Cabin Pressure by Josh Wolk

Author:Josh Wolk [Wolk, Josh]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9781401302603
Publisher: Hachette
Published: 2007-09-15T05:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

I HAD STOPPED SHAVING AS SOON AS CAMP BEGAN AND WAS QUICKLY ON THE road to a beard. When I was a teenage counselor, I tried to grow one every summer. Though I never made it to what anyone would call a full-grown beard, I could create a dark enough shadow to fake one. After I left camp in 1988, I never again attempted the full hairy. I always wondered what I’d look like, but I couldn’t confront that kind of change. After all, I was the guy who never altered his hairstyle. The day I was born, I think the doctor drew a line down the left side of my scalp and declared it my hair part forever, and since then I had let no hair stylist veer from the diagram.

This summer was my opportunity to finally finish a beard. I didn’t care what I looked like here, nor did anyone else. When I was a teenager trying to grow one, I worried about facing girls on my day off. This year I didn’t even care about that. I understood why so many guys got fat after they were married. Husbandhood was the death of vanity, because it was just too exhausting to pursue unless you had to.

I loved to scratch my beard. It was a tactile symbol of the carefree life I was living. Every rub was an itchy reminder that I was one step away from not getting out of bed to pee. At home, I was ritualistic about my morning showers. But here, two or three days went by between them. The lake did the trick, I thought, and even if it didn’t, I couldn’t possibly smell worse than the kids or some of my coworkers. Jousting Chas seemed to take perverse pleasure in rarely washing his clothes or himself. One pair of khakis that he wore every day must have had its own sweat glands, because one man couldn’t possibly generate that much body odor by himself. When he stood up in the Dining Hall to pick for sailing, he left a vapor trail.

I was now fully embracing the low-impact camp life. Three meals a day were brought to me by campers. The weather was delightful, and all job pressure had slowly faded away. I no longer felt the omnipresent tension of career worries that I had been carrying around in my shoulders for the last twelve years. At camp I didn’t worry about the cost of a restaurant or whether I should switch phone companies or whether I needed new clothes. I just worried if some kid out there was drowning, and some kid never was. One morning I left lunch and was halfway back to my cabin when I looked down at my sandals and noticed I had a large glob of jelly stuck to the top of my big toe. What better indicator could I have asked for that my life was at its simplest? I crouched down, wiped the quivering purple mass off with my thumb, flicked it into the woods, and then licked my thumb clean.

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