In the last eleven months, six severed human feet have washed up on Canadian beaches; the most recent one was discovered on Wednesday.
For the relatives of the original owners of those feet, this is a serious and sad case. But for the rest of us — and probably for them, too — it’s a very odd and sinister thing.
Of course, it’s also fodder for gallows humor. Comments around the net have run the gamut of gallows humor from speculative jokes to groan-inducing puns (“It’s only 5 feet from the boardwalk to the ocean”).
As for me, I’m really curious about what’s going on here. There are many theories as to why these feet are washing up on shore and where they came from. Some of the locals think the feet belong to victims of a plane crash whose bodies were either never found or never recovered. Others wonder if they’re connected to “a rash of young men who have gone missing in the area”.
While the identity of the misplaced metatarsals is definitely intriguing, I’m more interested in a different aspect of the event: Why just feet?
From what I’ve read, it seems that the most likely reason for only feet to wash ashore is the fact that of the six feet found (so far), five of them were inside running shoes. Running and training shoes contain enough rubber to keep a foot afloat increasing the chances that they would be carried to shore by ocean currents. But in order for the feet to float to shore, they would have to be detached from the bodies in some ways. Sharks, maybe? The woman who found the latest foot said that two leg bones were sticking about 3-4 inches above the top of the shoe, and the bones had clean edges as if they had been “sawn off”. That kind of speculation tends to get people thinking “foul play”, when it could be that they were simple bitten or broken off. Without a proper forensic examination , any official investigator who assumes foul play may get caught with his foot in his mouth.
So far, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police have said that there is no evidence of foul play. I have to digress here for a second and say that any time I read about an investigation by the Royal Canadian Mounted Police, I always imagine that no matter what they’re doing, they’re doing it on horseback. Whether they’re examining a crime scene, arresting pickpockets, having lunch, talking around the water cooler at the police station, interrogating a suspect or asking a victim to pick a perp out of a lineup, they’re permanently attached to their horses. My brain likes to keep me amused.
At any rate, maybe by the time a whole basketball team’s worth of size 10 Nike’s washes ashore, we’ll know if these people were victims of an accident, or whether there was treachery. . . afoot.