Art or profanity? I can’t decide.
“A shoe tree starts with one dreamer, tossing his or her footwear-of-old high into the sky, to catch on an out-of-reach branch. It usually end there, unseen and neglected by others. But on rare occasions, that first pair of shoes triggers a shoe tossing cascade. Soon, teens are gathering up their old Adidas and Sauconys, families are driving out after church with Dad's Reeboks and grandma's Keds. The shoe tree blooms with polymer beauty. A work of art like this may last for generations, tracing our history by our sneakers.
On Highway 50 near Middle Gate, Nevada, a lone cottonwood stands, clotted with hundreds of shoes. One tipster tells us the first pair was thrown during a wedding night argument by a young couple; later, their children's shoes were added to the bough. Whatever its origins, the tree now seems to suck up all the discarded footwear in the county.
The Shoe Tree in Salem, Michigan even has a legend involving a serial killer and a quantity of small children dispatched for their footwear.
Case Study: The Great Beaver Shoe Tree
The Shoe Tree in Beaver, Arkansas was mysteriously chosen, one of many thousands of trees in woods lining an otherwise featureless highway. Hundreds of old sneakers and running shoes dangled, some over 30 feet off the ground. Why this particular tree instead of its scores of flanking arboreal brethren?
Many of the shoes had names and messages scrawled on them in magic marker. Closer inspection revealed that shoes had started to spread to branches on adjacent trees, like sneaker kudzu. Eventually, this whole stretch of road might have been choked with shoe trees.
In 2000, disaster struck. A wind storm felled the Great Beaver Shoe Tree -- perhaps aided by the unnatural burden of hundreds of waterlogged hangers-on. The road department hauled off the branches and fallen footwear, and the mighty loss could be felt across all of Shoetreedom...
But something magical happened. In subsequent months, locals and visitors continued to bring their cast-offs, heaving into the trees surrounding the gap. A few trees contended as replacements for the Great Shoe Tree.
Then some people, recently arrived and living in fancy log cabins nearby, decided they didn't like the attention to their stretch of road. Persons unknown butchered the offending limbs from the trees, wood and rubber and laces tumbling in a shower of horror. At last report, the shoe trees of Beaver had been severely diminished.
But others flourish in gentler communities. More have been sighted in Nordman, Idaho; Milltown, Indiana; Hodgdon, Maine; Atlanta and Owosso, Michigan; Lyndonville, New York; and elsewhere."
This phenomenon is not confined to the USA either so it is not perculiar to the American psyche.
I am troubled.
1 comment:
Is it perhaps a poor cousin to the electric wire shoe-danglers? Perhaps in those backwater towns of the USA they don't have much electricity, so trees are the go....or perhaps they are just a very literal race, I mean when the shoe salesman says put your shoes on a shoe tree at night to keep their shape.....
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