Feet are comprised of fifty-two bones, one for every week of the year, a quarter of the total number of bones in an entire human body. There are around 8,000 nerves and 125,000 sweat glands in each one. There are sixty-six joints, and thirty-four muscles. With so many moving parts, it is not hyperbole to argue that the foot is the most engineered structure in the human body.
An arch’s ability to support massive weight is one of the most fundamental concepts in physics—and weirdest. The idea is that if you push against a wall with your hand, the wall is pushing back with the same amount of force. This is one aspect of the concept of inertia. The arch of the foot (or any arch) diffuses the forces of compression, which increases the entire structure’s load-bearing capacity by orders of magnitude.
But feet don’t just provide stationary support, they move. They run and jump and—most of all—walk. The plantar fascia, a fan-like structure of connective tissue that is not muscle, not bone, not tendon, but a springy, stringy, sticky protein structure, tenses and releases beneath the arch with every step. Like a spring, the plantar fascia can hold tension generated by the leg and release it as that potential energy transfers forward. Who thinks about this complex orchestration of biology and physics? Our feet, most of the time, are just there, performing miracles.
I know all of this because since April, on the past five fourth Wednesdays of the month I have driven to St. John the Wondermaker Orthodox Church, in Atlanta’s Grant Park neighborhood, to wash and trim and file the feet of a handful of the city’s 2,200 unhoused men, who come to the church for hot breakfast and stay for a pedicure.
Before, I didn’t think much about what happens to feet that are always in shoes, that are always walking. That are wet every time it rains. That sweat all day and then all night in July and August. That don’t have access to showers. Or lotion. Or clippers. Or antiseptic. Few people do, except perhaps militaries, long-distance thru-hikers, weightlifters, and the church. Of course, a church thinks about feet—So if I, your Lord and Teacher, have washed your feet, you also ought to wash one another’s feet. For I have set you an example, that you also should do as I have done to you.
There are several foot clinics for the unhoused in Atlanta, as well as in cities all over the country. Most are church-started and church-led. Never a churchgoing person, I didn’t know about them until a friend introduced me to her friend who, with a crew of herbalists, bought a van and filled it with homemade plant medicines. The Herbalista Free Clinic began serving people who congregated in church parking lots, alongside the Harriet Tubman Foot Care Clinic, so named because a person cannot walk to freedom if their feet hurt.
I’ve been coming for a few months now, but I am still new. It’s October and has finally cooled off since last month. It rained all last week. Most days, the red brick building sits quietly among the houses in the neighborhood. It would be easy to miss as a church but for the face of the namesake saint above the door and the gilt cross that crowns an information placard. Today, the small courtyard below the stairs to the sanctuary is full of people waiting for a plate. There are murmurs among them of winter coats and new socks needed. I know my way now, through the collection of men in their stained and torn clothes, some reading, some talking, some staring at their phones, some staring at me. The late-summer smells of humid bodies give way to warm butter and bacon as I pass through the screened door into the basement, where the church staff and volunteers are rounding off big aluminum pans of grits and biscuits. Food is the most obvious and pressing need of all creatures. I suppress an urge to snag a biscuit as I walk through. The corridor out of the kitchen winds up a few stairs and then a sharp left up a few more stairs to a generous room of folding tables and plastic chairs and the passive, beatific stares of gold-encrusted Russian Orthodox icons hanging on the painted cinderblock walls.
The other volunteers, who have been doing this for years, answer my questions, and I hand them their glasses or face masks or fresh gloves. I wipe down their stations with CaviCide and refill bottles of calendula foot rub. I work on the men’s feet, too. It’s only ever men, and I’m not sure why—only that I know it’s safer to be a man living on the street than a woman. It’s safer to move around and safer to ask strangers for help if you’re a man. All of the volunteers are women. I am the youngest by far—Yolanda and Christine both share an affection for bright colors and beaded jewelry, as if they are accustomed to a lifetime of going a bit against the grain. Of the four of us who have been coming regularly, Yolanda is the only one who is Black.
In the time I’ve been coming to St. John the Wondermaker, I haven’t held a foot whose skin was the same color as mine. Except the soles of their feet. Those are the same pale pink as my own. I remember in preschool a boy asked me to marry him, the way four- and five-year-olds do. But I turned him down. I told him our skin wasn’t the same color. He told me it was the same color on the soles of his feet and the palms of his hands. He showed me the palm of his hand. I still told him no.
We arrange four plastic chairs in a row against the wall and use old milk crates as tables for our tools: a metal tray, nail clippers, cuticle clippers, files, spray bottles, baby wipes, Dremel tools, a headlamp. I set my station up next to Susan, who is slight, graying, and authoritative in her rubber-coated apron that protects her blue jeans and pastel snap-front. She provides calm, detailed instructions and encouragement to me from behind her N95 mask.
I think a lot about those 8,000 nerves. Susan says, several times to each person she works on, “We like to be a pain-free clinic, so please tell us if something we are doing hurts.”
I clip a long, curved toenail short to try to remove as much fungus as possible from underneath. My charge winces. I apologize.
“Try to take it off a little at a time,” Susan instructs. “Like this.”
She shows me how to remove the nail in small strips. It takes longer but is gentler, and I can be more precise.
I think a lot about those 250,000 sweat glands: the first step in the process is to wash each foot with a light soap that smells of lavender and crisp laundry. But there is still a foot smell that follows me home at the end of the day.
The men tell me stories as I clip and file, mostly about their children: where they are living, when they last saw them, how fast they grew up. Sometimes they tell me how long they’ve been clean. They’re proud of it. Others, also proud, that they’ve never done drugs. Often, they ask for things they need: socks, new shoes, a toothbrush, reading glasses. Larry is the man who asked for reading glasses. Susan says they used to have some but haven’t in a while. Larry says aloud to no one in particular, “I’ll have to work on that today,” and I realize that he may have to work on that all day. And maybe into tomorrow. And maybe into next week.
I think a lot about arches. Some of them are high, others collapsed. I think a lot about plantar fascia. Some of it soft and pliable, some of it taut as a tuned guitar string. I wonder how many steps these feet walk. I think a lot about calluses.
Calluses are a biological response to the physics of friction. Routine stimulation of skin cells by things rubbing against them causes the proteins in the cells to up-regulate their production. As the cells die, they lose their organelles and nuclei, but the keratin remains. Instead of sloughing off, the keratin part of the cell sticks to other keratin cell remnants to form a callus. Calluses protect the areas of friction to keep blisters and other damage caused by friction from happening. But they also can deform the foot—especially in ill-fitting or worn-out shoes. Those deformations can disrupt the precision engineering of the foot to make walking painful.
Susan shows me how to trim calluses with a scalpel.
“You just take off a little at a time, like removing fish scales,” she says.
I cut little translucent flakes of keratinized skin off James’s foot until it is an entirely new shape. It is slow and satisfying. Like untying a knot or gluing a piece of broken pottery back together.
One man has a lucid, white scar that looks like a comet blazing over the top of the night sky of his foot. I ask him if it hurts for me to touch it. He tells me someone deliberately ran over his foot with a lawnmower, but no, he says, the scar doesn’t hurt.
Another man, Joe, confesses that he got his shoes soaked in the rain two days ago. He took his wet socks off to dry, but still walked miles in wet shoes for a couple of days. I can see he has a callus on top of one of his toes that softened with the moisture and has started to bleed and slough off, ready for infection. Susan helps me trim it back and wash it with betadine. We give him some alcohol and betadine wipes, and Susan instructs him on how to clean it once per day. Joe asks if we have any new shoes in his size. We don’t. As I hand him a pair of fresh, extra-large, black socks (somehow, we always have socks), I wonder how long it would take him to work on that; how long he’ll have to keep walking in damp, rubbing shoes.
I wonder a lot about the way shoes both protect and harm feet.
I wonder a lot about how these men got here. How far they had to walk from wherever they were sleeping. Red tells me he plans to spend the afternoon in the side garden of another nearby church. The pastor there has given him permission to use the spot for shelter from the rain or sun and for rest. He says he’s tired. I tell him I’m glad he has somewhere to go to get off his feet.
I wonder about all the pathways they each took that landed them here, with sore feet and no way to care for them except coming here, mostly on foot. I wonder about all the moving parts of their lives: where were they born, where were their parents, where are their parents, did they go to school, when was their last paid work, did they ever have paid work, why can’t their children help them, where were they the day their children were born, why don’t we have shoes to give out, or reading glasses? I wonder about inertia and all the forces that push back on these men as hard as they try to push into the direction of their desires. I think about the arches that should have supported their weight and wonder what happened that was too heavy. I want to ask these men everything, because the golden saints on the walls stare past us, perhaps at the source of some awe that is only inside their frame and that doesn’t answer any of my questions. But that is not why Joe and Larry and James and Red are here.
“How do I know when I’ve removed all the callus?” I ask Susan.
She answers: “It’s a feeling against the scalpel. There’s a little more resistance when you get closer to the living skin.”
I hold each man’s foot in my lap and go gently. One paper-thin slice of dead skin at a time until there is a little pile of scales on the absorbent plastic pad under me. I start to feel the resistance Susan spoke of and stop. Tiny red specks appear in the newly pink skin. I apologize and sanitize, having solved the problem I can.
