Around 2003, the slow open days of uncertainty after college graduation--the start of some wandering years. I was visiting friends in New Haven, Connecticut; he a PhD candidate and she a nonprofit saint fielding inquiries from transient types behind a steel desk in a worndown office during the day. One of those old New England cities where you want nothing to do with it but you feel like it would never have you, anyhow. They took me out for pizza.
Joining us was a friend of theirs. He was in town for the summer. Cheerful, floating kind of guy, a little road-worn.
"What are you doing this summer?" my friend asked.
"I'm selling kitchen knives," he said. "I work door-to-door for commission. I wanna pay for Switzerland for season." Before dinner -- classic New Haven thin crust pizza that you can't miss, I was told -- my friend told me that this friend wintered skiing and did whatever it took to pay for it in the meantime. I didn't know what that meant, to winter somewhere, or to have such a strong desire to ski that it meant selling knives. Even back then door-to-door was an archaic notion.
"I talked to your mom," he said. "She still interested in the 7-piece set?"
"Yeah, yeah," said my friend. "I'll talk to her."
"Great," he said. He wore Clark's Desert boots.
"What kind of boots are those?" I asked. On his feet they were wandering, knife-selling, slender, earth-grabbing-looking boots. He told me. "I don't mean to be lame," I said, "but I'm going to steal that style."
"Oh no worries, dude, no worries."
They were a boot for someone looking for boots, long before such an option was ubiquitous at Urban and the Internet and everywhere else. You had to hunt for a boot like that, something functional and straight-up and a little odd, too. I found my first pair at a cowboy boot store in North Carolina a few months later and have worn them ever since.
They are thin-soled, thin-walled, thin-laced, thin everything. They'll grab dry sidewalk like glue and slide on wet cement like ice skates.
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Anthony Bourdain wears desert boots on many of his adventures. This is, to me, a perplexing choice. Not for aesthetics but for functionality. Two drawbacks I found in the desert boots over the years were: comfort in the long-haul and handling moisture. Both of these lend poorly to adventure, missadventure and adaptability.
