Complex Numbers

Lost Soles

Maybe you think you already know the answer to this headline question. Maybe you're even right.

    Why Do People Toss Shoes Over Power Lines?  
‘Shoefiti’ is everywhere—but not everyone agrees on what it means. Some suspect it's innocent, while others ascribe darker meanings to a dangling pair of kicks.

Odd as it may seem, power lines have become a somewhat popular source of urban fascination.

That's because the power companies are too cheap to bury the lines.

People have wondered why they sometimes sport brightly colored balls...

I always figured it was so the line locations would be visible to pilots.

...why chunks of trees sometimes hang from them...

Because a tree broke and happened to get caught on a power line?

...or why birds love to use them as perches.

Who the hell knows what goes on in a bird's brain? But I'd guess "visibility."

I could click on all the links they provided, but I didn't.

Why do people often see pairs of shoes dangling from power lines?

Because they happen to be looking up at the time?

Lauren Cahn of Reader’s Digest covered a few possible reasons, and not all of them are benign.

The first urban legend I heard was definitely not benign: that it was a gang killing memorial. I've also heard it's a prostitute signal (like a bat-signal, but for whores), or that it indicates a drug dealer's location.

One time, driving through the outskirts of Seattle, I saw what must have been two dozen sneakers, each pair laced together, clustered on a power line like smelly, dingy grapes. I just figured a gang killed someone as he was buying drugs while banging a prostitute.

One popular theory holds that the shoes may be a signal that there’s gang activity in a given neighborhood... Plausible? Sure. But Cahn couldn’t find any police departments that would confirm.

That's because police are basically another gang.

Other stories echo the idea that the shoes could be an impromptu memorial.

Gosh, if you repeat something often enough, it must be true.

Other sources cited nothing more than juvenile mischief.

Sure, but no one wants to believe something that innocent.

The most innocuous explanation? That it’s simply a rite of passage. One columnist for Hidden City Philadelphia wrote in 2012 that the practice was common in the 1970s as a way of discarding old or outgrown sneakers.

Getting a pair of tied-together sneaks to hit an overhead line in such a way as to snag them on it takes skill and/or patience. Or so I'd expect.

More recently, students at the University of Michigan observed that the act was simply commemorating their graduation.

What, they don't let 'em throw mortarboards into the air?

There’s likely no one motive for the shoe-tossing. It may, however, be in decline.

Given the price of sneakers, I'd bet people are wearing them until they fall all the way apart. Also, aren't a lot of them Velcro now?

Whatever the motive for tossing them, the shoes pose a risk of interrupting the power line's performance.

I suppose if there are multiple lines and the shoes touch both and they're not rubber-soled and they get wet...

My best guess? Different reasons in different regions. It's not like all the shady characters in the world got together on the internet and said, "Okay, from now on, shoes thrown over power lines means "drug dealer within one block."

I mean, they could. But that's just asking to get them monitored by a better-funded gang.