Hair

(This is an excerpt from a manuscript about an epic outbacking trek I took six years before I became a monk. As you can see in the photo at left, some things have changed.)

Shortly after 0700 I coasted down the long hill into Conconully, skirting its round, post-card reservoir. Motoring quietly through drowsing neighbourhoods, bright clapboard glowing like a remembered summer, I was struck, as often on the Gold Side, by a sense of place. Hometown, as few Puget Sound ones are anymore.

A regiment of impact sprinklers had swept the state campground's day use area as clear as a July schoolyard, but that suited me fine; its deserted parking lot was perfect for peeling off my Michelin Man layers.

So laying down in the bed of the truck, I shed my December kit by stratum, cool air sweet on my nakedness as the long underwear at last came off. Then I squirmed back into my trousers, grabbed my toilet kit, and scrambled back over the tailgate. While setting bath water from the nearest sprinkler on the stove, I caught my reflection in the canopy.

The trendiest salon in New York City couldn't have given me that hairstyle. It fractalled off in a hundred directions, licks and wisps corkscrewing out like an armoury fire. If I'd had a black turtleneck, I could have passed for the hippest artiste in all of Greenwich Village. But bare-chested in dirty jeans, I just looked like an extra from Deliverance.

I dipped my comb and started in, and was soon dripping like I'd dunked my head to the shoulders, but never really mastered the situation.

Buddhist monks say they shave their heads to free themselves from attachment. Bollocks. They do it to free themselves from their hair.

(Adapted from Rough Around the Edges: A Journey Around Washington's Borderlands, copyright RK Henderson.)