Resoling my old boots
My walking boots are eleven years old. They are full-grain leather, stitched rather than glued, and they have been resoled once before, about six years ago. By this summer the lugs on the heels were worn almost flat and the left boot had started to let in water at the toe.
The easy thing would have been to buy new ones. The sensible thing, it turns out, was to take them to the cobbler in town, who has been in the same narrow shop for longer than I have lived here.
He turned them over in his hands for a long time before saying anything. The uppers, he said, were good for another ten years if I looked after them. The midsole was fine. The rand at the toe needed replacing and the outsoles were overdue. Three weeks and a reasonable price, roughly a third of what a new pair would cost.
While I waited, I walked in an old pair of trail runners, which reminded me why I like boots on the steeper, rockier paths around here. Runners are wonderful on dry, smooth ground. On loose scree in the rain I was much less confident.
When I picked the boots up they looked familiar and new at the same time: the same creased, darkened leather, sitting on fresh, deep lugs. I asked about care, and got a short and slightly stern lecture:
- Clean off the mud after every walk, even when tired. Mud dries the leather out.
- Dry them slowly, at room temperature, stuffed with newspaper. Never by the fire or on a radiator.
- Wax two or three times a year, more if they are often wet, working it in with fingers rather than a cloth.
- Store them somewhere that is not the car boot.
Good boots are not bought, he said. They are kept.
I have been guilty of nearly everything on that list, especially the radiator. I have now been on four walks in the resoled boots, including a muddy one along the river, and they are dry, comfortable and grippy. They feel like mine again rather than like something on its way out.
There is nothing very romantic about resoling a pair of boots. But I like the idea that the same pair will probably see me through another decade of these paths, and that the money went to a shop that might otherwise not be there in ten years either.