Truth is Hirsute
or
Whatever Happened to my Great Grandfather’s Magnificent Beard
hir´sute (hûr´sūt; hûr•sūt´), adj. [L. hirsutus; akin to L. hirtus, and horrere to bristle. See horror.]
1. Rough with hair; set with bristles; shaggy; specif., Bot., pubescent with rather coarse, stiff hairs.
2. Rough and coarse; uncouth; boorishRare. 3. Zool. Covered with hairlike feathers, as some bird’s feet.
No one seems to have given much thought to the cause of Rip Van Winkle’s awakening. I would like to suggest that on that auspicious Wednesday, there on that green knoll with birds hopping and twittering among the bushes, and a single eagle of truth wheeling aloft and breasting the pure mountain breeze, what awakened our (my) hero, was a girl. The simple passing of a girl of marriageable age, her earthy scent wafting through the tangle of his enduring mustache, neurons firing then, and he was awakened, to find himself out of fashion.
I am not a follower of fashion. Nor do I really care about how I, or others, look or dress or manage their appearance, or conduct their lives, for that matter, but I have begun to notice a growing fashion trend beginning to make an appearance in the little town in Northern Colorado where I live. Perhaps it has something to do with Colorado’s pro-growth position on everything from unsustainable housing development to the blooming marijuana industry. Perhaps we have the Boston Red Sox to thank for this trending physical/personal statement, or, more likely, it started with those hooligans who get paid to play hockey, or, I suppose, really, it started with cavemen, started with a caveman who was hounded out of the cave by his termagant, club wielding woman, and wanting to place a physical barrier between his lips and hers, from which nary a kind word ever fell, he decided no longer to take a flinty rock to his facial hair. Beards. Big beards. Similar to the Occupy movement, I have a feeling there is an important statement being made by these hirsute men; I just don’t know what it is, unless, of course, it has something to do with Rip Van Winkle and the search for freedom and truth.
Again, fashion, is not my interest here, but rather, I consider myself an observer of change: changing everything, changing anything, (not that I do much of it myself of course; I am too lazy to change much other than my underwear daily) big changes, miniscule changes, seasons, moon phases, the color of leaves, temperature, wind velocity, attitudes, angle of light, pitch of a train going by, loose change, spare change, name change, yes we can change, no we can’t change, exchange, the change, small change, and, of course, the changes I’ve been going through in recent decades as I approach the age of sixty.
Somehow I do not think cavemen thought too much about pennant races or silver cups, and what, anyway, does facial hair have to do with the pursuit of excellence or the quest for a championship?
I am not opposed to facial hair. I inherited a weak chin from my mother’s side of the family and have had a beard or a goatee since I graduated from high school (except for one brief time one summer when I shaved, and as I made my clean-shaven appearance, my two young daughters screamed at the intruder and ran for the doors and my wife covered a snicker with her hand)
I am not talking about wispy little soul-patches or daily manicured astro-turf-like goatees (have you noticed? they are predominantly either jet black or snowy white) or carefully coiffed short full beards (usually brown in color) or those scraggly fu manchu/goatees that red-haired men seem often sport (and, for whatever reason, not only their facial hair, but their entire physiognomy bears a striking resemblance to my neighbor’s angoras) I am talking about those magnificent beards showing up around town, beards that could be used to plow snow, beards that could drown their owners if they fell into a pond, beards that seem to dwarf the wearers and anyone nearby; magnificent black, brown, gray, white, salt-and-pepper, and blonde, beards that gradate from buff to golden wheat, beards that . . . Rip Van Winkle-like beards. These Beardos, as they call themselves, even have clubs and associations and meetings. I wonder if it is a challenge to follow Robert’s Rules of Order when you can’t tell who’s speaking? Who’s saying yea or nay, or I move, or second, or so moved.*
Truth be told, and in full disclosure, I should mention that I wear an unkempt white, schnauzer-like goatee and only shave my cheeks every quarter moon or so–coming and going, waxing and waning.
Okay. Before I wander off into a discussion about truth and change and getting old and how they are related to facial hair and the history of changing attitudes toward facial hair, I should probably mention why I am thinking about all this.
I was recently thinking about my maternal great grandfather and was leafing through old family albums stored in an old family place looking for a newspaper article that describes his fiery death in Denver in 1890. I will call him Job for convenience, although please understand I intend no allusion to the long-suffering, ever-faithful man of the bible. While looking through the albums, and after forgetting my original intention because I stumbled onto a photo of one of my cousins and a cousin in-law who both wore magnificent cow-catcher beards which I am sure annoyed the hell out of his mother and father and his mother and father in-law, respectively, who are also in the photo, smiling grimly. Of course this photo was from the era, not so very long ago, when men of a certain ilk never cut or shaved a hair on head or chin for years, and I, unfortunately, was too young to be a real 1969 era hippie, but oh how I wanted to let my freak flag fly, but I was only a young teen and apparently too well-behaved or too timid to flap that flag around in my mother’s face (my father having gone on to the great nightclub singing gig in the sky some time before) Eventually. I found what I’d been looking for: a photocopy of a microfiche copy of an article about Job’s death taken from the Denver Republican Newspaper dated August 5, 1890.
There is an illustration of Job done in the newspaper drawing style of the day which depicts a man with an absolutely splendid goatee, splendid in length and bushiness, clean-shaven cheeks, not bald but with a thoroughly receded hairline, smallish ears, a strong-straight-prominent-aquiline nose, what look to be beautiful eyebrows and eyes that seem stern and yet kind, perceptive but strangely distant, no lips, and no chin, just the splendid goatee. So, Job came to Denver, Colorado in 1871 and started a business as a chemist and pharmacist. I believe at that time, one was not really required to have much formal education or training as a druggist or chemist in order to call oneself a pharmacist/chemist. I believe he was really just an energetic entrepreneur who, a little later on, happened to discover an unusual deposit of clay near Golden, Colorado and became something of a tycoon of smelter bricks and assay molds. Good timing. There was a fair bit of mining going on in Colorado at the time. I hope that he was a better pharmacist than he was a chemist. Perhaps he was not a patient man, or perhaps, unfortunately, accidents happen to the very best of us and result from our best intentions, or . . . see, old Job blew himself up and in the process nearly killed several other people and demolished the better part of a building on the 1600 block of Larimer Street. August 4, 1890.
So before I delve into a discussion of my great grandfather and his fiery death, and the male visage at the turn of the century, and current trending changes in facial hair fashion, and changes generally: big changes, miniscule changes & et cetera, I need to talk a little bit about truth and telling stories and getting older.
What I am thinking is that truth is hirsute. Among all the things one has to endure, or get used to, or get over, or accept as one ages is that the line between fact and fiction, it seems to me, becomes more and more blurry. As my memories and the ability to recall recent or long-ago events become sketchy, I find my ability to distinguish between truth, embellished truth, fictions based in truth, out and out lies that are truer than truth, and nonsensical absurdities is diminished. One looks at life, past, present, future and knows there may only be a grain of truth in there somewhere, but we keep combing and winnowing and picking like primates searching for lice on a fellow primates scalp.
People’s reputations, careers, lives can be destroyed by offering a fiction as fact. What probably starts as a small embellishment can grow into something unmanageable and poof! you’re off the air, out of a job, back to editing submitted obituaries–those fountains of truth. Then again, I might be making all this up: the story of my Great Grandfather; men with beards big and steely enough to plow a row surfacing in a little town in Northern Colorado. It could all be a bald-faced lie. And if it is? We tell stories, or, we used to. Are you fond of your grasp of reality? Are you comforted by your ability to discern fact from fiction. Splitting hairs . . . yeay,yeah,yeah very funny. Puny truths, small change: one man’s life; Beardos. Not exactly a Kierkegaardian dilemma here, not much at risk, so . . .
According to the newspaper account, the explosion occurred around 1:00 p.m. on August 4, 1890. Several interviewees quoted in the article suggest that Job was making flash-light, a material used to illuminate subjects in portrait photography. At the time sodium sticks were stored in naptha to prevent oxidation, and other information in the article suggests the presence of magnesium and ammonia, perhaps phosphorous. Job took down from the shelf a bottle filled with naphtha, dropped it, and that was all he wrote.
What is less well known is that Job was part of a radical group that was concerned with working conditions in the mines and living conditions in the mining camps around Colorado. He traveled to Leadville and Aspen frequently to conduct business and became familiar with mine owners, bosses and workers. Perhaps he was not making flash-light. Of course, he would never have intended to maim or injure or kill. But perhaps his cadre had grown weary of trying to reason with the mine owners and bosses, and so recalling the sledge hammers of John Ludd’s followers and the sabot throwers of old, perhaps . . . an explosion or two just to draw attention to the miner’s plight and to scare the hell out of whomever might need some fear added to the fat of their lamb stew?
If you are unfamiliar with the writing style of newspapers published during the late 19th century, let me give you an example:
A TERRIFIC EXPLOSION
. . .
QUICK AND BRAVE WORK
Scarce was the gong sounded at the fire department central station, though, before the men and horses were out and speeding like the wind to the spot of the call.
. . .
. . . and labored bravely among the smoke and flame of the building, heedless of the fact that beneath them was a mine of explosives which would have responded to a touch of the flame in which they were engaged with a volcanic burst that would have left no vestige of the brave men above it.
Now apparently there was some confusion about the number of people thought to be inside the building at the time of the accident. Feared dead were four men, but one was found to have been thrown clear, through the front windows and into the street. Another man, fearing the collapse of the building, had fled out the back. One was missing, but soon returned from lunch. Only Job had perished, initially identified only by circumstance because no one had ever seen his lips and chin before, now only slightly obscured by the seared and singed remnants of his magnificent goatee.
I do not mean to trivialize the tragedy that rocked my ancestor’s family and a good part of downtown Denver. “[My great grandmother and her three sons] were completely prostrated by the blow” is how the newspaper article describes the effect the news had on familial survivors. My Great Grandmother wrote a beautiful, deeply religious and faithful remembrance of Job so that her sons could know him better. It is obvious, of course, that her grief was immense. She endured quietly and heroically and raised three sons.
(Why did I get into this, and how do I get out of it?)
So, in the end, I guess, truth is like a magnificent beard. Hidden somewhere therein is a crumb of truth. It is transforming and often disguised. It itches. It strains soup and incredulity. Apparently it is portionable, because some people think they have more of it than others.
In Conclusion: isn’t all this hairy nonsense really about desire? It’s what woke up Rip Van Winkle. It’s what motivates Beardos: the desire to disguise, dissemble, encounter the world behind a mask. The desire to make money and please a customer by making flash-light by 3:00 p.m. on an August afternoon in 1890. The desire to please and attract women, whose appetite for facial hair changes from generation to generation? And who, after all, can say that desire is not hirsute?
*For this essay, I attempted to get a statement from the spokesperson of the Rocky Mountain Beard and Mustache Club. I reached him on the phone, asked my many questions, mentioned my several working hypotheses, and he mumbled something unintelligible, referred me to their website: https://www.facebook.com/RMBMC and a recent news article: http://www.coloradoan.com/story/entertainment/events/2014/06/06/competition-sure-get-hairy-beard-moustache-event/10090243/ and hung up.