01/2025: These Boots Were Made For…

Image © Jose 2025

Back in 2014 I bought myself my first pair of western boots, I was in Roanoke VA and shopped around till I found what I thought was a pair of boots I felt comfortable wearing. I always thought having ‘specialty’ shoes was sort of silly, don’t have a pair of steel toe boots, nor a pair of clown shoes, while someone could argue a pair of running shoes for someone that doesn’t run should count as well. I guess anywhere around cattle, be it in the US or somewhere in Brasil, these boots make sense. I grew up with the western mystique, from the moment I was introduced to black and white television in South Africa, cowboy movies were always a part of the western content feed, along with cartoons and other similar productions. One of the movies and series I followed avidly was the Trinity series with Spencer Hill and Bud Spencer (Trinitá as we called it in Portugal), and even today listening to the title theme by Enio Morricone makes me smile and think back of the hours and hours of TV watching. Apart from blue jeans that Levi Strauss popularized in the 1850s (one could argue started out in the 1500s in Italy and France), nothing else we saw on television was accessible or appropriate, so we all grew up dreaming of buying cowboy boots and a Stetson hat, it took me 52 years to get the first pair, the hat is still in the bucket list.

Apart from sporadic use (somewhere in the Internet, there is a photo of me in my underwear wearing these boots with a Happy Birthday message for a friend of my wife’s who loves pinup men, but that is a different story…), these have travelled with me – moved 6 times since then – and have stayed mostly in the closet. The other day I took them out and decided to wear them in the new house. I also have a pair of unused Lee jeans that my friend Erik offered me, he was cleaning out a house of a n old fella that passed away. And this last week, every time I am in the new house, I put these two things on, and I feel somewhat ready to get things done. Of course, no one needs a pair of boots and jeans to do renovation work, but these ‘props’ generate a feeling of readiness and willfulness that is hard to explain. The boots are heavy, and stiff, so I move slower and perhaps that is not a bad thing since they allow me to take my time and perhaps fall less. And I may look like a cowboy without a horse or saddle, or perhaps this is just my self-conscious mind playing tricks, but suddenly I have a plan, and the boots are a part of it.

Just this week, I was watching the series Landman written by Taylor Sheridan (have you see how many series he has streaming at the same time, and the topics he touches?), and there is a particular episode where a young character is pitching an idea to an old timer who states that the ‘kid’ is not a Landman, his boots are working men’s boots, and it made me think about how much these ‘props’ end up defining what others think of us, but also how we feel about ourselves and what we do. I may not be a western cattle worker, and I am certainly not a landman, but I guess these boots were made for working, and I am going to give them a proper mission in life.

Look for a post somewhere end of 2025 where I will share what the boots look like, they should have some stories of their own to share.