The church hated long hair through the fifties and sixties even though everywhere you turned you bumped into another painted portrait of a long-haired saviour.
The big church painting of Jesus clearly portrayed him with long locks. Oh, those were different times, some said. No scissors, no knives? What? No barber shops or mothers with noisy hair sheers in their basements? I think someone tried to tell me once that there was an error in the painting and here's why. The big Jesus with his flock in the Valley of the Shadow of Death was painted during the Depression by a bum - or at least a guy with no money or home. In those days, even nice people looked like bums (possibly with long dirty hair) so you tried to be nice to them. So this artist, let's call him Van Gogh just for the sake of the story, is looking for a hot meal and a place to sleep for the night where he won't get rained on. He is walking down Route 130 - called the Camden Pike in those days - and he stops by the manse of the Palmyra Moravian Church. He goes into the church to pray and sees they have this big empty wall staring him in the face and he wants at it.
A deal is struck and Van Gogh paints Jesus as he thinks Jesus looks. And it is very, very Biblical and the sheep have those cool loving eyes and, although it's not wildly original (Moravians would not have approved of a Dali or a Magritte - both would have been turned away without a crumb), it's a fine job.
Van Gogh received some small financial reward and went on his way, presumably to paint another Jesus in another church - maybe the same image, I don't know. During the thirties apparently, people weren't worrying about the long hair/short hair issue. There was joblessness, starvation, economic ruin and a Dust Bowl to keep everyone occupied.
But skip foreword to the fifties and those of us trying to grow up in ensuing decades where fifties ideas would not suffer decline. By the 1960s, I had considerable ambitions: I wanted to grow up, spend a lot of time surfing and making out with girls and letting my hair grow to whatever length it wanted to. Fortunately, there was already a vanguard of forward-thinking individuals who would forge a path in the wilderness, so to speak, to make my dreams come true. I'm referring to surfers, beatniks, college radicals and the general anti-establishment rebels.
By the time I started surfing, I had convinced my parents to allow me to grow my hair long enough to cover the tops of my ungainly ears and, in the front, to let it cascade halfway down to my eyebrows. I had to keep explaining to my brother that I did not have “bangs.” Even with such modest hair fervour, I took abuse from the less radical tribe in my gym class or on the street. But I was sussing out secrets codes in the Beach Boy songs I was listening to on my record turntable. The lyrics may seem banal to most. “Round round get around, I get around,” or “Let's go surfing now, everybody's learning how, come on a surfari with me . . . ,” but when I saw those California singers on TV and they had hair dangling down over their eyes, I knew my hair could do that, too, if it only had half a chance.
So I slid downhill in the eyes of the community after that. I bought clam digger pants (a pawn to the fashion industry), a couple of “bleeding“ Madras shirts and I steadfastly refused to go down to the basement and get sheared among the African violets. I bought the 9’ 6” Greg Noll surfboard on Long Beach Island and I learned to surf small choppy waves. I could knee paddle, take off, turn left (but not right) on a wave and cruise. I learned to walk the nose and do a Quasimodo and eventually a head dip. Hair is a very important part of a head dip.
What, you might ask, is a head dip? It is thus. While you are voyaging across the face of the wave - in my case a three-footer - as the wave begins to break in front of you, you walk to the nose of your long board and tuck your head down, under the lip of the wave. The wave then smacks you upside the head but you don't mind. When you come back onto the shoulder of the wave, your hair is soaked in seawater and if you have long locks they are hanging down in your eyes so you can't see a damn thing. Then you artistically flip your hair out of your face, flinging droplets of seawater in the sunlight and you smile because you know this is all very, very cool. The more hair you have to fling back, the more stunning the move is to anyone or no one who happens to be watching.
I was extremely good at this charismatic but fatuous little surfing manoeuvre and did it over and over as I grew into a better and older surfer until I had really long hair and actually began to somehow do injury to nerves in my neck as a result of flicking my heavy sea-laden hair out of my eyes.
The paradoxical thing about long hair and surfing is that the longer the hair is in the front - the more you allow your bangs to grow - the harder it is to see. Your hair is always falling down in your face and getting in the way. But you don't care because it's your long hair and you'd rather die than admit that short hair is more “practical.”
Now that I'm older and much wiser, I see some of the absurdity and the follies of my youth, but it doesn't mean I'm about to change them. Although my hair is considerably shorter than in my glory days of the early seventies, I have a healthy mop of it that still hangs in my eyes during summer surfing at the beach. In the winter when I surf, I tuck most of it into my wetsuit hood so that I look like the most certifiable dork on the Eastern Shore. Not all of it stays tucked in, however, and, as a result, it gathers salt water and - you guessed it - freezes. I have to brush frosty locks out of my eyes but I allow the rest of it to form elegant, dangling icicles, some reaching down as far as my Adam's apple. It's like some exotic winter jewellery. The sun glints off it in a spectacular way and it is only a minor inconvenience as it dangles against my cheek when I scoot across a wave. I've discovered, however, that a head dip in subarctic conditions is not a really smart move.
In my extensive research on the subject, I've noted the historical and literary importance of hair. When someone wanted to rob Samson of his strength, who do you think they called? Yes, Delilah and her scissors or whatever they used in those days. Walt Whitman had long hair and so did a bunch of other dead poets. So long hair and creativity were a match. During those storied days of the late sixties and early seventies, it was a sure thing that long hair made you play the guitar better. That even worked for me. For example, picture me at thirteen, with something not much better than a flattop with a little fringe around the ears. I'm playing my Silvertone (from Sears) single pickup electric guitar through a Danelectro thirty-watt amp. I'm hitting the A note on the high E string enthusiastically - over and over. Not much to get lathered up about, eh?
Then fast forward to me at twenty. Hair hanging down to my belly button, hitting that same high A note over and over and shaking my freak flag. It's like a whole different universe of hair/music euphoria.
This same celebratory hair, however, meant you got stopped by the police more often. Did they really sit in their patrol cars and say stuff like, “Joe, you see that carload of long hair punks? Should we go get 'em and nail their sorry asses for whatever dope we can find in the car?” Did they really say stuff like that to each other? Yes, I'm certain they did.
But I was never caught at anything truly illegal, just stopped for my hair or maybe a burnt-out bulb in a tail light. When I went to college in North Carolina, though, I had a redneck refuse to sell me gas at a gas station outside Greenville. He looked at me, my shag, my 1962 Ford Galaxie convertible with the surfboard and the New Jersey plates. He sized me up good for what I was as if I had a big magnetic Day-glo painted sign on the side of my car: FREAKIN' NEW JERSEY HIPPIE SURFER. He took his time silently sizing me up, looking directly at me, creating a substantial, hovering North Carolina hiatus right there in the humid afternoon after I had requested service. “Ten bucks of regular, please,” was all I said. And I said it politely. His response when he finally got around to one was to slap a lock onto the gas pump and say, “Sorry, we're all out.”
I had a feeling that what he was doing was somehow against the law but decided to go the discretion route and I drove out of there, my long mane of hair floating freely and passionately in the southern breeze.
I cut my hair
for a job once and I cut it again before I immigrated to Canada. Did I really think someone would turn me back at the border for the length of my hair? Could be. I wasn't taking chances. The hair grew back and I felt that I had successfully hoodwinked the Canadian immigration authorities.
Hair sits on top of your head and keeps you warm in winter. It keeps mosquitoes and black flies off your skull in summer. Hair is politics and perseverance. It hides your flaws and at the same time makes you somehow larger than life. Hair should be left raw, trimmed slightly, or fuzzy. Clean but free. Hair is freedom and promotes a lack of concern for all the pestering conduits of fashion, conformity and upright pretentious browbeating.
One should not dismiss, however, the dangers of long hair. Even today you are probably more likely to be pulled over by police and searched if your mop is shaggy. Carry nothing illegal. The other car problem was first outlined for me in the 1967 classic How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive for the Compleat Idiot. There were quite a few of us complete idiots in those days and John Muir, the author, sold a big whack of books to us. His classic line in his how-to book on Volkswagen repair went something like this: “Be sure you don't yank your hank!” And he had a very good point. He admonished never to work on your VW engine while it was running - your long hair could easily get caught in the fan belt looped through those two pulleys. Muir assured his readers he'd seen one of his hippie brothers lose a big fistful of hair this way and it was not a pretty picture.
The world moves on, I know, and this year's flat top fad gives way to next year's mop top. People with long raw hair are not necessarily happier or smarter than their counterparts with shorter locks. Someday soon, long hair may become fashionable again beyond the mere drone of lead-singing alternative music icons. If it becomes fashionable, I will feign some indifference lest I be considered another convert of a current fashion.
And therein lies a conundrum. If long, unkempt hair becomes universally fashionable on men, do I cut my hair to endorse my role as “enemy number one of the fashion industry” or do I keep it long and let people think I am completely up-to-date and trendy? My guess is that I will ignore the paradox altogether - as we should always ignore paradoxes - and go surfing. I'll scoot across the face of a six-foot green wall of northern water, do a good old head dip for old times' sake and be careful when I fling the salt water from my locks so as not to injure my neck.
Epilogue: The Piano on the Highway
While driving Minnie's piano to Nova Scotia, I was also carrying other important cargo. There was Pamela, of course, and the surfboard. My mother had also given me some scarlet runner beans to plant in the damp cold Nova Scotia soil. There were money plant seeds and sprouted bamboo shoots. In my yard in South Jersey where I grew up, those tall bamboo trees had flourished, dividing the yard from the traffic like majestic oriental guardians that swayed in the summer winds. Japanese immigrants sometimes stopped and asked my mother for new shoots just like the ones I was taking into Canada.
I was also carrying some baseball cards to Canada. Baseball cards from when I was a kid - a Mickey Mantle rookie card, a Roger Maris from the year he hit all those home runs, a couple of Hank Aarons and a pair of Stan Musials. Others too. According to the book for card collectors, my handful of baseball cards was worth more than the car I was driving. They were worth more than all the royalties I received in total from the first six or seven books I wrote. Some of those books took a couple of years to complete.
During the rainstorm in Maine, I was carrying a heavy responsibility and a bit of fear. The fear was gone by the time we were driving past Lake Utopia in New Brunswick. But the responsibility had been there when I left Canada and headed south and it was still with me when I got back home. It would be with me for the rest of my life and I would continue to carry it with as much dignity as I could muster.
The responsibility came with the territory of having two daughters and keeping the house and cars fixed, food on the table and trying to keep everyone warm and happy. And in some ways, it was a losing battle, I knew, because . . . well, I just knew.
There was a lot I did not declare at customs going to and from the U.S. I carried images of the sea on a summer morning when the waves were perfectly formed and there was no wind. Surfers called those waves “glass.” Glass was ruined by the wind. Glass never lasted but if you could sneak in a few waves before the wind came up, then you had something to carry around in your head to ward off negative thoughts.
I carried morning glass in my head all the time, not just to New Jersey and back. I always took it to the dentist's office and it carried me through drilling and gum work.
On the road north I carried in my wallet an ID card I had bought in college. I had sent away five bucks and received official credentials from the Universal Life Church stating that I was a minister and had the right to marry people as well as “all the rights and privileges accorded to a minister of the Universal Life Church.” The card was signed by the Reverend Tony Diamond, DD. Why I still carried this card was a bit of a mystery but there it was.
I also carried the soft, beautiful secrets of a spring forest in Nova Scotia: dew on the fists of fiddleheads, spider webs crystalline in the morning sun, sagging with the weight of the night's damp caress.
I carried a sense of urgency, which I had conjured up sometime in high school. I had a gut feeling that life would slip away from me if I didn't snag it and hang on for all that it was worth. There wasn't much time to sit by the side of the turnpike and let your engine idle. Sure, get the heck off the road if the downpour turns hellish but get back in the flow and get moving as soon as the sun comes out and your plugs dry off.
I carried my Canadian passport, of course, and my Nova Scotia driver's license but both of them had a picture of a guy from New Jersey on them. I sometimes had a feeling that people could tell this and some day I might be questioned. Just because I had sworn allegiance to God and Queen and taken a driving test in Nova Scotia, did that truly make me Canadian?
Driving Minnie's piano to Canada was a significant event in my life. The Miller Piano Company in Coatesville, Pennsylvania, built it in 1929. I had first heard it played by my grandmother I think around 1960, the year Adolph Eichmann was captured by Nazi hunters, the year Gary Powers was shot down in his U2 plane over the Soviet Union. We were headed into a dark time as Minnie played the piano for me. My grandfather, Gaga, was eating raw oysters in the kitchen, oysters that had been shipped up in a five-gallon can from the Eastern Shore of Maryland. My grandmother had been up since 5:30.
The weight of the piano in the U-Haul made it hard to go up hills and a line of cars clogged up behind us. There was not much passing of other traffic - a tractor, maybe, like the one my grandfather used to plough the fields with - slow but lots of traction. I could feel the trailer weight slowing us down, overheating the poor engine, and I realized that I should have had the radiator replaced as my father advised.
Pamela, as I recall, did not complain about the heat and we left the radio on loud with the windows down and wind blowing all through the car. It was a dull roar of pop music, traffic, and wind - especially out on the Tantramar Marsh looking like a giant manicured Acadian lawn.
The final leg of any journey gives rise to a kind of anxiousness, a joy tinged with satisfaction but also fear. The journey is an event which interrupts the ordinary life and prevents you from dealing with the usual set of problems, tasks and responsibilities. That all comes collapsing back upon you as you near home.
On a clear day, as you drive towards Lawrencetown Beach, you can see my house from about two miles away as you cross over the Lawrencetown River and look beyond the great expanse of marsh and lake. At that moment, I look across to see if my house is still standing. When you go away, you always pray that your home and your life will still be there when you come back.
The potholes on our gravel road seemed deeper than when I'd left. I drove very slowly but the bumps were substantial and I heard the piano produce a minor chord or t
wo before we made it to my driveway. Having arrived home, Pamela jumped out of the car and opened the back door to the usual explosion of dog. Jody, jumping and licking faces and peeing on the ground in the excitement of our arrival.
It rained hard that night, the torrential rain having followed us from Maine. In the night, my dreams collected their chaotic scrapbook secrets and pooled them together into an insane montage of events.
In the morning, I unlocked the U-Haul and removed the surfboard, uncovered the keyboard and ran my fingers along the keys. One of the ivory coverings had fallen off the D note right next to middle C. I began a one-sided conversation with Minnie's piano, a kind of welcome speech, an apology for a difficult trip and some words of thanks for our safe arrival.
Later, after my neighbours helped me move the piano into the house, it would become a kind of shrine of memory and music, sitting in a room that captured the first light of morning on a hillside by the sea.
~~~
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Driving Minnie's Piano Page 18