After a long spring and summer of baseball practices and games in the sun – and absolutely no farming – I’ve decided that the “tan” that I have acquired should be called the coach’s tan rather than the farmer’s tan.
My coloration has many of the same attributes of a farmer’s tan, with the dark (relative to my general whiteness) neck and lower arms, but it has additional color patches, such as the legs, that set it apart.
When I take my shirt off, which only happens in the comfort and safety of my own home, my coach’s tan really shines in the full-length mirrored closet doors in the master bedroom.
Though I have no bangs due to my hairstyle, my forehead is white because my baseball hat has been covering it. Add to that the bill of my hat and some sunglasses, and my “tan” begins about mid-cheek and continues south to the top of my T-shirt line just below the Adam’s apple.
A couple of my shirts have a slightly lower neckline, and I have been surprised a couple times this summer after looking at myself with these shirts on. It’s like I’m wearing a White-Out collar, as my tan line no longer blends seamlessly into my clothing.
Those of us who don’t have or choose to take the opportunity to go shirtless in the spring and summer must live with the consequences; the famous farmer’s tan.
According to Wikipedia, this sort of tan “is distinct in that the shoulders and back remain unaffected by the sun.” Similar tan lines, it continues, include the “Texas tan or trailer tan.”
I didn’t know this prior to my extensive research (typing “farmer’s tan” into a Google search yesterday) but the Texas and trailer tans are caused by working in the sun while wearing a muscle shirt or an A-shirt – also known as a “wifebeater.”
I don’t own a muscle shirt or a wifebeater, so I have never experienced those unique tan lines. I also don’t “work” in the sun too often, because I don’t get paid to do so.
Then there’s the “trucker’s tan,” in which “one arm from the sleeve downward is tanned significantly more than the other arm due to driving with the windows down,” according to my online source. There’s even an “inverted trucker’s tan,” in which the passenger of a car has a tan on his or her right arm from resting their arm on the window.
I once had the “dumb tourist’s tan” in which my scalp was fried during a trip to Hawaii because I didn’t cover it while on a half-day drive around Maui.
The shorts that I wear reach to my knees, so seldom does my coach’s tan stretch above the kneecap. If I am watching a game from the bleachers, however, the shorts creep up to expose some of my lower thigh and I have been known to get a nasty burn in this usually protected patch of property.
As we travel further down my body (it’s like a PBS special, isn’t it?) we have the well-colored (again, relatively speaking) shins followed by the extremely white ankles and feet.
My feet are so white (everybody: “How white are they?”) that when I take my ankle-high socks off it is difficult to tell that I am indeed sockless. If I wrote “Hanes” on my foot with a pen, I could probably fool a few people.
This coach’s tan will fade rapidly as the seasons change and my skin will quickly revert to its winter coat, but it will leave an indelible record of body discoloration that will allow me to look fondly back upon these glorious days of summer.
Adam Breen teaches journalism and yearbook at San Benito High School. He is former editor of The Free Lance.
