Living in Perth, Western Australia, winter here is different to that most humans imagine. We have this picture in our conscious and subconscious of dark and dreary days, snow and wassailers, seemingly dead gardens, and black forests that grow out of our own nightmares to freeze us into terrified submission. People talk of the lack of sunlight and seasonal depression, and of staying at home with warm blankets, cheery fires and hot coffee until the sun is reborn in our lives. A pagan belief, perhaps, but one by which people style their lives in winter. Here though winter is life. The sun burns us for two thirds of the year and leaves our skin, our sands, our very air on fire. Only in winter do we get rainfall of enough strength to penetrate the dry ground. The sun shines for at least three days of every week, a cold sun perhaps, but still omnipresent. Also, the number of hours of daylight don't change seasonally as much as they do in many Northern Hemisphere countries because we're so much closer to the equator.
Don't let me fool you into thinking it's not cold. We think it is. A newspaper columnist a week ago wrote of the cold and salty Fremantle winds sweeping with glee through her closed windows, and bemoaned the culture that leads some of us to say "But *this* isn't cold!". In more global terms, is it really cold though? Let me illustrate. This time one year ago I saw ice for the first time. Now, everyone here knows what ice is. We're not that uneducated. Ice is made by putting water in little divided trays in the freezer, and it comes in convenient little cubes just the right size for getting your tongue stuck to in summer. What I and my neighbours were startled to see was ice on our windshields. A nice solid coating, glowing a greeny-blue sort of colour in the early morning sun. I always thought ice blue and ice green were just names for two of thousands of colours on paint swatches, like "Morocco Brown" and "President Blue". Now I know that they actually have a real meaning, that they're colours with an incredible life and intensity not captured by any paint salesman. There were two icy days, where the temperature was still below zero (Celcius) after the sun rose. But that was all last year, and I doubt it'll happen this year. It just doesn't get below freezing very often.
None-the-less, people here rug themselves up and turn the heater up, bemoaning the greyness outside and the chill in the wind. Many cannot understand how I manage without shoes. I have developed a standard range of answers, depending on my mood. The simple "This corridor is kept at twentyone degrees year round" is enough to keep most people silent for the time it takes to pass. But it's getting less so as the year cools. The responses I get began as "You're brave", or "do you feel the cold?", very simple, non-obtrusive language reflecting surprise more than anything. Now the language is becoming harsher as people reflect their own feelings about the weather and the season into my feet. I lose track of the number of people who have said to me "Your feet must be so cold". End of statement. If I say no, they just smile and say a conversational equivalent of "That's nice dear". I used to answer "No, are your hands cold?" but the answer now is always emphatically "YES!".
What I don't understand is why people let themselves get so cold if they find it so unpleasant. My hands are never cold, nor are my feet. Quite a few people have said to me "I've always found that if my feet are cold then the rest of me is cold", or, more tritely, "Shoes on feet, warm all over". Obviously the latter isn't true in all situations. It doesn't seem to have occurred to the people who say this that maybe my feet aren't cold. That maybe I'm wearing warm clothing, sufficient to keep in heat and protect from wind. That I'm not forcing my legs into stockings and heels, letting water from puddles get into my shoes and all up my legs and stay there all day. As a physics demonstrator I work with liquid nitrogen on a regular basis. 196 degrees Celcius below zero - very very very cold stuff. I've learnt that you can pour it on people's clothing quite safely and that body heat will evaporate it rapidly. I've also learnt never to put it on someone's stockings. Every experience I've had with stockings is that they don't do anything for heat except make you cold, and that exposure to LN2 will result in patches of frozen skin for the stocking-wearer. However, spilling it on bare feet is perfectly safe. It all has to do with heat transfer rates. Call it magic if you will, but it's the same magic that makes splashing in puddles so much fun without shoes and so much misery with.
Speaking of puddles, I'm loving them. The first real downpour we had this year flooded lots of places, including a carpark I walk through going to work. A little redheaded girl and I found ourselves wading through deliciously deep water, for her up to the knees, for me to mid-calf. We chatted a little about the world and the things she was doing before I had to leave. The sun shone down on us merrily, and on the puddles, and by the time I returned some six hours later the puddle had almost completely evaporated. So I danced on the little bit of mud that had collected.
I continue to work barefoot, attending careers expos in evenings in school gymnasiums. Often the floor is some sort of parquet or at least a hard sprung wood of some sort. Quite pleasant, never unbearable. The most recent expo was one I also attended last year, in shoes. Last year by the end of the night my feet were very sore, from moving around, talking to people, being the salesman for several hours. This year they felt fine, even eager for more afterwards. I've found this consistently, that the long hours are only hard on my feet if I force them into shoes. But this is too complicated to explain to casual acquaintances.
I've had to become more careful about my walking than I did in summer - if I begin too early in the morning I sometimes find that my feet haven't quite "woken up" yet enough to adapt to the sharper, poor quality roads in my neighbourhood. So instead I wander the kerbs, the puddles, the sandpiles where old houses are being turned into new high-density units. All have unusual and pleasant textures, even the stamens and pointy caps from those eucalypts that flower at this season. One of my favourites is a plastic-fabric woven barrier that was put up at one stage across the sidewalk while concrete was being set, and has been left there to float its free end in the wind and sand. It always contains a mix of water and sand in different parts of the loose mesh, so everywhere you put your feet feels different.
I'm really looking forward to finishing one whole year barefoot. I can count on one hand the number of times I've worn shoes this last year, and tell you exactly when and where and why each was. So far, every season has proven to be fantastic for my feet in one way or another. Winter is still mostly an unknown, worthy of exploration. I will continue to persist in going barefoot in winter, because I can, and it feels good, and because I've never turned down a chance to explore and experience.