Earning Your Face

Way Too Much Reality

This is your face.

You have earned it.

Much of your history is etched on your face. Other High Country folks can look at your face and tell a good deal about you. Some flatlanders can understand your face, particularly those who have lived out in the open, away from cities.

But most flatlanders won’t understand your face. They’ll think you look beat up, or that you don’t have enough sense to get out of the weather. They could be right on both counts.

Let’s start with the early morning view of your face in the bathroom mirror; it can be a religious experience.

“Jesus Christ, that’s a frightening face,” you mumble to yourself.

Sometimes, the one nearest and dearest to you, who is also standing at her sink may comment.

Nice face,” Blue Eyes says.

“It’s the best I can do at 7am.”

“Damned scary.”

“Thank you for your input.”

“Anytime.”

The moment passes and you realize that this is your worst looking face for the entire day, unless of course, you walk into a pole on Pearl Street because you aren’t paying attention.

The steam from the shower softens some of the hard edges on your morning face. If you are male, the shaving routine gives you several moments to reconsider your first impressions of the morning. Your second thoughts about your face are considerably more positive than your first. If you are female, there is the hair-drying and maybe a skin care routine that allows you a second opinion. In either case, reality is a little less glaring after some careful consideration, rationalization, and delusion.

So there is this mythical character who stares at himself in a pool of water and turns into a Republican or a heartless stone. I’m not suggesting that you spend so much time staring at your face that you’ll turn into a Republican, but I do want you to consider your face, component by component. Besides—you don’t have much chance of turning into a Republican—you don’t have that much money in your bank account.

Hair. The hairline is either about where it was when you were eighteen or it is not. Mine has gotten somewhat shallow above both temples, but in general, my hairline is about the same. The problem is that there is considerably less hair above the hairline than when I was essentially a hair machine at eighteen. Male pattern baldness is a totally different issue.

My friend Bill had a normal head of hair when we first met on our way to Air National Guard basic training. He is now hair-challenged. However, the lack of hair seems to have had no appreciable effect on him. He was a superb merger and acquisition lawyer, one of my two oldest friends, the grandfather of seven, a wonderful character to spend time with, and couldn’t lose weight if his jaw was wired shut.

Unlike men, who don’t think much of their hair until they don’t have any, women take hair seriously. I think of trying to describe women’s hair is like walking into a frame shop with a print, and looking at all the possible frames on the wall. Then standing there dumbfounded, because there are too many choices.

So I’ll break women’s hair down into a good hair day and a bad hair day—depending on what you are thinking or what is happening to you. And that may depend on more variables than any male can ever process with his smaller brain—ever. So I’ll stand on the good hair day and bad hair day comparison. But let me observe that hair frames the face and suggests that a High Country woman has earned her face and should show as much of it as possible—this place isn’t for everyone.

Forehead. A great forehead needs a couple of contorted wrinkles in it. You know what I mean—when your boss asks a question that indicates he has been off the planet for a significant period of time and you don’t really want to spoil the day by saying, “Are you kidding me?” But then again his question is so stupid and out of context that you need to make some gesture to indicate displeasure—obviously, that gesture is the wrinkled forehead. Those permanent lines indicate incredulity at ongoing stupidities and are usually well-earned. All sexes should take pride in their contorted forehead wrinkles.

Eyebrows. Up here you need to have eyebrows to keep the sweat out of your eyes in summer and the snow out of your eyes in winter. There are eyebrows that bleach to the color of snow in the summer and to the color of walnuts shells by late fall. There are eyebrows that turn up and turn down, and unibrows that just ignore convention and worm above a nose. There are eyebrows like mine that look like jungles and cause barbers to whack at them as soon as I sit down in the chair.

“Mind if I trim the brows?”

“No, not at all”

“Whack. Whack. Whack. … Whew, that’s better.”

“Than what?” you ask.

“Than looking like a lower primate,” she answers.

Eyes. They can sometimes tell the whole story in an instant. Just a second of eye contact between two human beings can have magical qualities. It’s like two Viet Nam vets whose eyes meet and instantly say, “Welcome home.” They just know at that moment of contact where that person has been and what they may have seen. It makes them smile to be still alive and able to send that message with their eyes.

It’s seeing a set of eyes across the room, and feeling your mouth smile in recognition of someone you want to talk to. It’s looking at this person you share your life with and knowing exactly what that person is thinking—mostly.

There are three general levels of eye contact, (1) full-on, (2) glancing, and (3) not-at-all.

Full-on eye contact is a tad aggressive and invasive. There are times when you can see all the way to my heart, in my eyes, if I hold your stare. There aren’t a lot of people in this world that I trust with that vision. Full-on eye contact is something to be used judiciously, for a good reason, and certainly not just to see if the other person will blink. That is meaningless bullshit.

Glancing is the way most of us communicate with our eyes. We don’t invade another person’s privacy with a full-on stare, but we do make sure to make eye contact as we move about, and particularly when we are conversing. It is nothing more than a quick glance to make sure your words are being heard. It’s an acknowledgement with your eyes, that their words are being heard.

No eye contact can mean a number of things starting with, “you are a complete waste of a human being,” and ending with, “you scare the shit out of me and the last thing in the world that I’m going to do is make eye contact.” But mostly no eye contact means that the person doesn’t give a damn, you don’t count, and they aren’t listening.

Ears. These could be the most unattractive parts of our faces. There are several curious phenomena about my ears. I’ve noticed that my ears are the cause of a recurring speech pattern particularly in situations where there is a good deal of ambient noise. Life partners tend to describe this phenomenon as “selective hearing” or “programmed inattention” or “spouse listening”. The phenomenon manifests itself in a variety of phrases,

“What?”

“Huh?”

“I didn’t hear you.”

“No, I’m not ignoring you.”

The other really odd thing about my ears is counterintuitive. There is a bald spot on the top of my head that will absolutely turn into fire if I neglect to slather it with sunscreen when out in the spring sun. But why is it, that I can’t buy hair for the top of my head, but hair seems to sprout randomly from my ears? If I didn’t trim it back, I could grow my own earmuffs.

As a High Country person, there is a good chance that you have sun or wind damage to your ears making them look the worse for wear. And maybe you don’t hear as well as you did before, because you spent unnumbered nights close to the stage dancing like the world was going to end by daybreak.

Nose. The nose is a special indicator. It can have any shape from “pug” to full “banana” to “cute as a button,” but up here it’s always a little rough looking. The surface of the nose isn’t exactly smooth like maybe it has been frost nipped at 12,000 feet in a windstorm or scorched on a bike ride out of Moab—little pieces of flaking skin are a good sign. A certain crustiness around the nostrils is normal from an ongoing sniffle, exacerbated by sleeping in a really cold room with zero humidity, your best friend beside you, and the dog(s) curled on the comforter at your feet.

Cheeks. These are designed to hold your nose in place. The are usually well-tanned from being outdoors but capable of going pink for a variety of reasons, from embarrassment at being caught reading something serious, to forgetting the sunscreen, to saying something so incredibly stupid or inappropriate that you know you have screwed up as soon as it leaves your lips.

Along with cheeks we need to discuss beards. There is always the suspicion that the beard is hiding something other than bread crumbs and dried soup from the last meal. Let’s start with a really scruffy looking untrimmed beard that looks pretty much like a gorilla’s armpit. The question needs to be posed, is this really ugly beard hiding something even more ugly, or is the owner of this beard such a lazy fuck that he doesn’t care? On the other extreme is a beard that is perfectly trimmed. At the very least this beard indicates that the owner has way too much time on his hands or spends way too much time in front of a mirror, or both.

Before we get to the mouth, teeth and chin, we need to discuss laugh lines between the cheeks and mouth. Laugh lines are a good thing, like waking up to a life partner who sleepily slips a hand across your stomach.

Laugh lines are earned from laughing so hard that tears come to your eyes and the back of your head hurts. They come from a friend who tells a great story, or a slapstick fall on a groomer that ends in a face plant, or hitting the tongue of the river just right so the boat slides perfectly into the wave train. There is no way to fake laugh lines, you have them or you don’t. And if you don’t have them—chances are you need to lighten up.

Mouth. The mouth is almost as special a place as the eyes; it is where all the truth and lies come from, you just need to know the difference. There’s a good chance that if you have spent time in the High Country it’s fairly easy to tell truth from lies. The Mountain Gods teach you that truth just feels right, like an old polypro pullover. But sometimes a person can lie to you, and if you are smart, that only happens once with that person.

You can also lie to yourself with predictable results. It’s looking at the rolling, roiling, grey clouds of a storm front headed your way and telling yourself you are bulletproof, weatherproof, and not ever going to be incinerated by a lightning bolt. You know you are lying to yourself, and that in a couple minutes you are going to be cold, wet, miserable, and possibly incinerated.

“Having a mouth on you” implies that you can hold your own in a shouting match with a drunk, yell loud enough to be heard down canyon, and quick enough that if someone says something profound, silly, tasteless, outrageous, or just plain fun, you can match them instantly. That’s a good mouth.

Teeth. In the first place, it is good to have them unless you really like soup. A number of us are not native to the mountains or foothills; we came here from other places and lives where straight teeth were some sort of measure of your dad’s financial status. So a good number of us have artificially straight teeth. But some of us have missing teeth due to mechanical mishaps or possibly misunderstandings. Wages here are not as good as elsewhere and every dentist sets their hourly rate at more than you paid for your first car. Some of us look a little worn.

My friend Dan the ER doc told me about the teeth to tattoo ratio that he used when evaluating a patient. He said that it’s a good bet that if the patient had more tattoos than teeth, there was a fair to good chance that this person didn’t see docs very often, and only when they were seriously hurt—if then.

Chin. The part of the face most of us have landed on. I don’t have any scars on my chin, but I’ve entertained my dentist with the sound my jaw makes when moved from side to side. This is no doubt due to a face-first encounter with a third compression bump when I could have sworn I only saw two compression bumps as I skied too fast under the lift towers.

A good chin tucks into the hood of your parka just as it juts out when someone does or says something really obnoxious and worth an objection. It is always available as place to put your hand when you are leaning on a table and pondering.

I have reviewed the major components of your face. And even if you don’t live in the High Country, chances are you have recognized parts of your face. There is only one thing you need to remember and then smile.

This is your face.

You have earned it.

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