expatriate Westerners are sometimes bemused to find their children growing up with such a gap. Those who take to zori later find the adjustment less natural. A young American teacher who came to Hawaii in the 1960s, Victoria Nelson, took months to develop the necessary “zori callus” between her toes, alternating several pairs so that the blister, whose location varied from pair to pair, had time to heal.15
To judge from extensive remains that have been found, early sandal technology makes much of today’s mass-market footwear appear crude, no matter how elaborate the machinery that produces it. Armed with a new carbon dating method, accelerator mass spectrometry, which spares all but a tiny sample of ancient textiles, archaeologists have been discovering that complex and beautifully produced sandals were older than they had thought. Some sagebrush-bark shoes from Oregon turn out to be nine thousand years old, and various remains from a single cave in Missouri have been dated as between eight hundred and eight thousand years old. The earliest was a padded sandal of plant fiber with a pointed toe, a sling-back formed from twisted lengthwise elements, and a cord zigzagging through loops across the foot, tied down at the ankle. (Some sandals were made from Eryngium yuccifolium, or rattlesnake master, considered an antidote to snake venom.) From the Anasazi people of the desert Southwest, the Utah Museum of Natural History has hundreds of sandals made from yucca leaves and cordage, dating from seven hundred to two thousand years ago, and also exhibiting an impressive variety of forms, weaves, and tying systems that are surprisingly like the technology of today’s open footwear.16
Our Own Devices: How Technology Remakes Humanity Page 9
