Paddle Your Own Canoe: One Man's Fundamentals for Delicious Living

by Nick Offerman

  * * *

  Unfortunately, that was the end of the successfully orchestrated part of my plan. I had been so focused on my big Say Anything moment that I hadn’t given much thought to the postcoital accommodations. I mean, I was old buddies with these ladies, so I was sure they’d at least let me crash on the couch. No dice.

  Not knowing what to do next, with all of $70 in my pocket, I went in to a pay phone and called Jeff back home.

  “Well, Jeffrey, the eagle has landed, and the eagle has been kissed, but now the eagle is homeless and without much bread. I guess I’ll fly home tomorrow. Pick me up?”

  “Ah, Tricky Nicky! Ha-HAA! You got some major brass ones, my friend. You got it. I’ll see you at Midway.”

  Great. Now what? I looked through the phone book and found a cheap place in the mountains. I called up, and the lady was very nice on the phone. She even sent their jeep to pick me up. Looking back, this was probably a pretty crappy hotel, but for a nineteen-year-old playing hooky from Illinois, it was a crazy paradise. I was completely enamored of the colonial style, situated as it was amongst the jungle foliage. When I arrived, the manager, Maria, with whom I had spoken on the phone, was just as nice in person. There was a big shindig under way with a live reggae band, and everyone was drinking daiquiris. I had never even heard of a daiquiri. Turns out, it was like, strawberry rum booze, all cold and shit. Fucking right on. Jamaica.

  I commenced to dancing with the people and feeling like life was not too bad. I was thinking of calling Lynette, because we really enjoyed dancing together, and I thought she would love this music, but then again, this Maria was beginning to be ever more super nice. Long story short, I spent the night with her, and she packed me off to the airport the next morning in the blue and yellow dashiki she had been wearing.

  Ultimately, this caper turned out to be a really fun way to wrap up a great teenage romance. When I tell this story, people often accuse me of behaving like a stalker, and even in those pre-9/11 halcyon days of travel, my subterfuge could definitely have been interpreted as creepy. But I hope that the story’s resolution makes it plain that everyone involved came out of the fray with a satisfied smile. The only downside, really, was discovering that I was allergic to something, presumably strawberry daiquiris, judging from the painful red rash all around my crotchal area.

  The Moustache Makes the Magick

  First of all: Teddy Roosevelt. Pow! How’s that for a punch in the teeth? Or moustache?

  As a mere sprout, moustaches always represented, simply, manhood to me, as well as heroes, cowboys, and my uncles Don and Dan, who were already my idols and had moustaches that were flinty, bristly, completely virile, and tough as nails. When I was just a little pisser, I knew that I would only truly become a man upon the day that I could grow a moustache. I associated the notion of those noble whiskers mostly with my uncles, because they owned tractors, wore vise-grip pliers on their belts, and were out in the weather harvesting their incomes by way of cultivating crops in the soil. They were brave, admirable souls to me (they still are), much like Burt Reynolds and Tom Selleck were at the time.

  A moustache carries with it a little bit of derring-do. You’re the kind of guy who will come barreling up doing a power slide in your pickup truck and then give a girl a wink. You know your knots. You know what to do with beef tallow. Freddie Mercury was also a major idol of mine, and he had a badass moustache to perfectly complement his whole leather-guy Tom of Finland thing. When I eventually learned that he was gay, I didn’t think less of him, I just thought that gay people must be pretty kick-ass, then, if he was one of them. Before I ever knew anything about sexuality I just thought he was a rough/pretty-looking dude who could sing his face off, and once I began to learn about the varying sexual orientations of we humans, then I thought he was a rough/pretty-looking dude who could sing his face off.

  I recently had the extreme pleasure of showing my friend the seminal 1986 film Highlander, which is REQUIRED VIEWING (for young men, anyway), and I was blown away, yet again, by the amazing Queen songs that make up the film’s soundtrack. Freddie Mercury brought manhood to the stage like few before him and damn fewer since.

  A moustache tells folks that you’re willing to take the bull by the horns. You have a certain amount of gravel in your craw, like many of Sean Connery’s characters. Name me one actor since Connery to bring to life such a swaggering sense of manliness, with or without whiskers, but especially with. Can’t do it? Neither can I. But by sporting a moustache, I can bring a hint of that staglike flavor to my own savory life. Later on, Sam Elliott took an awfully fine swing at that feeling with his incredibly aesthetic lip hedge in The Big Lebowski. Portraying the Stranger in that film, a man with such life experience, including enough notches on his belt to be able to give advice to THE DUDE, for Pete’s sake, required a brambly thicket of absolute chaparral beneath his nose, and Sam brought that shit. Hard.

  I also emulated a lot of sports figures in the eighties. We were really into sports in my house. Mike Ditka and Dick Butkus were the two most Rooseveltian members of the Chicago Bears organization, to my way of thinking. It was an amazing time to be loving sports teams around Chicago, because the Cubs were great (They’re always great! Shut up, reality!) and the Bears had the best season in NFL history (suck my balls, Miami ’72) in 1985. No question. Then Jordan’s Bulls showed up. Phil Jackson. MUH. STACHE. I was at “teen” age, a very formative time for me to indulge in revering these superhero-looking guys with moustaches, like Walter Payton, Mike Singletary, all the Bears’ linebackers, Wilber Marshall, and Otis Wilson, plus William “the Refrigerator” Perry and Willie Gault. The Cubs were also great upper-lip role models, with Ron Cey, Billy Buckner, Dennis Eckersley, Fergie Jenkins, and Lee Smith all sporting cool-as-shit moustaches. Cy Young Award–winner Rollie Fingers of the Oakland A’s must be included on any such list because he was a bewhiskered badass on the mound who brandished a full-on Snidely Whiplash handlebar moustache that was mighty intimidating to any poor sap facing him in the batter’s box. Also, Goose Gossage, ladies and gentlemen.

  Earlier moustached film heroes Errol Flynn and really anybody playing Zorro forever associated for me the gentlemanly pursuit of sword fighting with the moustache. Wyatt Earp brought his hirsute stache to the gunfight at the OK Corral and was justifiably pissed that he was mainly remembered for only that one heroic day when in truth, his whiskers saw him through careers as city policeman, county sheriff, teamster, buffalo hunter, bouncer, saloon keeper, gambler, brothel owner, pimp, miner, and boxing referee. Now, that was a moustache. In the same vein, Mark Twain had the kind of lip bracken to land him on the list of men I’ve always idolized. His sense of humor always sounded to me like if someone real smart came from my neck of the woods, and he said what he meant. I shouldn’t be surprised if, in my later years, I try to emulate his technique even more than I already do, writing stories about mischief while riding the nation’s rivers astride a steamboat.

  In general, depending on style, your moustache can read as heroic and lend a granite quality to your visage, or if you go in a slightly different direction, your moustache can connote criminality in a character. I think it’s funny that when I’m playing a sheriff, I think, “I am going to need a kick-ass moustache,” but if I am playing a bank robber or cattle rustler or Irish thug, I think, “Oh, I had better grow a kick-ass moustache.” The important thing is to start with the moustache. Everything else can be adjusted around it, forcing your truth to trumpet beneath it, be that truth good or bad, strong or weak, sexy or abhorrent. On the heroic side, astronauts rock a moustache if they know what they’re about.

  The straight dope is: If we’re TRUE to our natures, then we grow a robust beard. That is what was intended by the ORDER OF THINGS. Society has put a spin on us, making a “clean-shaven” countenance the social “norm,” which, from Ma Nature’s point of view, is bullshit. But then, so are air-conditioning and Saran wrap and Cap’n Crunch and a
bunch of other cool shit that allows us to “rise above” nature at times. A moustache is a socialized way to say, “Okay, look, I’ll let you see most of my face, since that’s what we’re all doing right now, but if you would kindly direct your gaze to this thornbush above my mouth, you will be reminded that I am a fucking animal, and I’m ready to reproduce, or rip your throat out if called upon, because I come from nature.” In this way the moustache can be considered a relief valve of sorts, for the buildup of animal preening that most people completely repress. That’s what makes a man with a good stache so cool, calm, and collected.

  It’s funny to me that people ask me for tips on growing a moustache. I often reply, “I honestly don’t know. I was born with this moustache. I just cut it periodically so that it doesn’t go down my throat when I’m enjoying my soup.” My whiskers grow without any provocation from me whatsoever.

  I have about as much advice on growing a moustache as I do on growing fingernails or hemorrhoids. I’ll tell you this much: My life is always more delicious when I have whiskers on my face, but that might just be because those whiskers tend to accumulate bacon crumbs and scotch, rendering them literally delicious all day long. In response to the query, “How do you grow that robust moustache for Ron Swanson?” I can walk you through the steps:

  1. I don’t shave my lip area.

  2. After two weeks, I have a passable moustache, in the form of long, luxurious stubble.

  3. I continue to eschew the razor.

  4. After three to four weeks, my whiskers have developed to the point where I can play a sheriff who is so tough that he eats nails, but still not Swanson.

  5. I refuse to shave.

  6. After five weeks, the whiskers growing from just beneath my nostrils have extended down, wirelike, to reach my top lip, a distance of one full imperial inch. Now, and only now, may I don the pleated Dockers and thick, long-sleeved knits of Pawnee’s director of Parks and Recreation with confidence and authority.

  Finally, I just want to add that I am a character actor, which means that, unlike “good-looking” actors (your Will Smiths and your Daniel Craigs), who always play (with great aplomb) different versions of the same dreamboat, I, lacking their cheekbones, rely on versatility to color each of my roles with a different crayon or brush. My old pal Mother Nature has done me quite the solid by bestowing upon me a thick mane of hair and a rampant growth of whiskers, both excellent basic materials from which to sculpt wildly differing character details. I have deeply relished my opportunities to try disparate hairdos, from Mohawk to hippie, and the same goes for the facial bush, from Grizzly Adams beard to muttonchops to Swanson stache.

  The peculiar thing is, people familiar with my television work now seem to expect me to wield the moustache at all times, when in reality, I will wear it seldom outside of the shooting season. Having enjoyed my life as an aspiring chameleon thus far, I look forward to many more years of it. Parks and Recreation films for seven months of the year, and when I add on the month of moustache growth to prepare for the season’s launch, that’s eight months, or two-thirds of my year, that I am locked into that look. Therefore, I take great pleasure in spending my off-months looking like anything but Ron Swanson. Sometimes I shave my head bald, and sometimes I grow a large shaggy beard, and either direction sees me happy as a clam.

  For an actor, donning a character is a strange transaction. Ron Swanson, for example, does not belong to me, and so I cannot in good conscience “be” him when I am not at work with his cocreators, my boss and the writers of my show. It’s like the Iron Man suit. As much as Robert Downey Jr. loves to play that particular iteration of Tony Stark, it would hardly be appropriate (though yes, it would be awesome) for him to wear that suit to the grocery store or the beach. It’s no different than the uniform anyone wears at work. Wearing Ron Swanson in my “regular” civilian life would feel to me commensurate with a Best Buy employee putting on that blue shirt and proselytizing to strangers at the car wash on the virtues of high-def televisions. I will have to be satisfied with the amazing good fortune bestowed upon me, that it’s what I get to wear whilst working at the greatest job anyone has ever had.

  10

  Wax On, Wax Off

  Without teachers in our lives, we would be a bunch of sorry dullards, indeed. Dimwits and dunces. One of the many gratifying advantages of mammalian life is that the older generation tends to teach the youngsters the skills they need to thrive in these harsh elements. I can tell you nice folks as a flat fact that were it not for the teachers in my own experience, not only would I be unable to extricate the toilet paper from the roll, but I would not ever have even found my way to the john. My parents, naturally, have been my first and best teachers, along with their respective families, who shared in the chores.

  Many hands make light work, and a little “handful of joy” like myself, not to mention my little brother, two sisters, and a bunch of cousins, provided a workload that was equal to an army of aunts, uncles, and grandparents. Dad first taught me to drive a clutch, followed by my uncles Don and Dan and grandpas Mike and Ray. Each threw in his two cents, instructing both me and my cousin Ryan so that by the time we were nine, after years of gentle lessons, I could engage the consarnit transmission without any crunching.

  Grandpa Mike’s teaching was especially efficacious. He was an old man who didn’t have time for maneuvering, so he just went straight at us. I believe Ryan and I were six or seven when he asked us if we would like to sample a chaw of the Red Man chewing tobacco forever in a pouch in his hip pocket. You bet your ass we wanted to try it. Not only did the patriarch of our lives favor this masticating medium, but so did most of our favorite Chicago Cubs! The time had arrived for us to join the legion of men, moving mountains of hay and oceans of yellow corn about the county. Grandpa gave us each a portion and said, “Now, you just chew it, like chewing gum.” We complied, champing away in a manner worthy of any swaggering jack down at the grain elevator, if I do say so myself, lasting all of ninety seconds before we both promptly vomited in the yard and lay down in the grass to die. Class complete. Grandpa Mike wasn’t fucking around.

  * * *

  Later in my ongoing career as a student I was to win the teacher lottery not once but twice, at the Krannert Center for the Performing Arts in Champaign–Urbana. Permit me to “wax on” now, if you will, as I unfold the Ballad of Robin and Sato-sensei.

  Robin McFarquhar was my “movement” teacher. In any given year, he shouldered a variety of classes, like Stage Combat, Circus Techniques, Deep-Tissue Massage, Mask Work, Intro to Your Spine, Tai Chi, and Guts. I also took an independent study in piss and vinegar with him. Every student in the department, both undergraduate and graduate, fell under his gentle British wing, and Robin did everything in his power to heap learning upon our virgin, spongelike spirits and bodies. McFarquhar, with his actions, illustrated to me a quality that I have really learned to look for in an instructor: that he/she be one who continues to indulge in a hungry course of learning for him/herself. When he wasn’t laying some delicious tutelage upon us, which meant mainly during summer vacation, Robin was traveling the nation and the world, participating in workshops of all sorts, from Feldenkrais to Alexander Technique to stage combat to literally walking on coals. That might sound extreme to you, or at least a tad hocus-pocus, but let me assure you it was anything but, for he would dutifully return to his classroom every fall and do his utmost to inspire us to perform that very act in all of our work: walk on fire.

  Robin’s movement syllabus at the U of I theater school generally taught one to know and understand the instrument of one’s body, along with its possibilities and limitations (imagine any time you have begun a new program of exercise, and some long-unused muscle group speaks up and says, “Hey! Whoa! You’ve paid us no attention whatsoever for these twenty-seven years, and now you want us to perform repeated sets of lat pull-downs? Take it easy, sailor.”). We got acquainted with all of the disparate
muscular work-teams in our own operations, especially those crews handling the spine, that finicky nerve center from whence all bodily motion springs. Once we had socialized with all of the labor divisions, we then put our company to work in tasks requiring both finesse (juggling, mime, court-sword) and brawn (backflips, broadsword, wrestling). As you might recall from your own school days, the divergent realms of theater nerds and athletes seldom experienced any crossover, and so Robin was teaching us merely to be athletes before we could begin to participate in his artistic decathlons.

  As amazingly delivered as these disciplines were, they were mostly dealing with the vessel. If it was whisky school, these classes focused on the barrel, with its distinct cooperage, the tinctures in which the oak staves had previously bathed, the truing of the hoops, and the application of peat smoke in some exceptional cases. But, continuing this well-distilled analogy (cough), the real pedagogical treasures in Robin’s classroom concerned the spirits contained within the cask. The man taught us guts, plain and simple. At the top of every session of circus class, the assembled troupe would recite:

  “Come to the cliff,” he said.

  They said, “We are afraid.”

  “Come to the cliff,” he said.

  They came, he pushed them

  and they flew.

  The sense of it is, come to the edge of the cliff, face the leap, and be afraid. Then acknowledge your fear, step forward once more, and then push yourself off the cliff. I was lucky, as I was already stupid, so I was ready to take any flying vault that people would watch, but for many of the softer students, ones who had enrolled in the program aspiring to become the next Molly Ringwald, the prospect of attempting a backflip was terrifying stuff.