Beaudry and I saw a couple pairs of shoes draped over the power lines while eating lunch last week. While we wondered what the significance was, we agreed that it looked funny. I asked Andy about it yesterday, and he didn’t know either, so I googled it. It turns out that nobody knows definitively, or at least there isn’t just one reason. These sites have collected some suggestions:
Realm of the Wombat
Talking to myself since 1997
Update: Stache thought he remembered his father doing this for fun when he was a kid. So Matt called him up and asked him about it. His father replied, “That’s a ghetto thing! I never did that,” or something to that effect. Stache then got his brother on the phone who he said it was about marking your territory. So that’s the news from the Volgraf family.
While I agree that shoes over powerlines are a strange phenomenon, I have very real questions about the so called “shoe trees” of the American West….perhaps it’s because they don’t have overhead powerlines as much out here given that they can run electric lines underground nowadays.
http://www.roadsideamerica.com/set/shoetrees.html