James Etheridge

When I was a kid, during the summer I went barefoot all the time. We all went barefoot and did so while doing the usual summertime activities such as riding our bikes, walking to the store, catching crawfish or building dams in the creek, even playing backyard baseball. About the only thing I wasn’t allowed to do barefoot back then was cut the grass. That was because, according to my mother, in case I slipped and my foot went under the mower. Years later I realized that if I slipped and my foot went under the mower, it really wouldn’t matter if I was wearing a pair of US Keds or not.

Each year when shoes became optional around the middle of April, the process would begin of toughening the bottom of your feet for a summer of going barefoot in the Georgia scorch. That was accomplished by walking over rocks, through the woods, across dirt and sand and, of course, up and down concrete driveways and asphalt streets. If your feet were properly seasoned in the springtime, by the first day of summer you could go anywhere you wanted barefoot with no trouble at all.

It could also be soothing and comforting. There was, and still is I’m sure, no feeling quite like walking barefoot across a freshly mowed lawn on a summer evening. The same went for the creek. I remember walking in the creek all the way through the woods from our house to the flood plain at the bottom of the hill. The cool flowing water over your feet and between your toes was cool, relaxing and even as a kid had a way of filling your senses you could never feel wearing vans or flip flops.

I got my first stitches and scar from going barefoot. One Saturday I rode my bike over to my cousin Dennis’s house, which was a common occurrence in the summer and a distance of about a mile. Dennis had a 24-inch Schwinn bike with high handlebars and a banana seat, the definitive bike style of the Sixties. I hopped on the back of the banana seat for a ride up the street with him and as we were going down the driveway, my right heel got hung up in the spoke and ripped a gash across the Achilles tendon. It didn’t cut it, thank goodness, but it bled a lot and hurt like crazy. I rode my bike back home, across Mary Lou Lane, which was downhill on the first part before bottoming out. The rest of the way was a big hill, which I had to get off and walk my bike about halfway up. When I got to the top of the hill and took a right on our street, Rollingwood Lane, it was downhill the rest of the way. Being a Saturday afternoon Aunt Hurricane, my pediatrician, was not in her office and so my parents took me to the emergency room at DeKalb General Hospital. My heel was stitched up and I was eventually as good as new, but it taught me a lesson about riding on the back of a bike with someone and not just barefoot.

My friend Billy across the street learned a lesson the hard way too. We found a series of trails going from the bottom of the hill on our street all the way over to Sugar Creek. We would get on our bikes and ride the trail as fast as we could, pretending we were daring enduro motorcycle racers. One morning Billy was riding barefoot and one of his toes got caught in a vine. It yanked all the skin off and almost took the toe with it. After a trip to see Aunt Hurricane he was fine, but his toe looked like a Vienna sausage.

We ate watermelon barefoot, too. Watermelon was a summer treat right up there with the ice cream truck and Icee Slurpees from the 7-Eleven store. To keep us entertained for an hour or so, our mothers or fathers would cut a watermelon in half, split it into quarters, give each one of us a quarter and a shaker of salt. We would then sit and eat the watermelon down to the rind, passing the saltshaker around and having seed spitting contests. I don’t remember as many different types of watermelons then as there are now, just the long, green, seeded ones. One of my cousins in Texas ate the rind about down to the skin and had to be taken to the hospital and have his stomach pumped. I wasn’t there, but the news traveled all the way to Georgia and served as a warning to us kids about eating too close to the rind.

I went barefoot all through my teens well into my twenties. In high school, I took Driver’s Ed. One of the main strategies of Driver’s Ed was scare tactics.  One day a DeKalb County police officer came in with slides of accidents from around the county.  They were pretty graphic and the officer had been involved in the cleanup of several of the accidents. At Q&A time after the slide show, I was the first to raise my hand and asked the officer, “Is it illegal to drive barefoot?” The whole class chimed in with me. My father had told me that it was indeed illegal and would have a conniption if I attempted to climb into my car and drive away barefoot. The officer told me, “No, it is not illegal to drive barefoot, but the fact is that you can apply more pressure to a brake pedal while wearing a shoe.”  I didn’t care about any of that, though.  I had my answer and the only thing I cared about was going home and telling my father that a DeKalb County police officer had told me that it was perfectly legal to drive barefoot. He looked at me like he didn’t believe what I was saying but never said anything about it again, thus ending an ongoing disagreement.

Once I hit a certain age, about the time when I was about eighteen, my mother would throw a fit if I left the house barefoot.  I’d be ready walk out the door and go up to my friend’s house in Cedar Grove wearing a cowboy hat, t-shirt, rolled up jeans and no shoes. “Where’s y’shoes?” she would demand.
“I’m not wearing any.”
“Well, why not?”
“I’m just going up to Bobby and Don’s. All we’re gonna do is sit around the basement room, listen to music and play guitars.”
“Well, y’still need t’put on shoes!”
I’d leave anyway, climb in my Volkswagen with my guitar and head to The Grove, barefoot and happy. This happened numerous times. I finally figured out that when my parents grew up during The Depression, if you went out with no shoes on it meant you were too poor to own a pair. That certainly wasn’t the case with anyone we knew or us, but it was the way my parents saw things.

I’m not quite sure when I quit going barefoot. Probably sometime after I got married at age twenty-five. I didn’t have an epiphany or step in a bed of fire ants or anything. I just sort of quit doing it. I couldn’t go barefoot now if I wanted to. I’m not a germaphobe or worried that people might think I can’t afford shoes, but my poor old feet are so tender I probably couldn’t walk for two days if I even tried to go to the mailbox barefoot. But that’s okay. I still eat watermelon.