Question O' The Day

(Photograph copyright 2009, all rights reserved)

Aha! More creative answers. Clearly keeping the questions less, shall we say, concrete leads to some interesting things. So. A little background to this one.

We used to live in Texas. North Texas, to be exact. It's the Land of a lot of things, but what concerns us here is that it's also the Land of Freeways. It was...interesting to get used to. There's nothing quite as intimidating as taking a one-lane exit and flinging yourself practically vertical on one of the monster fly-overs that engineers are so fond of there. It's like being inside an abstract sculpture, but at 70 miles an hour. It took me a month of finding alternate routes to get the nerve to use them and another six months to get used to it.

However. Texas had money for roads, but what they didn't seem to have is money to clean them up. There was garbage all over the place. Some things were downright dangerous. Road gators, for example, are chunks of tire that fall off of semi-trailers at high speed. Retreads are legal there, and they cause horrendous accidents. I only ever saw them on the road, though, so there was some creative dodging at high speeds that I just looked on as a challenge.

To the point. Of all the debris on the freeways, the one thing we noticed the most were.....shoes. Lots of shoes. Shoes all over the damn place. There were other items of clothing and if in fact you could stop and pick them up, you could create an entire wardrobe on one trip to Dallas. But it was the shoes that got me. So here's the question.

Why is it that you only ever see ONE shoe on the road? Where's the other one? IS there another one? Are there THAT many amputees flinging their shoes around willy nilly while they're driving along? Do the shoes go feral and hit the road hunting for mates? Are there herds of feral shoes, then, roaming the South?

Hmmmm.