The Way of the Wolf: Ode to the Trip Beard

December 3, 2021

I parted ways with it last week. It served me well for six months as I kayaked 1,320 kilometres around Vancouver Island and completed a 1,360 kilometres canoe circuit through northern Alberta and Saskatchewan. I’m talking about my Beard—with a capitol ‘B’. My face-squirrel had grown to the point where I was chewing on it whenever I ate my food, or it would drink half of my beer whenever I had a sip. My friend said, “You could hide a badger in that thing.” It was slowly but surely taking me over, much like the Beard in the old Kids in the Hall sketch from the 1990s. My girlfriend knew not to mess with it or complain about it when it was around, lest I say “the beard stays, you go!”

Growing the Beard is as much a ritual as my long trips are. I usually get it going a month before a big trip so I have a bit of a running start, so it’s prepared to deflect the elements as I’m out there day after day exposed to whatever nature may throw my way. It’s my sunscreen, my bug repellant and my face warmer—so it’s a highly versatile and functional piece of trip gear. I don’t to the hipster ‘beard sculpting’ thing either. Once the beard starts, I don’t trim it at all. I just let it do what it does.

I looked a little deeper into the evolution of why men have beards, and the scientific studies are somewhat surprising. Most genetic traits in any species—human or otherwise—develop in order to attract the opposite sex and further their kind. With beards though, that attraction is subjective and not necessarily directly appealing to a potential mate. The real reason men evolved to grow beards is that it’s a sign of dominance to other males. Like a gorilla pounding its chest, apparently the bigger the beard, the more intimidating you were to other male competitors… which would in a roundabout way lead to an advantage in attracting a partner. On a month-long trip with another dude though, this sort of machismo is unlikely to help your reproductive swagger… but it does tap into that ancient lizard-brain/caveman aesthetic: a throwback to the time before Gillette razors gave us a choice with our Beards.

I’ve noticed through my own observation that my Beard (which eventually grew to the point where people would throw change at my feet if I stood on a street corner for too long) was anything but an attractant to women. It was, in fact, a repellant. My girlfriend hates it. My mother hates it. Women on the street generally give me a wide berth.

Comments like ‘Ugh!”, “Gross”, and “When are you going to shave that thing?” were common.

Guys on the other hand seemed to love it, respect it, envy it.

“Dude! Awesome beard.”

“Oh man, you should never cut it!”

“I wish I could grow a beard like that.”

So perhaps there is something to it being more about dominance among males than anything else.

No matter the science, a Beard these days is different things to different people. For me, it’s a sign of a summer well lived. A stretch of time where I was wild and free to wander the earth as I pleased. That’s why parting is such sweet sorrow when, for the practical purpose of not eating my own face, the beard had to go.

On the day of reckoning, I stood in front of the bathroom mirror with my clippers. The Beard tried to talk me out of it, but I stayed strong. I shaved it down to a civil war pointy beard, then a Lanny McDonald moustache, until finally it was all gone. Instead of discarding it, I saved it in a freezer bag. The Beard needed to do one last good deed. Since it had been with me on a couple of long, wild adventures I decided the Beard should give back to the wilderness it loved and then live on in another home.

I put it up for auction on Instagram to see if anyone would purchase the Beard in the form of a donation to Pacific Wild—a grassroots, BC-based environmental group who’ve done amazing work to protect our coast over the years. A few people bid on it, and eventually it went for a donation of $110 to a lucky contestant. Not a single female bid on the Beard. I thought at the very least my mother would lay down a bid so that she could incinerate it.

I happen to know the person who won this Beard… and he doesn’t grow a very good Beard himself. I guess it was a small price for him to buy a bit of dominance among his male peers… or to use as chinking for the cabin he’s building, or as stuffing for a pillow he’s sewing.

Though I miss it, the Beard is a sustainable and renewable resource. I’ll have another one primed and ready by this time next year, and that Beard will have a whole new set of tales to tell.