My Barber, Darrell, aka Fudd

For many years I cut my own hair - set the clippers to a little less than completely bald and buzzed - saved on haircuts over the years.

Then, two or three years ago, I decided to make the best of what hair was left and grow a pony tail. I stayed with that project for over a year with less than spectacular results. My brother called it ‘pathetically retro’, my granddaughter told me I was ‘too old to be hip’ and a friend from a mill town in the interior of BC said that all the workers who retired there bought Harleys and grew pony tails, looking for something that it was too late to find.

I decided it was time to get a haircut.

That’s how I met Darrell. He dispatched my pony tail without feeling the need to make any comment about it and I have been seeing him regularly since that first visit.

Darrell has been cutting hair for over fifty years and has a shop just a couple of blocks from my place. After all those years, he only comes into his shop a couple of days a week. If his Jeep is parked outside, you know he is there. But he would rather be at his camp.

Darrell is also an avid outdoorsman, hunter and sometimes guide. His camp is in one of the more remote and heavily forested parts of the province, an area where you can easily imagine that the landscape around you looked the same one hundred years ago.

The last time I got a haircut, Darrell told me that he had had a break in at his camp. The miscreants had done some damage and stolen several valuable items but what angered and aggrieved him the most was that they had taken a large cut-out image of Elmer Fudd. He showed me a photo of Elmer mounted on the wall. “What would anyone else want with that?”

‘Good question’, I thought, ‘Vewy stwange that this bungling cartoon hunter would be so missed’. I got the story.

Out bird hunting one day with one of his buddies he couldn’t hit a damn thing. After missing several shots his buddy called him Fudd and the nickname stuck. Several years later, when he found the image of Elmer for sale in a shop in northern Maine he bought it for his camp. “It is a one-of-a-kind piece”, he said, “how could I replace something like that?”

“Let me have another look at that picture” I said, “I do a little painting.” ...

I got another haircut yesterday and, at the same time, delivered a replacement one-of-a-kind, this one a touch more personalized. In this rendering you can see that Fudd has dropped his scissors in the snow – an excuse for missing those shots. He was distracted when he realized he had lost them.

Darrell is happy with the new addition to his camp and I have saved a little more on haircuts.