Petoskey — Finally, the weather is changing. The air is warmer. The sound of the birds sweeter. The ground less frozen. But it’s not summer yet. No, it’s muddy. It’s mucky. It’s sopping wet and soaking through the bottom of your shoes.
Nobody wears the right shoes in spring. That’s because we forget how messy it is. Nothing can be as wet as winter, right? Wrong.
The winter gets so hard at the very end that we try to skip right over the showers and on to the flowers. But when we try to skip an entire season, we end up landing right in a big, fat mud puddle wearing a pair of New Balance sneakers and spend the rest of the day sloshing around with wet socks and soggy shoes.
People think their sneakers can work, even when it has rained all afternoon.
There’s also the tiptoe method, of course. That’s a classic. People think that if they arch their foot and get enough of their sole off the ground, somehow they can avoid the mud. They don’t realize all their weight is in the front of their shoe, resulting in their foot pressing further into the soggy earth.
It’s all futile and foolish. People suffer in silence every spring. Thinking they can somehow dodge the puddles on their own, they put off buying the proper footwear. They reason that spring isn’t that long, and a month or two of wet shoes is the only price they have to pay.
They don’t have to live this way. And the truth is that it doesn’t cost a fortune to stay dry in spring. All you need is the right shoe.
When people think of L.L. Bean boots, they think of the tall, winter versions. The six-inch and eight-inch iterations are the most common. These are winter classics, but in the spring we don’t need the height. There’s no snow, so the leather that runs up the leg is unnecessarily warm. But that classic rubber sole; we still want that. The spring solution? L.L. Bean boot rubber mocs.
These are basically Bean boots with the top part hacked off, leaving only the rubber bottom. The result is a fascinatingly useful option for spring. The thick rubber is watertight. You can trudge through the mud without worry. You can stand in a puddle and be completely confident that your socks will be bone dry when you step out of it. And with no laces, so the Bean boot rubber mocs are easy to slip on and off.
If you are particularly fastidious, you may be irritated by the fact that your pants get all bunched up at the bottom when you wear boots. The bottom four inches of your pant leg always end up wrinkled, and if you are only wearing boots for a short period, this can be annoying.
But because rubber mocs are cut so low, the pant leg falls just as it would on a pair of loafers. No unnecessary wrinkles.
The L.L. Bean boot rubber moc is a strange looking shoe. But not in a bad way. It’s endearing in its pure utility. The fact that it almost seems incomplete without the top is charming. The bulbous leather toe box almost feels out of proportion, but it doesn’t detract.
This hints at a deeper point of classic American style, and Bean boots are a quintessential part of that classic American style. The rugged utility is a feature, not a bug. The purpose of the boot overrides the aesthetic concerns.
Traditional American style isn’t style for a settled civilization. It is style for the hinterland. The practical becomes the aesthetic itself.
Whether you are hurrying across the parking lot to grab groceries, walking in the woods, taking the garbage out at 10:30 p.m., or preparing the garden for planting, Bean boot rubber mocs are the perfect spring shoe for Michiganders of all stripes.
You don’t have to suffer soggy shoes. Enjoy dry shoes this spring.
O.W. Root is a writer based in Northern Michigan, with a focus on nature, food, style, and culture. Follow him on X @NecktieSalvage.
