F150 at Work

On the Columbia

For my job, I drive a state-issued Ford F150. When I find myself moonlighting, it's in my own F150. Eerie coincidence?

No. The F150 pickup truck is the most common work-horse in the US of A, so this F150-ization of my driving experience (and the attending pain in my gas-pedal leg and hip), is unique not at all.

On the Palouse

The regular work truck--a "rig" in state agency parlance--is more photogenic, being a red spot, standing out on landscapes basaltic and vegetative, in flower and winter-dead. I have a fair number of photos of the rig in its natural habitat, on two-rut roads through pastures, pulled off logging roads, and so on. Some are close, but more are far, one truck quietly punctuating immensity.

Before I wrote this, I searched various searches to find images of F150 trucks (or rigs) at work.

On the internet

And I was sorely disappointed. The F150 is the most popular working pickup in the country that invented them, and I've heard that the internet is also widely used, but the search for images of this truck at work turned up a bunch of shots of new trucks (lounging around, not working), and for some inexplicable reason: baby seats in the back seat of Ford trucks.

I don't get it, and I intend to fix it. So here and on anthrowback, I'll start posting photos of the most common American work truck at work.

Add an Extra Shot

Not a High-Res Shot. You're welcome. (Oh, and I am welcome: image courtesy of Christian Science Monitor)

Last week, Starbucks asked customers not to come in carrying firearms. Gun rights advocates were incensed, even though their manual already tells them to steer clear of possible queer places, such as Starbucks, which serves foreign-sounding drinks to liberal effetes.

I used to despise Starbucks, not so much because of their progressive yuppie vibe as for their global corporate domination, but now I live where they are legitimately a regional business, besides which they do make a point of making it corporate policy to not discriminate against same-sex enthusiasts and to request that people not come in armed. Nobody wants a caffeine-jittered finger on the trigger.

Starbucks made it clear that their request was just that, and that gun-toters could still come in and offer to the coffer their US dollars, but other businesses have gone all-out and banned guns on their premises. Places like Buffalo Wild Wings (no kidding, allowing guns in a place with men drunk on Coors and angry that there are no hooters would be a bad business model). Of course there are the upscale 'liberal' places like Whole Foods and California Pizza Kitchen where nobody would think to bring a gun in the first place. But then there are bastions of childhood like Toys R Us and Disney World (although to be honest, Disney only has that policy to discourage local crackers from getting season passes and sullying the magic kingdom for the Yankee tourists).

And therin lies the magic and doom of our market based society. The very same government despised by the right wing, the socialist-UN-nazi-Obamacare conspiracy that wants to take away our American guns is powerless to do so (precisely, and ironically given the tea party fears, because government--unlike corporations--must be reponsive to vocal minorities). But corporations sure as hell can ban, and they are. If companies really thought banning guns would hurt their bottom line in a substantial way, they would not go out on that limb, if for no other reason than the shareholders would not let them. Turns out, though, that more people feel safer with a gun ban in place than they do with the alleged deterrent of allowing every Zimmerman on the block to pack a glock. If the tea partiers have their way, public schools will be full of guns; meanwhile, the market will speak and part of boutique chic will be the metal detector at the door.

Desecration is in the Eye of the Beholder

Do this to my grave and I will haunt the Hell into you.

Some people decide what's gonna happen to their bodies when life departs, willing the afterdeath: cremation, burial, embalming, burning viking ship, and so on, hoping the dearly un-departed will live up to the legal document, maybe even the dying wish. I'll cop to having considered all of the above except embalment, and can add a few more to the list, like: worm-food, fertilizer, being planted at the base of a tree, and something like the Zoroastrian end. 

Some people live in fear that somehow their corpse will be defiled, their burial site will be desecrated, their remembrance dirtied. As an archaeologist I've witnessed cases and heard reliable tell of epidemics of graves razed, bones bulldozed, and I'd rather it not happen to my bones, but I don't lose sleep over it, or even comprehend it as more than an abstraction.

But the other day I witnessed the routine maintenance of a US President's grave, a founding father, beloved by Virginians. A guy pulled up, trimmed weeds with one gas-powered machine before blowing trimmings with another. I don't speak for any dead presidents, singular or en bloc, but the racket and fumes felt like desecration to me. Said president remains synonymous with ambitious and creative husbandry, the idealized American nation of farmers, and so it's hard to imagine the guy being OK with a noisome din and gassy humors of the modern maintenance regime.

I don't blame people like the guy in the photo, and if you recognize him, don't be mean. He's just doing his job, and there's a lot to do for only a few staff, not the dozens of slaves and overseers that did everything in the President's day. Blame goes to that culture which cannot get things done without real slavery, or a mix of wage slavery and polluting technology. Maybe someday we'll be forced to do things by hand again, kill the leaf blowers and employ corps of landscapers at fair wages to weed, rake, and in all manners tend the grounds and graves, but I'm not holding my breath (until I die). Until I can keep gas-scaping from tending my grave, I think I'd rather be cremated and put where the weedeaters and leafblowers cannot reach, where the noise blows in on the wind and not out on the exhaust.

The dead were not issued ear protection.

 
 . 

Sole-less Corporations

Devobootion

I'm pretty down-to-earth, and the most down and earthiest part of anyone is the soles of their feet, or the strip of rubber or leather or plastic that forms the soles of their shoes.

I've obsessed before about boots, from their importance to punk rock kids to their evolutionary diversification, to my propensity to buy cheap boots and leave their used-up husks as offerings in various places I worked. I've also ranted about the crappiness of corporations.

Now's the time to lay those threads together into a rope of righteous rage that I can use to flog the boot industry.

A year or so ago, having decided that not all my money is earmarked for food and housing and having run through my supply of hand-me-down boots from my dead dad, I decided to abandon my old policy of buying cheap-ass boots. I'd gotten some hand-me-down shoes from a cousin's boyfriend (who has better consumer awareness than I do, and apparently a larger clothing budget) that had held up pretty well, and there was a new REI store in town, so I went there instead of dropping the usual $35, and bought a pair that cost $130, the logic being that maybe they'd hold together 4 times longer than the cheap Hi-Techs (whose quality had diminished noticeably the last time I'd bought them), putting me ahead of the game. 

What I bought were Keens, famous for being able to handle large-caliber feet like mine (I have what Hawaiians call 'Luau feet,' and Americans generally refer to as 'duck feet,' wide if not clownishly long). The sole began to peel away the first time I wore them. To REI's credit, they allowed me to return them slightly used simply because they suck, no further explanation required.

Boots by Robber Soul, be sure to avoid this patent no.

Having returned my unintentional flip-flops, I turned around and chose a similarly priced pair of Merrills. I know that 130 bucks is not even halfway up the price scale, but I still held hope that they would not be utter crap. But they were. The first photo of this post shows what happens to the sides, which I suppose the corporate PR tools will try to spin as the result of my girthy feet, but I ain't buying that. Besides, the shot above shows what happened to the soles weeks after buying this pair: chunks of sole missing, red stuff wearing away to reveal sof grey foam less than a millimeter below. Besides which, the "waterproof" label is a lie, even before the sides split. 

I guess I could have taken this pair back to REI, but I was busy and the laces still worked, my feet still held within the boot more or less, and I had another newly acquired pair of boots that I could use in situations rougher than cubicle floors and long plastic hallways. Because the new pair were steel-toed, they were considered safety equipment, and therefore part of the $250 or so that they cost was reimbursed by my work. Hiking for miles in high-rise steel-toed boots sucks, though, and inevitably, the soles have started to do this:

"Hi, I'm Dick, spokesman for the Outsourced Sole Council of AmeriCo"

This most expensive pair, by the way, are Danners. I lack the funding to sample all of the boot manufacturers in America (by which, I mean China), but it seems like I will find nothing better without taking out a mortgage. This is a central commandment of life in 21st Century Americorp: Thou Shalt Pay Exhorbitant Prices for Premium Products. [The corollary to which is, All Non-Premium Products Are Shitty.]

Some would say that I should not blame Keen, or Merrill, or Danner, but the sole manufacturer, which happens to be Vibram. Long ago, that name was the gold standard of boot-soles. Rugged, oil-resistant, non-slip. The Danner's Vibrams may live up to that promise, but it won't do much good if they cannot stay attached to the midsole. The ones on the Merrills were slippery as hell even in light rain, and wore out after a few miles. I would not let Vibram off the hook, but neither will I blame them entirely.

Our system of manufacturing--by which I mean our system of contracting the lowest bidder somewhere across the globe and then slapping an American label on it--has lost its soul. If it were just boots, it would be bad enough, but this extends all the way up to the Boeing 787. If you are a middle class or lower consumer unwilling to mortgage your future, you are doomed to getting sub-par goods while the owners of the companies that 'make' them try to make par on some tropical golf course. Maybe it's time to re-aquaint these soul-less robber barons with the steel toe.

Or maybe, something less drastic, something less demanding of my tired and aching feet. Last week, finding myself in a far-flung place (the northwestermost portion of the lower 48, but not the contiguous 48), and done with fieldwork for the moment, that old urge to sacrifice a pair of spent boots struck again. And so somewhere in the 6 square miles or so of Point Roberts lies the pair of Merrills. As I placed them in a thorny thicket, I had no particular prayer--bunions for the 1% and bankruptcy for the offending companies, or even return of the soul of American industry--just a sense of relief, of ditching the silly dream that I could spend a middling amount and get a decent product. 

Back home again after the trip, I bought another pair of cheap boots. Let's see how long they last, and where they end up...







 

Garden 11: The Hoop House

September, and tomatoes are finally ripening.

I tend to go with the flow (Disclosure: rarely in the main stream, sometimes along a flux as inscrutable as neutrinos through granite), and opt for simply ept over the fancy engineering available to today's gardener.

But the flow's so slow with the maritime Northwest Spring, especially this year. The sun may climb quickly from it's root-bound Winter Nadir to the sunshine daydream of a Salish Summer, but the clouds wet and dark rob the light and waylay the warmth. So to get some early(ish) greens and tomatoes and beans going, I decided to goose the flow a little this year. 

June 2011: The plastic comes off.

This photo shows only the hoops, but imagine it covered in clear(ish) plastic, trapping air to tap photons that make it through the clouds; these shivering ragged survivors do manage to warm things up a bit. Not enough to affect soil temps, though, which I measured frequently and never saw get past the low 40s Fahrenheit before I yanked the plastic and let the real summer in. 

Anyway, the shot from the roof there illustrates my approach, which stems from frugality and some would say lassitude, though I prefer to think it is clever(ish).

• Dig a 12 by 4 foot bed sloped slightly down south.
• Lay out a 25 foot soaker hose up and back.
• Get some skinny pvc, stick one end in the ground in a corner the bed.
• Go down the long side, planting another every 2 feet.
• With the help of a boathook or friend, bend these over and stick the other end in the ground.
• Get a roll of heavy clear plastic sheeting, and lay it over the hoops and secure the long edges.

The only thing you cut is the plastic sheet, and there's no exotic material required. Easy. Cheap.

Spring's greenhouse reborn as Summer's tomato cage.

Plastic retraction time comes when the tomatoes start pushing against it, which as luck had it this year was when we started to get real stretches of clear sky, sun showering down on chlorophyll for hours on end. At which point I took a couple of old tomato cages I'd made a while back out of leftover fencing, and laid them over the hoops. Just guide shoots up where you want them and they'll flop on top, maybe even sling a few of the branches below. Watch for fruits growing into wires, but otherwise you're pretty much done til harvest. 

South of the tomatoes, I had lettuce and spinach, some of which had an extended growing season as the growing tomatoes kept the sun from hitting tender leaves all day. To the north was a single row of string beans, climbing twine to a line strung from eave to eave on the end of the house, but that's another story.


From the post-Equinoctal perspective, the hoop house seems like a worthwhile investment. Digging the bed was by far the most labor intensive part of it, and that gets easier over time. Everything is off-the-shelf and inexpensive, and one person can make it in under an hour. The tomatoes alone pay for it the first year. I'm glad I finally did it.

New Laptop

It was getting close to time to get a new laptop anyway, but the promulgation of new personal use policy from my employer sped up the process. They sent out an email to all staff saying that we're allowed to use our work computers, networks, and so on for a combined total of 15 minutes per week (in increments not to exceed 5 minutes).


It is their machinery, I guess, but it seemed a bit harsh, considering that they expect me to be on the road so much, dependent on a laptop for everything from finding eats to maintaining contact with loved ones. So 15 minutes a week is basically zero, especially when you consider how slow many hotel connections are. 


Today I head to a convention that is relevant to my work, but for which I am picking up a large part of the cost, and which I was not required to attend. I am only delivering papers 2 of 4 days of the conference, and want to be free to google various things that touch my mind during this time. I can just imagine some auditor defining that as "not strictly work-related," ergo a new laptop.


I suppose this means that I am addicted to connectivity. 

You Searched "Heatilator"

For some reason, it took me a long time to realize that a blogger can find out how many pageviews there are, which sites are funneling innocent netizens this way, and so on. The saddest thing was learning that almost nobody is arriving on a Mac. After a month or two of this, the thing I find interesting is that people searching for information on their heatilator end up here.



I said something before about why this might be, and after an exhaustive data collection process (I get exhausted easily, and get exasperated with ads, sooo. . .OK, there's no data) came to the conclusion that heatilators are neither antique nor cutting edge enough to be of internet interest.

So, here's what you need to know about heatilators. First, if it is some kind of insert that goes in your fireplace, something that has a fan, this is not the blog for you. I am a hardcore traditionalist heatilator devotee. Don't know about the electric kind, and don't care to learn. The beauty of the heatilator is the fact that it works without a motor, it's passive and green, it uses no electricity.

The heatilator works on a very basic principle: hot air rises. Typically, the heatilator consists of an airspace surrounding the firebox. You build the fire in there, and the heavy metal walls keep the fire from spreading, but conduct heat into the airspace. There are vents at the top and bottom. So in the photo above, the area behind all those openings is full of heated air. Cool air from the room moves in through the bottom, is heated, and comes out the top to warm the room. Convection.

Different styles exist, and I guess some work better than others. What they have in common is that there are made of brick or stone, and there's not much you can do to change them. The openings are where they are, the airspace is what it is. Each has its peculiarities. Like in this one, the five vents across the top center rarely have much air coming out of them. There is about twice as much area in the top openings as in the bottom. More on the fix later.

One thing you should check is whether the convection airspace is airtight. I looked back and saw a few gaps. If you can reach back and insert non-flammable insulation or mortar into any gaps, you keep hot air from escaping, increasing efficiency. Just remember that whatever you drop back there is going to be difficult or impossible to retrieve. Oh, and don't try this fix while a fire is burning.

Air flow is important. If you put things in front of any of the vents, the system stops working. Convection is gentle, and won't blow past things. Use this knowledge to keep your partner from putting "decor" on the hearth. Tell them a scientist said it is very, very bad.

So back to the five holes in the pictured heatilator. When procrastination gets boring, I will probably plug them up, either as part of a mantle, or maybe just mortaring in some bricks. Bernoulli or Venturi or one of those Italian fluid dynamics geniuses figured out that if you restrict the size of an outflow, velocity increases. So if I cut the total area of the upper vent array, the air coming out should be moving faster. I'll let you know how that goes...

Another thing that makes the heatilator work better is having a long-running fire. If you are starting with a cold house and start a fire, it takes a while for the heatilator to really get pumping. You've got to warm the firebox and the convection air space to get it moving at all. The longer the fire burns, the more you heat up the masonry around the fireplace, and the better the heatilator works.

Not just that, but heating up the ton of masonry stores heat that will radiate for hours after the fire dies down. If you are trying to heat your house with the fire, you are way better off with a long, steady fire than with building a roaring fire, letting it die, and repeating the process. The direct heat from the flame is a passing thing, while the convection from the heatilator and radiation from the heated masonry keep working.

What else?

Queries that landed people here include concerns about having a TV mounted above a heatilator. The best solution is to kill your TV. Watch the fire. It's more interesting and has no commercials. Or, hang a thermometer where the TV will go. I doubt the heatilator is pumping out so much heat that it would damage anything, but if you are going to stress out about it, just put the TV somewhere else.

Oh, and the heatilator can be used to make your room smell nice. Get a scented candle and put it in a glass holder big anough to contain ALL the wax. Place it in one of the upper vents, and the heat will melt the whole thing, slowly vaporizing it and sending the scent into the room.

Is there more?

Umm. Maybe not. It's pretty simple. Stop wasting time on the internet and build a fire.

Boot Print Trail

The recent punk posts (ha) included some comment about Doc Martens. That's a brand that in those days helped some punks feel better about themselves. If you had real Docs instead of surplus combat boots, you were harder core, you'd gone the extra mile (and paid the extra buck, hmmm) to prove you were punker than thou. 

Already, I can feel this post veering into rant territory. Maybe not like the one in October 09 (see Evobootion and Boots... posts at http://mojourner.blogspot.com/2009/10/evobootion.html), but it seems like what people put on their feet reveals a lot about their cultural assumptions. Where you think you stand in society, look down and there are your shoes.

Evobootion has photos, and this post cannot. My sister assures me that she has snapshots of those days, but the boots are long gone, and all there are are words.

Pre-punk, I wore sneakers. They stunk so bad that little wavy lines emanated visibly. The only boots I had as a kid, I think, were the standard tan leather with a yellowy sole. As the hardcore world opened, I managed to get a pair of army surplus boots. Basic black. There was a rule if you played sports that you had to wear a tie and polished shoes on game days, and so they actually got polished a few times. Weird.

But usually (and eventually) that didn't happen, and partly laced combat boots, scuffle-stepping through the halls were something to set me apart from the sea of docksiders, penny loafers, and sneakers of 1980s Virginia. The preppies had the most bizarre array of footwear I'd ever seen until encountering rich Lon Gislanders in college, strictly defined in terms of a brand and style for every occasion from cotillion to pretending to enjoy the outdoors.

Some punks were just as rigid, and there was defnitely pressure to wear the right stuff, although you were pretty free to ignore it in a small scene like Richmond. I ditched my orange converse hi-tops with the black magic marker tiger stripes when I feared it would look more new wave than hardcore. I bought Sears engineer boots when it seemed cool.

But then, function kicks style aside for me. I thought the untied combat boots looked cool, and enjoyed the free easy feel, but when it came time to cover some ground, or get out on the floor to do some skaning, do-si-do-ing and stage dives, it was time to lace up.

In college, the rigidity and conformity of the DC scene left me cold, and after a year or so I pretty much stopped going to see bands. Meanwhile, I fell in with people who listed to hippy music, and enjoyed a period when nobody I knew could figure me out. Lowery writes abut the same kind of thing happening at the other end of the country in his blog (http://300songs.com/2011/01/07/67-turquoise-jewelry-grace-slick-where-art-thou/), simultaneously mocking and appreciating what the old counterculture had wrought. I didn't have the turquoise jewelry, but did pick up a pair of thrift store romeos, those short boots with the zipper like Captan Kirk wore. They were not quite ironic enough, and could have been mistaken for dress shoes, so I got day-glo paints and spruced them up; right atop each one was a turquoise lizard on an orange background. Wearing those with a christmasy plaid pair of trousers, and spiked orangy meringue hair to a Dead show was fun, watching to see which hippies (and young imitators) lit up, blew a fuse, or tuned out as they passed the punk inexplicably appearing in their midst.

But over time, it became less and less important to have footwear that made a statement. More and more my feet wore whatever worked best. The combat boots outlasted the slick-soled romeos. Hush puppies, or desert boots or whatever those things are called made appearances. Stinky sneakers returned.

Then I moved to the tropics, and my feet were freed. But that's another story, already told in the post before Evobootion.

Onward.

On the Radio Now

Lucas is playing a sound quilt on KAOS:

Contemporary pow wow music, a trippy interlude, and up pops what sounds like John Lennon and Dick Cavett talking about Indians, over and then followed by a drum riff... Now a guy talking about native cultural and language loss and preservation.
The airwaves of Olympia oxygenate our local culture. People think that computers and webs can connect freedom lovers, and that the System is vulnerable to leaking into the same net damning data, inspiring even our rulers to be honest and peaceful.

Of course the web ain't that way. Some govbot is at this moment getting antsy at my mention of such things. The internet requires connection, plugging in, and for all the supposed privacy measures, you have to assume that the spies and big brother have better software than the average citizen. Are you connected to the web, or just trapped on it, waiting on the spider?


Radio lives in the air, not just in the stone's throw radius of a wireless hub. You send nothing back; the station just transmits. So yeah, you do not affect the programming of the broadcaster, but nor are they subject to denial of service attacks, viruses, or being kicked off the server. Low power stations can be mobile, off the power grid, and received by people similarly unplugged. Both ends can function without petrochemical infusions if they want, and if we ever get to the point of civil, martial, or natural disturbance on such a scale that the fragile cyber world becomes disconnected, radio is likely to survive. Mad Max's ride, the last of the V-8 Interceptors, had a radio.


The listener can turn the radio on or off. There are no packets telling NSA what she's listening to, and she has in her arm the strength to generate enough power to tune in on crank-it-up machines costing 20 bucks. The airwaves can be breathed in at will.


Democracy requires radio. TV was just about the death of freedom, and computer connectivity's ability to disperse information far and wide is more than offset by its susceptibility to secret monitoring, pinpoint location of users, data mining for phrases and patterns that mark a man as a rebel. Again, I feel Admiral Poindexter's cold gaze on these words.


The airwaves can be jammed, but not form a single location in a West Virginia bunker. Given the security industry's fetishization of technology, I'd venture to guess that they've been bored with radio broadcasts for decades now, and have grown lax in paying attention. The town I live in has pirate stations that don't even bother to hide, low power broadcasters that regularly venture into opinions and news that make the supposed liberal media look grand and old. In many areas of the country, NPR is on the left, but here they are outflanked by KAOS, who are outflanked by Radio Free Olympia, who are probably outflanked by stations I have yet to encounter.


Freedom is on the line, but it is not online. It is in the air.

Evobootion

My first college room-mate was a rich kid from Lowan Guyland (whereas I was just from Goy-Land), and my first exposure to guys who own a lot of shoes. I mean, this Himelda showed up to live in a 144 square foot room with more than a dozen pairs, many of them various shades of patent leather dress shoes. At the time, I pretty much only wore combat boots, and at night I could hear them clumping over to his closet to menace his patent leather slip-ons.

It took years and some education to understand that this guy was just exhibiting classic evolutionary dynamics. Finding fertile ground in nouveau riche Dicksville (or Dix Hills, whatever), shoes had diversified like finches to occupy every niche, from the family's carpet showroom to various ritual contexts: Passover, Mall Cruising, trips to The City. Furthermore, through showy elaboration, his footwear had a demonstrated ability to signal to potential mates, "I have money, and I am not afraid to spend it on ridiculous crap." If I sound bitter, it's only because I find it sad when exotic species displace the indigenes that spent so many generations adapting to a place, that a flood of Gucci knock-offs extirpated farmers' clodhoppers and fishermens' chest waders.

In time, my engineer and combat boots mutated, as selective pressures shifted from seeking punk rock mates to psychedelic quests, which required things like moccasins and a pair of romeos bedecorated with day-glo lizards and such. Man, am  sorry I don't have photos of those to post.

In the absence of a trust fund, the struggle for survival meant that those died out before too awful long, replaced by two major branches: rubba slippas and work boots. The last post introduced these species, mostly in an island leeward ecosystem context, but here I'd like to get into the diversification that burst forth when the varied demands of the Pacific Northwest began to affect new generations of boots.

Ambulamuchimus affordii. Low-rise cheap boots have survived the migration. Flexible generalists like these are fairly adaptable, and can get by in a variety of environments.

Ambulamuchimus robusta. With their top-grain cattle hide, lug soles (nearly worn off now), higher tops and insulation, and all around more rugged construction, these specimens outlive several generations of A. affordii, and in fact I inherited these from my dad. In addition to that sentimental allure (of little intrinsic value in the survival of the species), these are of good enough quality that I take the time to oil them. Their framework is such that the worn soles can be replaced, rather than dooming them to oblivion. A triumph of longevity that more than makes up for the low reproductive rate.

Fossicker aquaticus.  These exhibit adaptation to the cold nearshore waters of the Puget Sound watershed. Waterproof, insulated, and crucial to the intertidal surveys and stream-walks an archaeologist needs to do in the northwest.

Gwarus lumberjackii.  And finally we arrive at the corks, or calks, or whatever you want to call the giant spiky boots favored by those who must traipse through mossy forests. These can stomp into oblivion those pansy combat boots I wore so long ago. They transform wet slippery blowdown into boreal highways, ice into sidewalks. Waterproof, impervious to cold, and quite fetching to boot.

Boots In-Side My Head, I Said Boots Inside My Head

Being an anthropologically-minded archaeologist, I find myself judging people by the boots they wear into the field. In Hawai'i, of course, there were plenty of times when boots weren't involved, and I did more than my fair share of work in rubba slippas and fake birkenstocks. Bruddas usually wore the same, or would show up in gum-boots or steel-toes (or unadorned cowboy boots in paniolo country), at least back in the 90s they did. I had a Tongan supervisor who always wore rubba slippas ("flip-flops," haoles) on survey through the jungle, and swore that it was just as safe, that it made you walk more carefully. He saw more artifacts than anyone else, and I think that the pace and tactility afforded by the slippas helped.

On many crews, there would be somebody with a pair of high-end hiking boots made by some company that proles like me don't even recognize. Not that I have a problem with quality footwear, but often it was the wrong tool for the job. Lava chews the soles and jungle rots the top off of any boot, so it never made sense to have expensive ones. Plus, the people with the expensive ones were, often as not, lazy and/or clueless when it came to hiking through the bush looking for sites, the kind of people who'd gotten educated in classrooms only, who didn't understand the value of game trails and drank water from camel-packs instead of a Menehune Water bottle re-used for the umpteenth time. Sometimes insufferable to the point of citing Dunnell in the field.

Then there were the people who would show up in sneakers to slog through mud or traverse a'a. Sometimes they would end up losing one or making it through with bloody ankles; always they end up being the Limiting Factor. Now and then this would happen when some dumb haole kid (me, circa 1991, for instance) would show up in rubba slippas in a vain attempt to feel local, but lacking the skill to go off-road with the things, or the judgement to leave them behind when heading into the thorn-paved kiawe groves.

I'd go more by cost than anything else, but found myself in Hi-Techs pretty often. When I worked on the Big Island with Pele's insatiable hunger for soles, I would head to K-Mart every month or so for another pair of whatever was cheap. Being the devotee of made-up ritual that I am, I carried over my practice of interring T-shirts that had reached near-compost stage to boots, stashing them in lava bubbles. A sacrifice, an offering, a recognition that the land had won. Some day, some archaeologist will run across these and wonder...