“But Mom, everybody’s got them, and I really really need mukluks, you know, to keep my feet warm. My feet are always freezing like frozen ice cubes!” I said, very nearly stomping my feet tantrum-style which weren’t really that cold to tell you the truth.
I seriously coveted mukluks when I was in Grade 3 at South School. After all, I had to walk all the way down the block and across the footbridge where (appropriately) the museum is now and down another block before I even got to the crosswalk at South School. And let’s face it, most of the time I was forced to walk that walk out in the cruel elements of a freezing, snow-filled Central Alberta winter.
After all, mukluks were what we called in those days “radical” which was the highest form of praise before “groovy”, “far out” and “cool” came along. And after all, Ricky had some, Mark had some. Even John and Fred each had a pair. Not a single girl at school had any, which made it a must-have for any self-respecting kid of the male gender.
Mukluks, for those of you who have never heard of snow, were originally created by the Arctic aboriginal people whom we used to call ‘Eskimos’ but who have since legally changed their name to ‘the Inuit.’
The real mukluks are soft warm boots made out of the skins and fur of various animals, although over the years synthetic trendy fashion footwear mukluk boots have become all the rage to the extent that the Kardashians and Hiltons wear them in tropical places like California, which looks as ridiculous as it sounds.
But back in the snowbank/snowfort/snowball days of youth, the first mukluks I saw, and the ones that I immediately coveted, were plain grey moccasin-type winter boots that laced up to the tops of your thick grey woolen winter socks.
Of course, I myself, with my elementary school braces (on my pants not my teeth), long-sleeved shirts buttoned at the collar, and my immovably perfect Suave hair cream wave perched permanently on my forehead like some yellow hair bump — I myself sported ‘overshoes.’
This was exactly the same as carrying a large sandwich-board sign that said ‘HOPELESS NERD’ on one side and ‘LOSER GEEK’ on the other.
These overshoes, which only men in suits called “galoshes” and nobody under 20 called “rubbers” with a straight face were either half-shoe covers that slipped over the bottoms of dress shoes, or full-on overshoes that pulled on over regular shoes and boots. They came up about as high as the radical mukluks, but they had zippers or fasteners instead of radical laces. They were so un-radical that you had to hide to put on your overshoes in the boot room.
Those lucky enough to have a pair of mukluks (aka: everybody but me) were allowed to wear their mukluks in class instead of leaving them in the boot room, which, of course, another good reason for me to have a pair. Wearing mukluks in class was, for sure, the very pinnacle of radicalness.
“You’ll get chilblains,” Mom would say whenever I would mention how ‘rad’ it was that you could wear mukluks all day, inside and outside. I had no idea if chilblains were an actual real thing that you could get or not.
“If you have cold feet, and you come inside and you wear your warm boots and your feet get hot, it can be bad and you can get sick,” Mom would say. And although in Grade 3 you totally believe everything your Mom says, I kind of suspected she was making it up because she was of the adult opinion that geeky overshoes were far better for a school kid than radical (and expensive) mukluks.
Turns out, there really is a medical condition known as “chilblains” which, according to the Mayo Clinic website is ‘a painful inflammation of small blood vessels in your skin that occur in response to sudden warming from cold temperatures.’
Go figure. But as usual, I digress. One particularly cold day that snowy winter, I finally got my very own mukluks. I remember clearly going to the Eaton’s store downtown with my Mom, where the shoe department was past the big white staircase in the middle of the store. When I came out of Eaton’s lugging a brown paper shopping bag with string handles on the top that held a box with my very own mukluks
I was so happy that Mom decided to mark the occasion by stopping at Kresge’s next door where we sat at the soda shop counter and had ice cream sundaes. (Chocolate for me, maple walnut for Mom). That’s how big of a day getting mukluks was!
The very next morning brought a typical frozen world of ice and snow that I was chomping at the bit to attack in my radical new grey leather mukluks with the brown leather laces.
I took one step out the back door and my feet went flying out from under me and down I went, my toque, mitts and books flying randomly through the air like a flock of scared birds.
When I picked myself and my accoutrements up and took another step, I slipped again. I didn’t go down but it took some nifty moves to stay upright. It was like that all the way to school. In fact when I wasn’t crashing windmill-style, it looked like I was practicing a complicated modern dance routine.
Seems the smooth bottom of my precious mukluks weren’t that great traction-wise for anything but deep snow. And not only that, my feet were surprisingly cold. Hmmm. Radical? Not so much.
As I hung onto the snow covered bike rack in the playground trying to stay upright on my cold and slippery feet, my friends just laughed and simultaneously lifted up the bottom of their moccasins. There on the bottom of the prized (and expensive) mukluks were thick brown leather soles.
“You gotta take them down to Kovak’s, the shoe place downtown, and get a hunk of rough leather sewed onto the bottom. Otherwise ya got no traction and you’ll be on your butt most of the time.”
My friends were enjoying this a little too much.
And later that morning, sitting at my desk wearing my mukluks and practicing long-hand writing, it felt like my legs were going to explode from overheating. I was sweating, and my feet were stinging and I was trapped in my radical mukluks.
Come to think of it now, I’m pretty sure I had a bad case of the chilblains.
Harley Hay is a local freelance writer, award-winning author, filmmaker and musician. His column appears on Saturdays in the Advocate. His books can be found at Chapters, Coles and Sunworks in Red Deer.