“These boots were made for walking. And that’s just what they are going to do. One of these days these boots are gonna walk all over you.”
Let’s hope that doesn’t happen, because if all the boots and shoes that have been thrown away at the city dump, dug themselves out and started a march on Yellowknife, it would be a mighty army of angry footwear. If they were in a mood for some stomping, it would be a noisy march. Finding perfectly good boots and shoes being thrown away at the dump is a common occurrence, but seeing a hundred or so pairs all together certainly gets your attention.
Sometime last week a whole lot of boots showed up at the salvage area of the dump. To be precise: they were Viking Class 1 VW Miner 49'ers. Good solid rubber boots with steel toes. The type of boots worn at mine sites. I am not entirely sure where they came from or who dumped them there, but I do know people were sorting through the pile and salvaging some of them.
I estimate that there were around a hundred pair of them and when I searched them on the internet they would cost new $184.99 before taxes. So, we are talking around twenty thousand dollars worth of boots. Those that don’t get salvaged, the city with their usual gusto, will simply bulldoze and bury because despite all the talk the city does about the dump and garbage, they fail to see the value of salvaging or the money that can be made from the dump.
Personally, I think all those boots should be moved over to the Restore, which sells stuff to raise money for Habitat for Humanity. They could sell them for ten or twenty bucks a pair.
If you work on broken rock, these boots are ideal. In fact, one of the first things I salvaged from the dump, decades ago, was a pair of miner’s boots and I have gone through several pair over the years, but have always used salvaged ones. They are particularly good for hiking over rocks in wet weather, if you are trenching or even running a chain saw.
New or used, they also make great, colourful and interesting planters. Also, since they now come in bright colours, they could even become a fashion item for urbanites. Stranger things have happened.
Think about this. Our city has the word Yellow in its name, so if everyone took to wearing these black and yellow boots, that would certainly get the tourists talking and would make us, dare I say, extraordinary. But why should Yellowknife be the sole beneficiary of this unexpected windfall. Most of the communities have dirt roads, which turn into muddy quagmires in the spring, so the GNWT could collect them up from the mines and outfit entire communities with steel toes rubber boots.
Ironically enough, these boots showed up at the dump, during earth week and just before the gum boot rally. So, if anyone at the dump had of been thinking ahead or on their toes, they would have seen the potential of this load. They would make sure that none of those boots get buried or needlessly destroyed. Did I mention, that new, those boots were worth twenty thousand dollars and even used, they still have a value and should not be considered garbage?
The city and GNWT talk a lot about garbage and recycling but don’t seem to have the right attitude or will, to stop waste. When I saw all those boots at the dump for some reason a vision of a chorus line of miners participating in the musical Stomp flashed through my mind. Also, I wished I had a warehouse where I could store them all and find a new home for them because burying them in the dump is just such a waste.
But its not just these boots, so much stuff ends up buried in the dump. Salvaging could help reduce the cost of living in the North and could help many people in so many ways. It is just too bad we can’t get the politicians and bureaucrats to see the light. In the mean time, I can’t get the song, These boots were made for walking, out of my head.