Combat Boot Foot Care Strategies for Hard Workers on a Water Budget TPS-0135
Now, after a lifetime of being an urban survivalist and now more of a wilderness survivalist but phasing in between. I've always been pretty nomadic and for the most part living in situations where, whether it was the band studio or the company warehouse or a van. Living in a van or a car, whatever, just very much, not domesticated.
I've gotten away with pushing the limits of foot care and foot hygiene, although, it was never wise to just except a sub optimal or degraded state of hygiene at any level but I could get away with it when I was younger.
The body chemistry was different and just sensibilities were different but where I'm at now, and where I'm at in my life, I have no excuse, whether ignorance or being facilitated or having the time.
The one thing I lack is water that I can use for bathing. Whatever water I use for for hygiene, it has to be spot treatment like spray bottles or damp towels, minimalistic. When it rains, that's great, you get a free shower when it rains if it's warm.
I'm doing a lot of pond digging and building, I'm in the desert.
You can't mess around with hygiene in the desert because it gets degraded so fast.
Being alone in the desert getting work done, the integrity of my skin is always a fear, there are many things that are out of my control, like heat rash, bites and stings. I can't hide from all the insects.
I'm not gonna call them red ants, because I think they're actually called seed harvester ants, but I'm not entomologist. I can't 100 percent identify, but I'm 99% sure now that they're seed harvester ants, based on my studies and my experience of them, they bite down, and then they walk in a circle to sting you in a circle from pivoting around a bite point. I've had welts all over just from going about life. I've gotten smarter in terms of being in balance with them. But it's difficult to avoid them if you wanna get anything done.
So obviously it's another reason I gotta be conscious of my feet, but I'm talking about breeches on the skin and infections and whatnot. There's enough I gotta worry about without my own stupidity, negligence leading to abrasions or any other kind of issues with the skin.
Wearing boots, I've got these nice kind of desert colored, more modern combat boots, tactical boots.
Between those and different types of sandals that I've made with paracord and old shoe soles. I cut the shoe off and drilled holes in the soles and tied a length of paracord through it to make a sandal. In the summer, it can be so hot, the boots, you can't be in them very long.
I've chosen to take extra foot care at this point, because I've had enough close calls with scorpions and with nails and splinters and glass and all kinds of stuff out here in the wasteland.
I've been impaled by pieces of wood. Luckily, I haven't stepped on nails, but there's just so many splinters, all the different ghost town shards of wood buried in the sand.
Whenever there's a windstorm, you thought you got everything out of the sand, cleaning up and there's tons more. Every time there's a windstorm, you see more, and you step on more.
I've had my share of close calls with worse potential impalement. Even with the sandals, which give me some protection from least stepping straight on top of something, I've got poked enough to where I've decided the trade off of the security and the peace of mind, especially if I'm trying to build something or actually move at any significant pace I've just arrived at the conclusion that I'm almost always gonna just put the boots on.
So that means as the temperature changes, that hygiene degrades faster and faster.
There's a very short span before those boots get funky and my goal now, and what I've been successful at for the first time in my life of being a boot wearing person, is that I've been able to manage to prevent the boots themselves from getting funky.
The only thing that gets funky is my feet in the socks, and to some extent, the socks themselves.
But I've arrived at a balance where somehow, by my luck and magic and miracles, I haven't had to spend a lot of my captured and stored rainwater on a lot of excessive washing of the socks.
What's works for me now, I put off the high maintenance foot care for wearing boots and doing work in boots off to my peril by seeing how far I could push sandals, because obviously they're low maintenance. You can get away with it mostly in the city, not always, but out here too many close calls, too many mild impalements, and too many ants and holes to underground burrow holes to twist your ankle in if you don't have ankle support...scorpions as well. I had a close encounter with a scorpion not too long ago and I just said, no, I can't. The top of my boot has gotta be above it's range. Unless it climbs up me, which it definitely could. But at least I'll have a couple seconds to notice.
I try to be hyper aware of it, but there's certain tasks where you're digging or you're moving stuff, and they can creep up on you. So for the most part, I've switched over to, if I'm moving around outside, boots are gonna be on.
So paradoxically, I would expect that I would have to expend a lot more water and do a lot more cycles with the socks. But I've found this sort of very miraculous, paradoxical balance, where if I do several hours worth of serious work and I'm basically at maximum exertion for several hours, digging, building things and whatnot, trying to stay out of the main heat of the day.
Over this last winter, I was very productive and even if it's winter, even if it's cold, you're still gonna get a lot of moisture and a lot of toe jam and just a lot of funk happening in shoes and boots.
So what I would do is is, anytime I felt the temperature and the moisture level, building up in the boots, or start to feel the tiniest bit of your body trying to cool itself down, a little bit of sweat moisture...I would take a break and remove the boots and let the socks just dry out in the wind or the sun. I would rotate them.
In the winter I would wear multiple layers of socks so without having to wash them individually over and over, without letting them pile up in a basket of dirty clothes so they just sit there and don't really dry out, and they maybe get worse.
If you're not washing them frequently, which I wasn't, I was able to basically wash my socks in the wind, which is amazing, because I didn't have to spend my precious supply of soap. I didn't have to spend my precious supply of water. Just intervening in that cycle of whatever the microbial growth would be that would make it really stink and really be nasty.
As long as I would interrupt that cycle and swap the socks out...because it was cold, I would wear several layers of socks at night, sleeping when I wasn't wearing the boots, and then when I would put on the boots, I would leave only one or sometimes two layers of socks on, putting the other pair in a side pocket so that I could always have multiple on hand. I could cycle through them and when that moisture started to build up, I would just rotate it out.
At the time of changing the socks, I would very frequently just use my hands to massage and if necessary scrape anything out. Maybe on a weekly basis I would scrape off some of the dead skin, and if there was any build up of toe jam. But for the most part, I was keeping it dry.
I would just slightly rub off or draw away whatever moisture and whatever debris from the socks or from skin or from sand, cause the sand would get all the way through the boots and the socks.
As long as I continued to cycle through the socks and then rub the feet and make sure that my feet were totally dry before putting on the dry socks that I was rotating through, that could happen several times over the course of several hours and nothing would stink, I could literally successfully rotate through them just by that methodology.
Within about a week I'd do an intensive, more deep cleaning with soap and water, and the need for that has intensified as the temperatures changed more.
But I've been able to use nail clippers, clipping the nails and using the file to get at some of the callouses that are overgrown and the dead skin. Sorry if it sounds nasty, it's not really that nasty.
If I talked about dirt under my fingernails and callouses and blisters on my hand from digging and holding a shovel, it's really not that foul.
I have arrived at this flow where it works, there can be a lot of sock material on my feet, but I can rub it off with just a little bit of soap and water on my hands.
It's a unique scenario. Most people, if you're gonna go hiking or camping, then you can pack dirty clothes in a bag, and then you just get back and put it in a washing machine, and you have all the water in the world and all the soap and electricity to do that. But in this situation, I'm rotating through those few socks.
Maybe twice I season I'll wash everything. I just have a little galvanized metal pail and some all natural soap. Some drops of that, and now it's all rainwater and the rainwater doesn't even get funky the way I'm storing it.
So just hand wringing in the little pail and then hanging stuff up and out to dry in the sun.
Usually, even in the winter, it dries fast enough, the wind will desiccate it fast enough, and in the summer, it'll be baked within an hour.
So it's been a pretty resourceful and pretty resource preserving strategy.
It really feels nice to be doing hard work in the desert and have feet that are really happy when they're well cared for, and I'm happy not to be living in the stench that I always had sort of gotten used to and put other people through when I wasn't as diligent. So the combination of caring about self care and foot care and being in a place in my life where I have no excuse, I'm not rushing off to work, and I have the time to do it. So I put it in that schedule. It gets done and it's smarter and healthier for me to be safe and making sure to wear the boots wherever I go walking around. There's no excuse other than to call laziness.
If I say, oh, I'm just gonna go reach and grab that one thing real quick, and I'm gonna walk super light and careful, and what not. But even then, sometimes you never know, even trying to feel out each step.
Once you put that pressure down and you're wrong, you're gonna pay for it.
So I'm not trying to make excuses, but there are times when I will feel like I know an area but it always changes.
Applying this type of hygiene to my scalp, if I start to sweat at all on my head, I gotta blast it with a spray bottle, put soap in it, let it dry because just the slightest bit of funkiness, it just compounds and it gets out of control.
I hate having shoes that stink or boots that stink.
There's just not much you can do about it. There's a lot of boot material that does not respond well to being soaked in any way or washed.
I'm very grateful that I can get away with hard work and my boots don't have this compounding stink that almost makes them unbearable. You have to get rid of them before they're even worn out, because they're so unbearable.
But no, I sleep next to them, I park them next to the bottom of my bed and they don't bother me.
If I'm out there working, I take them off as soon as I am not using them directly for a task, and then the feet can breathe. The feet can get dried in the air and I'm able to see them just be aware of their status. I don't keep them pristine all the time. Certainly they get dusty and there's dirt on them and whatnot. But I was just today, the reason I'm saying this, it's almost like my feet are taking the mic, because they're glad that they got some TLC today.
If you have issues really embracing this process. It's right there in the field manuals. They even say, massage your feet, these old army field manuals, pretty daring to talk about self foot massage.
But if you remember, in Full Metal Jacket, when he's going around, the drill sergeant inspecting everyone's hands and feet. That's, that's no joke.
Luckily, I would only be a liability to myself if I let my hygiene get degraded.
But certainly in teams, which I have been in various types of teams as a civilian, where you're in close quarters with your team, and it matters, your performance and your hygiene matters.