A Tale of Two Sandals

I bought my sandals in Glasgow at Millets, the venerable English supplier of outdoor equipment. Millets is the type of store that probably supplied Sir Baden Powell and his hearty boys with canvas tents and leather underpants back in the glory days of institutionalized pederasty. Millets went bankrupt weeks after I bought my sandals, about the same time that those sandals began emitting a most awful smell. I’d wash them or leave them in the sun for a couple of days, but minutes after putting my feet back into them, the smell would return. Food, moisture and warmth: that’s all an ambitious bacterium needs to start a family, and my size thirteen feet supply lots of each. Whatever bacterial culture it was that started as a backwater banana republic in my sandals has now gained first-world superpower status and is ready to supplant Canada’s seat on the G8.

So long as I keep my sandals low to the ground and my sizeable feet firmly wedged in them, the odour is relatively diffuse, and its source is difficult to locate. This is what has saved me so far on this trip from being lynched by a righteous mob, especially once we embarked on our seventeen-day minibus tour of South Africa. My companions on this trip—5 of them squeezed into a van with faulty air conditioning—probably thought they were smelling elephant dung, and I hope they will forever recall that smell with fondness, the way we think of horse poop in Alberta. But removing my foot from one of these fetid cauldrons is like waving a bowl of unwashed tripe around the room and Cara has been making me take my sandals off before we enter any accommodations and watches me as I scrub my feet in the tub.

Two weeks into our tour, we arrived in Oudsthoorn where we bought supplies at the largest supermarket we’d seen since leaving Pretoria. Being unable to find Odour Eaters - possibly because all of the signs were in Afrikaans and I was too embarrassed to ask for them by name - I bought a bottle of Dettol, a bright orange disinfectant that comes with its own Geiger Counter and instructions to ‘consult your physician if mutations occur.’ The instructions were to dilute the Dettol with five parts water, but I smeared it straight onto the blackened soles of my sandals and let the goo settle in for several hours before rinsing the sandals in the room’s garbage bin. The Dettol masked the smell of my shoes in exactly the same way a string vest fails to mask a hairy back. Rather, it gave my shoes an eye-watering pungency, like rotten canvas soaked in gasoline, that was impossible to ignore. I wrapped my sandals in several plastic bags, bunged them under a seat, and spent the remainder of the tour barefoot in the van.

I’m looking forward to spending Christmas in Germany for many reasons, but mostly because it’s going to be cold there, and I won’t need my sandals any further. We’ve chased the summer for nearly six months now, so it’s time to greet the winter, albeit a milder one than we’re used to; my sandals will remain in Cape Town where the powerful North-Easters that blow through here might suffice to limit their destructive power .