“Waves”

Stories about scars are almost always great. There’s usually something painful and gory and gross and crazy and there’s always proof of the story. You can see it and touch it and get really close to it and ask if it hurt and how much and wonder if it will ever heal. So here’s a story about one of my scars. I went to Mardi Gras with three friends. I came back with a skinny red scar that sliced from above my right eyebrow around my eye down onto the top of my cheekbone. Mardi Gras officially ends with a celebration of Fat Tuesday, but the big night is Saturday. Saturday has the biggest parade, Endymion, and it’s the longest night on Bourbon Street, if one night there can be said to be any longer than another one.

I’ll skip what happened between the time we left our apartment and when we returned. Mardi Gras is too much to explain. In that way, I was lucky to end up with that scar. People wanted to hear about how it happened and I didn’t have to try to sum up New Orleans in a two-minute conversation on the way to class. We got back to the apartment with one bedroom and it was my turn to take the side of the air mattress closest to the wall. I was tired. So I dove for the air mattress. The side of he air mattress closest to the wall was also closest to the only chair in the apartment. I overshot the mattress and went face first into the edge of one of the chair’s wooden legs. I hit it hard enough to end up with the cut and a bruise around it. Think Scar from Lion King. It made for a fun story for a few weeks, but I was glad when it healed and I didn’t have to apologize for disappointing people who wanted a better story to go with it.

The point is that scars are overrated. You can come back from Mardi Gras with an incredible scar, but you might not have the story to match. I need to say that because the scars I want to talk about aren’t the ones from the movies, the showy scars on the face of the villain in the superhero movie, the scars that show you probably made a few bad decisions and got yourself into knife fight and didn’t win. Those are the overrated scars. You can do some stupid shit and end up with a scar that looks interesting. Like trying to dive onto an air mattress when there’s not a lot of room for error.

The only scars that aren’t overrated are the ones you really earn. To earn a thing is rare. To really earn it and make it and feel it and know it and know that no one else can claim it. It doesn’t happen often. Maybe it never happens for some people. It’s rare for me. Things can take labor and time and energy and everything you’ve got and not really be earned.

Those are the important scars, the ones you earn. I didn’t earn that scar on my face. It just happened to me. I think the only scars I’ve earned are on my hands. There are scars on my hands that I didn’t earn. A scratch during a basketball game that is still red. A scratch on my right palm. Two cuts on the back of my left hands that never healed quite right. I ended up with those from tripping and falling. There’s no story to go with those. Stuff happened, and now I’ve got a couple little marks on my hands.

Yet one or two of the scars on my hands were earned. Think about hands. They’re something we can’t hide, something always out in the open, always visible. Still, you can fake a lot about your hands. You can fake your handshake. If you want people to think you’re confident squeeze as hard as you can. If you want to seem gentle, skip the vice grip.

My hands are ugly, but I didn’t really earn the ugliest part of my hands. There are a few ugly scars that just happened to me. The ones on the back of my left hand are probably the ugliest. When it gets really cold they turn red and then purple and then blue and they’re somewhere short of attractive. But there are some things on my hands that I really earned. Those rare things earned fully and without regret. Things I knew might happen but that I was ready for. There’s a knotty white line on my right middle finger where the spiky cartilage of a stiff-snout skate left its mark as a I tried to drag it out from under a pile of twenty more unwanted fish. A diamond-shaped patch of discolored skin on my left hand where a halibut’s tooth got caught as I tried to toss it back into the Gulf of Alaska. When you agree to spend a month on a commercial fishing boat in Kodiak, Alaska you expect to earn some things. The scars are one of them. There aren’t many fisherman working out of Kodiak with nice looking hands. One of first stories I heard about fisherman was about one of my captain’s employees who loved to build up callouses by soaking his hands in saltwater. When he didn’t have to fish, he would do it anyway, just for fun sometimes. He liked to do it on airplanes and then peel the callouses, half an inch thick, off of his palms just to see what the person lucky enough to sit next to him would say. So I thought I might earn some ugly hands. Certainly some stronger hands, some tougher hands.

The problem about spending a month on a fishing boat is that you earn things you don’t expect and some things you never wanted. You earn trust. It’s an absolute trust, but maybe it’s too much trust. You earn the trust of people who you really don’t want to trust you because it means they’re going to tell you things you don’t want to hear. Your captain will tell you how he became allergic to chemicals by falling into a vat in a chemical plant when he was a kid and how he has to wear a gas mask if he goes anywhere besides his boat or his cabin in the woods. He’ll ask you what you think about his conspiracy theories and alien theories and you won’t know what to say because you just want him to stop trusting you so much. The trust isn’t all bad. The captain’s wife spends a week on board and cooks the shrimp and salmon and crab you catch as soon as it comes out of the Gulf and it’s the best meal you’ve ever had.

It’s trust that comes out of nowhere and all at once, though maybe you should have seen it coming. You start to earn it when your friend who you see for one week every year, one easy summer vacation week at a beach in Florida, calls and asks you to fish with him for a month in Alaska. He won’t do it unless you do it and he needs the money. His parents run the fleet and own the boat and know the captain and will make sure you’re safe and will put you with the best crew and pay you well. You earn it in six more moments. In one of these moments, it’s going to be too much trust.

You earn it on the first day on the boat. It’s called the Mar Pacfico, and it looks old. It’s a rusty one hundred and seventy nine tons and it’s ninety-one feet long. There is one bunkroom for four crewmembers and the other two crewmembers have been fishing since they were teenagers. John is technically homeless and was living in a shelter before this trip because no other company in Alaska will hire him to work on their boats. He’s the best net repair man your captain has ever seen but he’s called you and your friend stupid and soft five times before you’ve caught a single fish. Oscar, one of the engineers helping you repair the boar before the first halibut run, asks you and your friend why you’re doing this and you’re not sure expect for the money and to help out your friend. Oscar says he hates John and he’s crazy and that you can die on these boats and you should probably go home now. You shrug it off and look at your friend and hope this works.

You earn it again you pull in a big load of sole. You’re fishing for rock sole and you reel in the nets and they’re seething with red scales and bulging eyes and sole on top of sole on top of sole. There’s a pair of half to salmon sharks in the net, to and you have to pull them off of the boar with ropes and hydraulics, but you’ve got thirty thousand pounds of sole and your friend yells and sticks his arms in the air. John laughs and your friend demands a picture in front of the huge haul and John calls him stupid again but you take the picture anyway. You’ll have five more loads like that one and end up with two hundred and twenty five thousands pounds of fish in three weeks. You’ve been on the boar for five days and you haven’t seen land in three and everyone stinks but it’s probably not too much trust yet.

You earn it again when you work your first twenty-four hour day. Your captain finds a hot spot and the nets go out and in and out and in again and your sweeping fish into the hole for hour after hour. It’s too dark to see the water off the side of the boat but the floodlights are too bright to let you fall sleep on deck. You keep earning it when you climb forty feet up the tower at two in the morning when the wheel with the hydraulic wire breaks. Its you and him in ten degree weather forty feet in the air on a boat tat’s rocking with the waves more than it has on any of the trips. You can’t wear your gloves because the wire is thing and you need to be precise even thought you can’t feel your fingers. The nets need to go out now but the wheel has to be put back and hooked up with a new chain. He’s laying face down on top of metal beam no wider than your foot and you’re hanging onto the ladder with one hand feeding him the wire. It takes twenty minutes and you thought you were going to fall three times and he slips once but you hook up the chain and run the wire and the wheel is fixed and the nets go out.

You earn it again when you’re back home for the summer and you get a call from your friend’s dad. He’s Uncle Wig to you, even if you have no idea how he ended up with the name Wig. He’s never called you in your life because he hates using a cell phone. His office in South Bend, Washington, the base for his company’s Kodiak operations, is a whirlwind of papers and documents and open notebooks and unorganized bookkeeping done by hand and without a computer. He uses a fax machines instead of email and prefers to drive parts from South Bend to Seattle, six hours, instead of trusting a shipping company. His daughter quit the family business because he refused to use a computer for payroll and travel for the crewmembers. He didn’t know how to text and wouldn’t answer his phone and it was too much and she quit. A cell phone call from him is earned and it is rare.

He asks if your friend was acting odd on the boat. Your friend is an odd dude. Most off the stuff he did seemed about right. He dove forty feet off the highest tower on the boat into twenty-degree water in his boxers but that was pretty normal. He drove around Kodiak yelling at random people out the window of the captain’s car asking if they wanted to buy weed from one of our crewmembers. That was pretty strange. Trust. You don’t say any of this and just mention that he seemed a little up and down on the boat. Angry some days, giddy for hours of shitty, shitty fishing. But Wig tells you things have changed. Your friend was arrested yesterday. Picked up sitting on the street in San Francisco in nothing but his boxers. He was visiting a friend his parents didn’t know and he started threatening to kill him. Your aunt is headed out there now to bail him out and get him help. You want to help and say you’ll talk to him. All that trust has to count for something.

The last moment when you earn it, the moment you know you’ve earned some trust but you think it’s too much trust, is at the end of the summer. You check your Snapchat and it’s from your friend. No one told you he was allowed to have his cellphone back but you’re glad to hear from him. You open the Snapchat and it’s your friend’s arm. Unmistakably his arm, short and tan and muscular. You work out together every summer and he can always out lift you easily. He’s short but strong. There’s athletic tape around his wrist but it’s dirty, brown turning to black. Grimy, really. The forearm has two deep gashes. They’re parallel, symmetrical. They’re the same length and the same depth and the same color. They will make for impressive scars. The unhealed skin on your palm from the halibut incident and the dead skin on your finger from the encounter with the skate are nothing. The gashes are deep but clean. They haven’t started to bleed but they are a shiny, smooth red. Gripped in his hand is a can opener, the metal guard broken off and the round blade exposed. It’s just about the right size to make the gash. The Snapchat is ten seconds and you replay it. This is too much trust. You’ve earned it, though.