I started cultivating my beard the day after my mother’s funeral. I just needed to change things up a bit. If nothing else, I needed to see something different in the mirror. We were beyond the fuzzy stage when I returned to hiking in early March.
Until the stubble showed up, I was clean shaven on the trail. As winter progressed, the cold forced me from shaving every day as had been my previous habit. So shearing the crop shifted to join my weekly town routine along with laundry and a shower. I should reverse those because the shower always comes first!
Believe it or not, on the trail having a beard made a huge difference. Sans beard I had a hard time convincing people I was a thru hiker. I just didn’t look the part. Thru hikers are supposed to be scruffy. Almost by definition facial hair is an expected part of the male uniform along with a distinct odoriferous funk and filthy fingernails.
I didn’t fit the picture.
A typical conversation would go like this:
Q: “Where’d you start?” A: “Georgia.” (I didn’t want to complicate matters by explaining that I started first in the north before going south.)
Q: “Where ‘ya headed?” A: “Maine.”
Q: “What section are you doing this time?” A: “Not doing sections. I’m a thru hiker.”
Puzzled look. :~{
Q: “Geez. You don’t look like a thru hiker. When did you start?” A: “Late September…”
And so it would go. Even Crazy Larry labeled me a section hiker on his hostel’s Facebook page – after I had explained my unconventional hike more than once, but then again Larry admits he’s crazy.
Once the beard showed up, the entire social dynamic changed. People assumed I was thru hiking and were interested in the number of miles I averaged each day, how much my pack weighed, and how long I thought it would take to reach Katahdin. It just goes to show that judging a book by its cover can be very misleading.
By now, someone out there is wondering why I whacked off the whiskers. It’s simple.
Last week I chanced to stumble through a swarm of freshly hatched gnats. There were ‘zillions’ of them, and more than a fair share opened a game of hide and seek in my facial hair, and were still squatting on my property several hours later when I reached camp for the evening. Combing them out was a pain in my posterior. While tending to my nitting so to speak, my subconsciousness recalled reading last year about guys combing ticks and other unwelcome guests out of their beards. Yuck!
Fear the beard! The scariest animals on the AT are not bears. Lyme Disease carrying deer ticks strike deep dread in every hiker’s heart. Why offer those pests an extra opportunity to lay you low? So it was bye-bye beardie.
Maybe the beard and I will meet again when this is over. I’ll think about it. My buds at Fitness Together like it, though my spouse does not.