The boots and the shoes returned to Denver on Monday, all of them lined up in tidy rows outside the downtown library - a child's tiny, white sandals sharing space with a soldier's scuffed, well-worn boots.
Every time I see the display, it gets to me. This time, there were 54 pairs of empty combat boots, each set representing a Colorado soldier killed in Iraq. The sandals and other shoes represented Iraqis killed in the war.
Tied to the boots were laminated copies of each soldier's story, of where they served and how they died, some of which ran in this newspaper on Monday. It made them, well, not just a pair of empty boots.
Yet this time the display was different - not emotionally, mind you. You've got limestone for a heart if you look at those boots and shoes and aren't moved.
No, the difference this time was that very few people bothered to show.
Maybe 50 people stood at the 6:30 p.m. silent vigil. A year ago, the number was maybe 10-times that.
"Colorado Eyes Wide Open," sponsored by the American Friends Service Committee, was a big thing back then. People wept. They stood before the long lines of boots, they touched them and prayed.
Not this time.
"I just think people are burnt out on the war," said Claire Ryder, who organized the event. "All that we are talking about and caring about now is the economy and the election."
She had gotten up early on Monday with three other volunteers to fetch, dust off and arrange the boots. They would stand over them until 8 p.m. Monday night.
"You do this for the people who can't speak out anymore," she explained. "You have to do it so people can see what's at stake."
"Eyes Wide Open" is not a war protest, says Claire Ryder, 48, a Denver residential real estate appraiser. It simply highlights, she explained, the tragic human cost of war.
"It is a memorial," she said. "If you are for or against the war, you still honor the dead. We make no statement here. The shoes speak."
Maybe 100 people in all walked through the boots, including some who stopped to yell at Claire Ryder, calling her a "dirty hippie," to tell her she and her "protest stinks."
"People with Christian symbols on their cars and their children inside them will drive past and flip us the bird," she said. "It happens all the time. It's not real Christian behavior."
It is the fourth "Eyes Wide Open" exhibit she has organized. The next one is scheduled for Memorial Day in Longmont.
It is what Claire Ryder does between appraisals. She is, by her accounting, a devoted peace activist and activist, period. I first met her several months ago at a court appearance related to her arrest at the Columbus Day parade last October.
Lugging around and displaying the boots is an outgrowth, she says, of watching through her elementary school classroom window in Guam as trucks hauled bombs to B-52s that would be dropped on Hanoi.
"I later went to the museum in Hiroshima, and that was it," Claire Ryder said. "I started speaking out."
A friend keeps the boots in large, rugged boxes in her garage, most of them paid for by the American Friends Services Committee, a Quaker organization. Several pairs were donated by veterans who'd returned from Iraq and were moved by the exhibit.
The "Iraqi" shoes were donated by friends and others. Occasionally, Claire Ryder said, she will stop at thrift stores on their 50 percent off sale days and pick up a dozen or so.
"I do spend a lot of my own money on this, but only because I think it is important. If I actually added it up, I'm thinking my husband would divorce me."
She hauled the boots out again on Monday as a way to commemorate the 4,000th U.S. combat death in Iraq.
"The boots and the shoes," she said, "makes it more real, I think. It tells people that these were people, too, the soldiers and the civilians, that they were once human beings."
Is the message reaching people?
Claire Ryder looked at the mostly empty library square. "I've been doing this a long time, and I will say I have seen people I've never seen before."
The point, she said, is to get people to care enough to speak out, to hold a vigil, even to put a sign in their yard. If she reaches one additional person, she said, it is all worth it.
"The danger is in not doing anything," she said. "If we all sit mute, the war will just keep going on."
Of the light turnout, she says, "Sure it's discouraging. But does it stop me? No.
"Once you regroup - doing this does take an emotional toll - it just makes you try that much harder. Sometimes, you want to rest, to put it all away. But you can't.
"I've got to keep going," Claire Ryder said. "If we don't do it, who will?"
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