Low-angle shot of a woman in her twenties with long straight dark-blonde hair, in a brown suede jacket and knee-high cowboy boots, sitting sideways in the open door of a ranch truck pulling on a boot

The Boots on the Passenger-Side Floor

The boots ride on the passenger-side floor of the truck, carrying dust from three states and the smell of the work they are put to.

Ruth Amsel 2 min read

The boots sit on the passenger-side floor of the truck. I kicked them off at the last gate and drove the rest of the way in socks, and when the cab got hot the smell of them came up — oil and sweat, and under that the smell of the ground itself, the way leather smells after it has been worked all day.

They ride on the passenger floor because that is where I put them for the drive home: out from under the pedals, within reach of the door. They stay there overnight and sometimes into the next morning, until there is something worth putting them back on for. This morning it was fence — a run of wire down, posts leaned, a yearling out on the road side. The boots went through the gate standing up and came back covered down to the welt.

the cowboy boots standing on the passenger floor of the ranch truck, a straw hat on the bench seat and the windmill through the windshield

The jobs do not change much. Postholes and salt blocks, a pump that has to be pulled and cleaned, the corner of a shed that needs straightening. Each job leaves its mark. The toe is scarred where the posthole bar has come down across it. The right boot has a crease along its side where a horse stepped on it. The left boot is darker at the ankle, where the leather has soaked and dried — spring mud, snowmelt, irrigation water — and gone stiff and cracked.

The dust on them is not one dust. Grey, floury dust sits in the creases where the foot flexes, the kind that gets into the stitching and never comes out. Red dust from the last job lies over it on the toes. Mud from three states has packed hard in the bottom of the tread — red, grey, black gumbo, each layer underneath the next.

later in a small-town western store, facing right, holding up a boot from a long wall of cowboy boots

The smell of the cab is the leather. On a hot afternoon, with the windows up, the heat pulls out of the hide everything the year has put into it — boot oil, sweat, alkali, and a sour note from the tanning that never quite leaves. It is not unpleasant. It is the smell of leather worked wet and dried hard, and it is there on the floorboard every time the door opens.

The leather is full-grain cowhide, oiled when it starts to look dry. The soles are a tan rubber with a chevron tread, and they have been replaced once. The new soles were stiff for a month and then broke in, and the welt still carries the marks where the old ones were pulled off. The right sole has worn down faster than the left since then, from the foot I brace against the posthole bar.

Last spring the truck went into a hay meadow up to the hubs. I put the boots on to walk out, and they came home full of water. They sat two days by the stove, rough side down, and dried stiff; the toe of the left boot has never been quite straight since.

They are back on the passenger floor. The right boot leans against the transmission hump, its sole worn through the rubber to the cork at the ball of the foot.