Sound Transit’s Federal Way Downtown Station opened this weekend, with lots of music, dancing, speeches, curious people, and rain. My trip there began at Columbia City Station, and took 15 minutes to reach the airport and 30 the final stop. The activation of the new stations (which include Kent Des Moines and Star Lake) added eight miles of track to the existing line (33 miles); and Sound Transit expects around 20,000 new riders will flow into the 1 Line. During my return to Seattle, Kranken fans filled the car. Finally, the wait was over for this moment, this extension, this key part of the journey to the game.
To celebrate Sound Transit’s big day, which, hopefully, will soon be followed by the completion of a key segment of Line 2 (between Seattle and Bellevue), I decided to share with you my secret obsession: Shoes I have spotted on light rail trains over the years. Now, it must be understood, I don’t have fetishes relating to feet or anything like that. What happened instead is this: As a devoted pedestrian, one never notices shoes sharply because they are, obviously, on the move. But when the feet they protect and comfort are on the train, they are at rest, and so open to contemplation. You can, in a word, see the shoes: their design, their colors, and, above all, the person who decided to wear them.
In his book, Camera Lucinda, the great postwar French semiotician Roland Barthes designated this kind of appreciation as “adventures.” The phone-captured shoes in these pictures are, forgive the pun, transportive. They take me from here (the train’s car) to the souls that make a city (its windows, stoves, carpets, wardrobes, its evanescent beings, their dreams). What I present here is a small collection—I have 112 such pics—of the shoes that caught my attention and, as a consequence, the camera on my phone.
Though these shoes were seen during my trip to Federal Way on Saturday, December 6, they disboarded the train at Sea-Tac and Angle Lake. But I had to include them because of the socks—one, sky-blue and long; the other pink/grey/white and short—and the attitude of the feet. Now, found in my general philosophy is the idea that the different parts of our body have some amount of autonomy, although they are all connected to and commanded by a cerebrally centered nervous system. But when the mind is not paying attention, they have a small amount of freedom to do their own little things. In this pic, I see the feet—dressed up in colorful socks and comfortable black shoes—secretly communicating. What are they chatting about?
What’s the bag? A can of beer? And how much did these saddle oxfords cost? Are they the real thing? If you’ve got the cash, you can buy handmade ones. But I have a feeling these ones were mass produced. Still, they are quite handsome.
Vans sneakers? The magic here is found in the pinkish laces and the black tracing.
Standing shoes on the train love to strike a pose.
The state of Washington rises from these polished black leather boots like a blue-green sun rising on a planet inhabited by humans in the far future.
This excellent dandy recalls a line in Whit Stillman’s movie Metropolitan: “So, you’re one of those public transportation snobs.” This is the mode of an urban aristocrat. They don’t care for middle-class values: owning property, maintaining lawns, job promotions, saving money, and so on. In fact, their politics is a curious form of social democracy. Whereas the standard social democrat says: You can have rich people but no poor ones; the dandy says: You can have rich people but everyone has the right to look like a million bucks every day of the year.
This composition! So smooth, so composed, so there. What one sees here is a mind that knows what it wants and how to express it. Nothing is wasted; nothing overdone. Balance is the order of the day.
These are called “garden wellies.” But I believe a true citizen of this rainy city does not wear wellies in much the same way they don’t need an umbrella. We just take it, no matter how wet the weather.
Now this is an excellent example of what we often call good parenting. Indeed, what one sees in this pic is the truth of the saying: “Shoes make the man.” But we can also say: “A child’s shoes will make the adult.” Plus, the color of the boy’s gloves match his shoes. Always keep in mind that it’s never too soon to look good on a train.
