“New Boots… Hmm, that’s an old style.”
Typically, my father would greet me with a warm embrace—his commentary about my footwear is unusual, but not unexpected. It’s October 4th, and he’s referring to my dome pair of Redwing 875’s in Oro.
I’ve flown back to my childhood home for our annual hunting trip. Deer season opens on October 7th, and by that time, we should be 10 miles into the John Day River. The John Day winds through the high deserts of Central Oregon. It’s the only source of water for hundreds of miles, and deer have to drink. You might imagine this unfair advantage to be a huge draw for hunters, yet we are likely to be alone. Portions of the river will be ankle deep and strewn with boulders. Dragging an 800lb rubber raft loaded with 10 days of provisions and hunting gear over 40 miles is a Herculean task, and there are much easier pickings elsewhere.
In the past, my brothers and I have portered my father down the river, using the raft as a make-shift palanquin. But this year, his knees and body aren’t up to it, and he decides to stay home. If my father is sad, he doesn’t show it. Puttering around the kitchen, he’s excited and upbeat while picking through our gear. After inspecting my 875’s more closely, he proudly announces that he definitively remembers the moccasin toe, red dye, and coffee crepe sole from his own youth. Curiously, he asks me why I bought them… Truth be told, I myself am not entirely sure. We amicably agree that fashion has a way of repeating, or possibly never going out of style, so it must be something like that.
Hunting over the oars is tough. There’s constant wetting from splashing into and out of the raft, yet the air is so dry that fresh fruit desiccates overnight. At a moment’s notice, we’re scrambling up abrasive basalt rockslides and sliding across sharp granite ledges. Even traversing the scrubland is a fight through chapparal and sagebrush. A quick survey of our group’s footwear choices will tell you that this is not “new boot” terrain, and I’ll be honest, this isn’t an ideal break-in period.
Perhaps it’s the painful break-in, or perhaps it’s the melancholy time on the river without my father. Inevitably, my thoughts swirl and eddy around him and my new boots. He bought me my first pair of boots, my first Redwings, back when I was a boy scout. Both my parents were zero-generation immigrants, and they didn’t have money to spare. Spending hundreds of dollars on boots for their son was an extravagance that, honestly, I didn’t fully appreciate at the time. That night, he taught me how to oil and care for the leather the way his father showed him; he shared with me a reverence for the magic, the life, and the living of leather.
…
Fast forward a few months, I notice that Old Style needs conditioning. Redwing sells their own conditioning product, but it’s not particularly good. I hop onto the stitchdown discord and there’s near religious debates over the merits of Bick 4, VSC, etc. Everyone has an opinion. I’m sure chemists have distilled all the “good” stuff into bottles, but nothing seems to fit these boots. And yet, somewhere deep in the recesses of my mind, my father’s voice stirs. It’s not particularly clear at first, but the echoes are insistent. Animal fat is good for leather, vegetable oils are good for wood. I like the simplicity of it, and I feel the heritage of it.
After the wife and kids have gone to bed, I grab a pound of ground wild hog and render its fat. I run it through a coffee filter to get rid of floaters. The texture isn’t right, so I raid my wife’s candle making supplies for beeswax. I start titrating pellets, a few at a time, letting the mixture cool and harden. After a few refinements, I come to a consistency that I like.
My homebrew cream is too stiff to slather on in coats—instead, I pick it up on the tips of my boot brush and work it into Old Style, sips at a time. The scuffs and creases might drink a little more, and they darken for it. To the touch, the leather never gets tacky. Over the next few months, I repeat this meditation several times; it becomes soothing in its familiarity, intentionality, and repetitiveness.
…
I’m in Asia in April for a family reunion. The 2024 Patina Thunderdome is over, and I’ve submitted my photos. The aphorism is that a picture is worth 1000 words, but somehow, 36 pictures later, I feel our story is still left unsaid. So, at 2AM over too many drinks in a hotel room in Seoul, I ask my brothers for insight.
At first, Justin metaphorically opines that, bonsai is about bringing a plant close to death, torturing it, and yet caring for it… Loving it so much that it thrives, and seeking beauty in that. I find that too poetic not to mention, but I’m not quite sure it quite fits.
Then, Scott observes that most people find patina meaningful because it reflects their own life experiences—“Yours is meaningful because you’ve put Dad into them—you should write about that.”
So, that’s the story I write… I love you, Old Style.