Half Nekkid Scar Stories

It’s another Half-Nekkid Thursday already.

I was trying to take a decent photo of one of my scars. But the funny thing is, my skin just doesn’t really scar that much. I’m trying to find scars that photograph well and most of them are too flat and faded to show up in a photo.

Two knee surgeries and I can’t find a mark from them.

A wicked slash across my face that I used to say was from a knife, but was actually a cat scratch, and you can barely see it. It used to look like a dueling scar, from right next to my left eye all the way down to the side of my mouth. Almost all gone now, but boy was it cool when I was ninteen.

The time I almost cut off my fingertip with my first pocketknife, only the barest white line.

Even the slash across my knuckle from last july when I was home alone and and hacked my hand when I was sharpening my favorite knife is faded to almost nothing.

The one I was going to post is on my foot, and I can just see it, but it doesn’t show up in the pic below, so all you get is a little bit of furry hobbit foot with no visible scar. Yet, trust me, the scar’s there and there’s a story worth telling.

This was from a camping trip when I was, oh, maybe nine. Maybe less. We took a drive, my folks, my brother and I, in either our red Opel station wagon or our orange Datsun 510 station wagon, I can’t recall which (they’re pretty close to the same exact car). We went to Craters of the Moon in Idaho, then on to Yellowstone.

In Craters of the Moon though, there was damage done. My father hacked a hunk out of his hand with a hatchet (A bloody but not terribly serious wound), and I dropped a knife in my foot. We later wound up getting cleaned up and getting tetnus shots in the clinic in yellowstone, which led to me wandering around the camp delirious from fever from whatever else was in that booster shot (I forget what it was), which was sort of entertaining, I’ve always kind of enjoyed a state of delerium. But back to the actual injury.

Now, I didn’t exactly drop the knife myself. I had help. My mother, and one of those odd couldn’t-do-it-if-you-tried moments of coordination.

This is very close tho the knife in question:

A classic Finnish Puukko knife. I’ve got a couple like it, but without the distinctive horsehead pommel this one sports. This was our camping knife, we used it for everything, slicing food on picknicks, everything.

Mom and I came out of the tent, her ahead of me. I was in a baggy flannel shirt of my father’s, and mom had this knife in her hand, held by the sheath with the point forward and the horse-head backwards. I came out close behind her and like always, I was barefoot.

In one of those perfectly timed moments of ill-luck, her arm swung back as mine swung forward. The neatly hook-shaped pommel met my buttoned sleeve, and hooked there. My arm swung back, mom’s swung forward.

The knife hung in mid-air for a split second, it’s sheath still in Mom’s hand. And then it neatly turned point-down and dropped into the top of my left foot, where it stuck like a perfect game of mumblety-peg.

I imagine I screamed bloody murder. I don’t recall. I remember quite a lot of blood in the dirt outside our tent, and I recall the massive bandage on my foot. And to this day I have lightening-fast reflexes when I drop a knife, my feet move before I’m aware of the knife leaving my hand.

For years I had a weird eye-shaped scar on the top of my foot. And for all I knew it was still there plain as day. finding it faint enough that I can’t snap a picture of it is somewhat odd.

Now I’ll have to see if any of my other scars still show up. Hell, I like scars, I don’t want them all gone.