Daily Sitka Sentinel

A VIEW FROM 25: For the Boys

Henry Colt. “Sometimes a beard is just a beard.” (Sentinel Photo)

    Today’s front-page story notwithstanding, it is my belief that men’s facial hair does not receive nearly the amount of media attention it deserves. In fact, a comb through Sentinel archives revealed that our coverage of beards has been limited to the once-yearly Alaska Day Beard Contest (in whose 2015 iteration I nabbed the prize for “thinnest beard”—not to brag).
    It is time to change things.
    My first beard was actually not a beard, but a mustache. Junior year of college, the captains of my cross country team issued a teamwide mandate: we would race with mustaches at our conference championship (a race we’d historically bombed in but still had high hopes for). Were the ’staches meant for good luck? Intimidation? Catching the eyes of female runners from opposing teams? We didn’t really know, we just grew.
    Cross country is—literally—survival of the fittest, and Charles Darwin (who had one of the most luxuriant beards of all time) would have believed in the female runners theory. “It appears that our male ape-like progenitors acquired their beards as an ornament to charm or excite the opposite sex,” he wrote in The Descent of Man.
    But my wispy mustache did not charm or excite either sex. My girlfriend stopped wanting to kiss me (“because it tickles!”), my anthropology professors started giving me strange looks (if only I had studied evolutionary biology!), and my father, who saw my then-unfinished mustache at a pre-conference tune-up race, told me that I looked “like a 1970’s porn star.”
    Still, I persisted, because it was, as the saying goes, “for the boys.”
                                                      
    Two falls later, when I showed up for the first day of my outdoor education job, the first thing I noticed was that every single male coworker had a beard. There was Hartel, who modeled his beard after Henry David Thoreau’s; Garret, who sported a Cheeto-colored chinstrap; David, whose beard-encapsulated facial chiseling could have made the cover of GQ; and even Nelson, who, though unable to grow much facial hair at all, participated by growing out the hairs on a mole on his upper lip as long as he possibly could. My coworkers would have scorned the bro-ey phrase “for the boys,” and by now I did too — but who then, besides “the boys” (i.e. us) were our beards for? They were certainly not for the middle school boys we worked with (the actual boys).
    Whoever they were for, I stopped shaving.
    It took me two weeks to surpass my conference championship mustache — but now I had sideburns, chin coverage, and a gamey patch of neck hair to boot. My girlfriend was even occasionally willing to kiss me. I still had two completely hairless streaks on either side of my neck, but I dubbed those my Power Alleys, and kept growing.
    And growing.
    By the time my beard was halfway between Nelson’s and Hartel’s in terms of length and density, (a respectable length and density I might add), it started itching. Hartel recommended beard oil. David recommended coconut oil. I briefly considered Crisco.
    One day, Hartel brought me to a drugstore, where I held a vial of Spit & Polish Beard Oil. It was the size of a nip of bourbon, and smelled like well-groomed suburban fathers: equal parts dark beer, Viagra, and freshly-cut grass. Then I looked at the $19.95 price tag. I could put up with the itching.
    After I moved to Sitka, my eventual decision to shave my beard was as quick and intuitive as my decision to grow it in the first place. I came home from work one day and thought, “Hey, what if I shaved this thing?”
    I hacked at it with a plastic razor in the shower. I looked in the mirror and saw that I had missed a few patches. But I left them, because it was Sitka, and I was late for a party.
                                                       
    I’ll let you in on a secret. The only person who knows this secret is Matt Morris, the most well-mustached member of my old cross country team.
    The night before Conference, I couldn’t sleep because I was nervous for the meet and because my new mustache was tickling me incessantly. It was well past midnight when I crept out of bed, stole a pair of scissors from my roommate’s desk, tiptoed to the bathroom, and carefully snipped away the top third of that mustache. Then I got back in bed and dreamed about starting guns.
    The next morning I awoke to a clear fall day and had the race of my life. More importantly, our team (whose other members, as far as I know, didn’t engage in any late-night mustache trimming) kicked, clawed, and, like true cross country runners, vomited our way to the race of our life — an unprecedented third-place finish. I still get goosebumps when I think of the 15 of us standing on the starting line, waiting for the gun to go off, ready to lay it all out there—with mustaches.
    But that night at a post-race party, Matt Morris walked over to me, beer in hand, and said, “Hey, your ’stache looks a little different, did you do anything to it?”
    Yes I did, but every snip was for the boys.