Some people are proud of their scars. I am a bit embarrassed by most of mine, as it seems they are almost all permanent reminders of my own stupidity. Boat life is, for me at least, an unending cycle of wound recovery: I am in a constant state of healing something, and about the time I manage to successfully form a scar, I start in on another wound, ever coming up with new and profoundly clumsy ways to hurt myself. Best part is that daily immersion in sea water guarantees that proper, rapid healing will not take place. All those wives tales about salt water being good for wounds? Take a glass of sea water and put it on your window sill for a couple of days, and tell me it doesn’t start looking like a high school science project involving a worse for the wear piece of Wonderbread. Now take that freshly scabbed wound of yours and, instead of cleaning it once a day in a shower and keeping it covered in Neosporin, soak it three times a day, an hour each session, in a lively biotic soup of water that, by nature of being in a closed lagoon, doesn’t really circulate the way the open ocean does. How’s that scab coming along? Keloid tissue, people. I’ve learned to welcome it. Proud of it? Not really, as it seems more a badge of stupidity than anything else. Wary and oh so devoted to avoiding it whenever possible? You bet. Ever finding new ways of covering myself in it, despite care and caution? Sigh. I’ve almost healed this diagonal gouge on my chest, so I’m off to find something to bang my head on in the engine room.
