I doubt that anyone will, at any time in my life, consider me to be a swarthy sort. My skin will wrinkle prematurely, a condition owed to a life spent in the sun without appropriate protection. My hair will gray, as it already is, pushing back from my temples until the two sides meet. My arms will never be sinewy in the way that a true swarthy man’s arms should be, with gross veins popping in odd places between his fingers and his elbow. I dress sort of swarthy at times, with clothes meant to remind someone of the lake and of a life that accompanies that lake, be it my big blue one or giant salty one. I wear sandals a lot, but even this cannot elevate my generally soft existence into the realm of swarthiness.
I stood on the bow of my boat last Saturday night, casting aimlessly around and into the school of cisco that had pushed their way to the surface as they tend to do around nightfall on Conference Point. I’ve never caught anything while casting into these large swimming schools, but past performance isn’t indicative of future results and that phrase cuts both ways. One day I’ll catch something fishing like that, but that one day was not to be this past Saturday, so I cast and I cast with nothing to show for it but some twisted line. I wasn’t wearing a hat.
There were other boats around, one full of fisherman fishing, another with a man and a woman, alternating casting and kissing. No one was catching anything, as far as I could tell. I started my fishing deep, allowing the lightest of southeast breezes to push me towards the shore and closer to the other boats. I enjoyed fishing at first in the deep, surrounded by the ciscos, if for no other reason that I was aware that the shallow boats felt that I was onto something. That I had somehow outsmarted them. But I hadn’t. I never outsmart anyone or anything while fishing.
Once I had sufficiently fished and come to the familiar consensus that either, a) the fish weren’t biting, b) I wasn’t fishing with the right lure, c) there were no fish anywhere near my boat, or my personal favorite, d) there were fish there and my lure was fine but they still had no interest in it, I sat down on the captains chair and ran my fingers through my hair. I didn’t do this in the way that someone might romantically run their fingers through another person’s hair, instead I did it as a way to suggest resignation, frustration, relaxation. I did it because I was signaling to myself, to my fishing companions in the other boats, to the ciscos and to the night, that I was done. When I did this, I realized that I had been fishing amongst strangers with my hair puffed and pulled to its absolute highest. I had boater’s hair.
Boater’s hair is not to be confused with crazy person hair. They are entirely different. Boater’s hair is always different but it is always the same. The hair, once tamed and docile and coerced into a pattern or a shape, has been set free by the wind and the sun and the humidity. It is hair as hair was intended to be; wild. For some, the spread between work hair and boat hair is a wide abyss. For others, like me, work hair and boat hair are quite similar, with merely a few more hairs pressed into place for the work variety. But on this night, on that great sea, with those ciscos under me, my hair was as wild as wild could be. I had boat hair, and I liked it.
Sitting at your desk today, you should be able to spot those with some leftover boat hair. It’ll be some guy with most of his hair in place, but one clump in the front, off to the side, that refuses to lie flat. It refuses to submit to the gel or the spray, and instead it wishes to be free like it was yesterday, blowing in the lake wind, bouncing over waves and swells. It’ll be some lady, with her normally flat hair a bit more voluminous. A little bit wild. It will be mostly as it normally is, but with some of it free and flowing, as it remembers the day before spent under the sun and blowing in the breeze. These people today will look like they are working, and they will be, but their hair cannot wait for Friday.
Be cautious around those people who spend the summer without a hint of boat hair. They cannot be trusted. If you cannot tell the difference between swarthy boat hair and finely coiffed work hair, and those who sport either, then it has been too long since you let your own hair free of its molded constraints.