In ready-made shoe production, the shape of lasts (shoe forms) is arbitrary to our fashion aesthetic and does not actually coincide with the foot's natural form, with its splayed and articulated toes. Modern footwear immobilizes toes and crams them together, creating an assortment of physical horrors: hammertoes, flaccid arches, corns, calluses, ingrown toenails, and bunions, which local shoemaker Walter DeMarsh refers to as "biscuits."

Still, "with infinite patience we try all our lives to reshape our feet to an ideal established by shoe manufacturers," writes Bernard Rudofsky in Are Clothes Modern? But those of us with mobility issues, say, or polio, or nerve damage, or growth maladies, or wider feet have an even harder time with commercial styles and might be forced to knife-cut shoes to bring expansion or wear sizes that are "too damned big so the foot migrates around inside," says Walter, who has been handcrafting shoes for the "difficult to fit" for more than 30 years.

Decades ago, to accommodate the discrepancy in Walter's own leg lengths, Walter's shoe repairman uniformly elevated one sole, resulting in a "tippy, ugly, and dangerous shoe that was slightly better than nothing." Walter fell from it and broke his leg, and he soon after plunged into a shoe-making career, hoping to help those like him, also forced to ride a poorly-made-shoe-strewn "conveyor belt to hell." Walter's work is intense and expensive: Repeated measurings, fittings, and tweakings are always necessary in order to accommodate the individual's particular walking movements, patches of tendons, and pressure points where the "metatarsal heads sink through flesh." At minimum, a set of custom lasts costs $550, and the basic first pair of shoes is $625.

In his shop on a Friday afternoon, Walter secures the black leather uppers on a pair of men's lace-ups. Their style is plain, reminiscent of ice skates. He mentions an ancient king he'd read about somewhere who wore a robe of hummingbird skins. "That sounds like the Holocaust to me," he says. His store Mobeta Shoes rests in the underbelly of Pike Place Market and is outfitted with leather hides, calipers, industrial sewing machinery, Native American wood carvings, and pelts of snakes long "dead and dipped in chemicals" that were bought from a man so huge "he filled up the goddamned doorway." Tacked to a wall are some twitchy nature shots of owls gagging down a rat, a frog. "There was a heron eating a rabbit that was up for a while. But I rotate the pictures."

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