Bare Footed

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When I was between the ages 4 and about 10 years old, one of my favorite things to do was to run barefooted out of doors and feel the nice cool grass in the yard on my feet. There is a lot of things that could happen to bare feet out there in that cruel world and over a period of time, every single one of them did. Here’s a few of the bare feet problems I encountered,

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Bare Footed

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Stumped Toe

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All of the housing in the Phillips camp area had poured concrete sidewalks in sections about 3 feet wide an 5 feet long. Over the years, settlement or roots growing under some sections of sidewalk had caused uneven sections with as much as 1 inch higher that the adjacent section. As a young boy running full speed barefooted down the sidewalk, occasionally I would hit one of those rises with my toe and it would literally knock a chunk of meat out of my toe. I would fall to the ground holding my toe rolling back and forth in pain for five minutes, and then limp in the house and get my mother to doctor my bloody toe.

 

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Stickers

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There were two kind of stickers around Phillips that were particularly bad for bare feed. The worst one was a goat head sticker that had some long spikes that stuck deep into your feet when you stepped on them and hurt really bad. If you happened to step into a patch of them on the ground, you might get ten to twenty of them stuck in your feet. The pain was often so bad that it caused you to set down right there to pull them out of your feet. This often resulted in getting ten or twenty more in your butt you had to get somebody else to pull out. Once you got them all out, then you had to worry about how to get out of the sticker patch without getting anymore in your feet. You felt like a pin cushion once you got clear.

 

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The other type of sticker was the sand bur, these grew on plants with 30 or 40 of the burs on a stalk like wheat. There was usually a big patch of them, so when you stepped into a patch of sand burs, you might get 30 or 40 in your foot at one time. Once you got them in your foot, they were much harder to get out because they pulled apart when you removed them leaving 3 or 4 single spines in your foot to be removed separately.. You had to suffer for quite a while until you got them all out.

 

Sand Burs grew every where in the Texas Panhandle and probably hurt bare feet more than any other single sticker.

 

 

 

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Sharp Things

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Occasionally, I would accidentally step on a piece of broken glass while walking barefooted outdoors. This would usually cause my foot to bleed all over the place. Worse yet, sometimes a piece of glass would stick in the bottom of my foot and I would have to get Mom to check it out to be sure no glass was left in my foot. This meant Mom would get out the mercurochrome and dose my foot, then get the tweezers and dig around in my fresh wound for a while. This usually hurt more than the original cut, but it had to be done.

 

I really didn’t step on glass as obvious as this, but often there was was just one or two pieces that were hard to see. 

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Then there was the rusty nail in the the board, that I stepped on numerous times in my barefoot days. This was very painful and you had to pull your foot off the nail which left a bunch of crap in the wound. I would go in and tell my Mom the bad news and she would check to see when I had my last tetanus shot. Each time my shot had expired and I would get a hole punched in my butt to match the one in my foot which always seemed to hurt worse than the foot.
That nail is going to penetrate deep into the bare foot and hurt like the devil.

 

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Hot Pavement

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We had to be very careful out there barefooted on that pavement on a hundred degree day or we could get some serious burns on the bottom of our feet. I managed to burn my feet several times thinking I was tougher than I really was.

 

Looks like blisters are already forming on the bottom of those feet. 

 

 

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I’m not sure that good feeling I got from walking barefoot in the cool green grass was worth all the misery I had to go through, but I think it probably was in the long run.

 

 

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Thanks for reading Bare Footed,
Bill