In the days of railriding hobos there was a system of code the bums used to mark certain things-a friendly family, good for a brief job or a handout, a certain bar, maybe even the local whorehouse. There were symbols for men with guns, unfriendly police, and even good barns to sleep in.
Some examples of this code may be found here.
There is today something called warchalking-it is more or less based on this earlier type of coding-and this symbol language is used to help wanderers with laptops in tow searching for a free node to hook up and do some wireless surfing.
My, how the times they change.
If one drives through, walks through the day and is not aware of the codes everywhere, it must be a blissfully ignorant existence.
After a while, things that are 99% likely not codes start looking like a secret language. For the schizoids in the crowd, this means you.
For a long time, because I have a long commute to work, I have noted the language of shoes.
They are most typically a man's shoe, and often a boot. They will be seen at roadsides. They can be on the sole, as if the owner just stepped out of them, or on their side. If there is a significant difference, I do not know it.
As I was writing this, chiding myself for my silliness, my incipient paranoia coming to the fore, I realized that one place I frequently note a shoe is next to an on-ramp constantly populated by the most recent brand of bum, the suburban interstate off-ramp panhandler.
Exit 104 on Interstate 85 just north of Atlanta Georgia, to be precise. So even as Indrid is spinning his own little tale of paranoia, seeing the secret threads of a world that lives beneath the skin of your world, he has a revelation that perhaps, just perhaps his visions of some strange drifter language of shoes is not beyond the realm of possibility.
It is true that a sneaker thrown over a telephone wire in some neighborhoods has been said for years to mean a drug-dealer lives close by.
It makes me wonder, still, though-if these exits are marked there is some logic to this odd little signage of the rootless.
But what to make of the boot standing sentinel by the road 8 miles from the last exit and 10 from the next? Behind it one only sees thick green foliage, the WPA planted woods, bramble-bound and twisted.
What's waiting there? What's buried there?
What's living there?
Hey. It's just a boot, man.
Once I have finished deciphering this language of derelict shoes I will let you know of my codebreaking joy.
If I survive the woods behind the shoe.
