Grant Stone Brass Boot

A true journey changes you. On a trip, you might meander, but on a journey a story takes place. And in a story, the main character always changes. When I started on the Thunderdome I was fully expecting to take a trip. It was of course likely to be a quirky trip given the looks my wife gave me, and I had assumed that the main interest would be to watch the boot leather change. However, I did not anticipate it would fundamentally alter how I think about boots. It was going to be a journey. I could wear these boots on a date with my wife or out for beers. They were good for work, for walking the dogs, for cleaning up after those same dogs, for snowshoeing, for mowing the lawn, and for shoveling the driveway. Wearing the Brass Boots across multifarious activities brought the question home: What is the nature of a boot? Up to this point I had thought of boots as a continuum of footwear, like lining up all types of boots from work to dress in order to see their diversity. I now believe that “boots” have a fundamental essence. And the Thunderdome helped me recognize its elements, like comfort, stability, longevity, usefulness, patina, and pleasing proportions and lines that compliment the human form. However, this new understanding is not unmoving essentialism. Instead, it is more akin to the transmutation of Charles Darwin, the“I think” page in his Red Notebook, where a generalist boot is in fact an ancestor, sitting at the base of a family tree of footwear. As new versions developed, they created variations on themes, accentuating elements like ruggedness in work boots, the fineness of leather in dress boots, and comfort and ease in a pair of Chelseas. Sometimes it is the person who changes the boots. In my case that was true, with plenty of patina in the form of scratches, scuffs, and salt stains. It is true that the reverse can also happen. These boots, in some small way related to how I think about the world, changed me too.