The Deer Beard

"It's a deer beard."

That was my response to my wife this morning when she asked me why I wasn't shaving for church. I had managed to get away with a week's worth of growth before she noticed it, or at least commented on it. It's no secret in the Shelton household that my wife prefers me clean shaven. And it's no secret that at certain times of the year, for reasons that I can't explain, I must grow out facial hair. It's that simple. For ten years now I have had an unexplainable urge to sport a beard around November and through December. Now psychologists could have a heyday with this kind of primal thinking, but having just read the book Wild at Heart I got my answer, or at least the answer that I always felt was now put into words. But before I go into that, let me chronicle my excuses of the past.

In 1997 I took a fly-fishing trip to the San Juan River in NW New Mexico with a college buddy of mine a week before Christmas. Knowing that the mountains are a cold place, especially in December, I reasoned that I needed warmth for my cheeks. After all I would have on a coat, gloves, and a stocking cap. The lower half of my body would be in waders, so that left my face, and the beard was born. It felt almost as if I were breaking the law. A gentleman must be clean shaven and presentable, but that's a societal rule (long-forgotten anyway) and I was heading out to the wilderness. It was a wilderness complete with paved roads and parking lots right on the river, but it's the romantic premise of westward expansion, the exploring of a new territory that hooked me.

After all, Indiana Jones never went on any adventure without his hat.

So the next year and in years since, when I have had the same opportunity in what has turned out to be a yearly tradition, the winter expedition has always been accompanied by a beard. Each city has a heartbeat and one must attune himself to its rhythms, unnatural as they may be. Patience isn't a virtue of city life. It's stop and go traffic, cursing while in line five minutes at McDonalds for food it would have taken twenty minutes to prepare while at home, if one even had the ingredients to begin with. Bell schedules at school, time cards at work, alarm clocks in the morning. All of these annoyances are very unnatural to a man with a wild heart.

A standard fishing trip may start with a twelve-hour drive through New Mexico (a state that my brother affectionately refers to as "The Way to Colorado") at seventy-five miles per hour. The driver is hopped up on convenience store coffee, Red Bull, and gut bomb burritos. He just left the impatient rhythms of the city, exchanged them for the impatient rhythms of the highway, and is headed for the trout stream where the fish work at their own rhythm. If a fisherman were to fish to the trout with the same impatient rhythm he has used in city and highway life, he's apt to get frustrated at the lack of "luck."

And so every fishing trip, the first two or three hours are usually spent fishless, trying to figure out what "the fish are biting on." In reality the fisherman just isn't on the same page with the fish. So once he gets his city casting out of the way and heads for a new hole, he in-turn gets a new lease on life. This is where "Natural Ryan" is reborn.

So my thinking was that in growing out the beard, I would be preparing myself weeks in advance for slowing down to the rhythms of the natural world. It's sort of the "working up an appetite" theory, kind of like how we listen to Christmas music weeks before Christmas, or in my case, November, if I can hold out that long.

And so every year when the weather turned cooler, instinct would kick in. The geese start to fly south, the squirrels load up on acorns, and I forget my razor. And according to Wild at Heart this is perfectly natural. Man was never meant to be strapped down by society's softening rules. Before you get the wrong idea, let me make this statement: I don't mean that Man can just go do anything he wants to like murder. That's not the natural state of Man I am referring to. It just means that Man by nature must proove himself to feel worthy, seek out adventure, smile in the face of danger, overcome obstacles. It is imbedded in a man's soul to fly in order to be a man and the hindering of a man's sense of adventure is emasculating at best. It's this sense of adventure that is tied into the natural rhythms of life outside of a societal governing body. It is this sense of adventure that makes a man feel like a man in a world where it's illegal, at least according to tv. I don't need to grow out a beard to feel like a man, but when I sigh in the morning as I get out of bed and face another day at work, it sure helps.

Hunt, fish, gather, provide, build, create, live. Those are man's natural rhythms. So when it gets cold out, one must use what God gave him. Jeremiah Johnson wouldn't have dared live in the mounatins without a beard. Heck, Chuck Norris. Need I say more?

But trying to put this into words when put on the spot is nearly impossible. It's just as impossible to try to explain this manly need to a woman, just as it's impossible for a woman to explain the womanly needs that a man doesn't understand. It's not wrong. It's just our natural rhythms and we are as subject to their laws as we are to the law of gravity.

So this December is the first time since 1997 that I won't be heading out to trout water. It just didn't work out in the scheduling. I can see this far enough in advance to be already be grieving the loss of Natural Ryan, but never to fear, deer season is only a few weeks away and with it an opportunity to get back to nature, if only for a weekend. And so in preparation for my wife's question this morning, I knew I couldn't be caught off guard and give some cheap answer like "Holiday Beard" or "because it looks better with a sweater," both answers I have given in the past. The problem is that deer season will be over when December gets here and Natural Ryan will not have migrated back to society just yet.

I still have a few weeks to come up with my next excuse.