Can you solve a mystery for us? Why is it that every so often as you’re driving along there’s just one shoe lying there on the road? There’s never the other shoe in the pair, just that one shoe. Does someone throw their shoe out the window in disgust? Do kids throw their parents’ shoes out the back of the station wagon? Do they sprout from seeds sewn by bird droppings in the pavement? This is a worldwide phenomenon: I’ve seen road shoes sit there, dusty and flattened, in India, Europe, and Mexico and on many highways and byways of North America. Any advice will be appreciated. –Emily Baumbach, San Rafael, California
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Well, we can nix the sprout-from-seeds hypothesis right off the bat. You’re undoubtedly thinking of shoe trees (guffaw). OK, got that out of my system. Many great and not-so-great minds have wrestled with this phenomenon without arriving at any firm conclusions. I note, for instance, that my fellow investigator David Feldman devotes seven pages to the topic in his book When Do Fish Sleep, in the course of which he elucidates 13 theories on lone shoe origin. Clearly, what Dave needs is to meet a nice girl. It is high time I settled matters once and for all.
There is disagreement on how widespread the phenomenon is. Contrary to your report, some say it’s confined to North America, and that you never see shoes on, say, the German autobahn.
