Off with her hair

I’ve come to the realization that this lifestyle is not well suited for long hair. Or long hair is not well suited for this lifestyle. I’m continually amazed when I cruise sailing blogs and see women with long luscious locks blowing carelessly in the breeze, glowing skin, clean, manicured, smiling, beautiful. They must have showers, I tell myself, and water makers, and a battery bank that stretches for miles. (The truth is they probably have more resolve than I.) Since we don’t have any of the aforementioned luxuries I figured I’d just make do with good ol’ fashioned braids. I would grow my hair out and learn how to contain it in beautiful, intricate, tight knots.

Spoiler. That didn’t happen. Turns out I have neither the skill, nor the creativity, nor the patience, nor the arm strength to keep my hair in braids. Add to the mix that I couldn’t run my fingers through my hair without them ending up in a mess akin to a Chinese finger trap. Any brush had to be coaxed, gently, through the tangles and inevitably left carnage in the form of split ends.

This is probably because I go a startlingly long time between showers. In fact, I haven’t had a proper shower since before we left Bahia del Sol. It’s been nearly 20 days. And even those showers were cold and smelled of egg salad sandwiches and didn’t leave me feeling particularly clean.

Now before you go turning your nose up at me I will reassure you that I’m clean. I bathe, on a semi-regular basis, it just doesn’t usually involve freshwater (and only rarely involves soap). The one exception to this recent shower drought is the waterfall at Bahia Santa Elena, but I didn’t have my shampoo on hand and despite the freshwater rinse my scalp was still encrusted with a thick layer of salt. As far as I can tell the only benefit to this is that my hair finally has “body” (that elusive quality my hair products have been falsely promising me for years). I should figure out how to market and sell this…

On most days my hair is a bit of a mess (which I try to hide in buns, both tight and sloppy), but I’ll admit that began long before living on a boat on the ocean without access to regular showers. I’ve never been one to pay much attention to my hair. It didn’t seem worth the time, effort or money. The blow dryer made an appearance only on special occasions. $20 was the most I could ever justify spending on a hair cut. Bobby clips will forever remain a mystery to me. Hairspray is a dirty word. All of my curling irons were acquired second hand and never felt the pulse of electricity. For my wedding my maid of honor, last minute, made an appointment at Great Clips when she discovered that the plan for my hair was to “I don’t know…brush it.” Case in point, it’s something I prefer not to spend much time thinking about.

Note: My laissez faire attitude towards hair does not prevent me from admiring and envying the women who always look perfectly put together. While I have learned to accept that I am not destined to be one of these women, it does not quench my envy.

Back to the matter at hand. Short hair became a foregone conclusion when I lost my favorite hairbrush. I congratulated myself when I didn’t cry, which is what tends to happen when I lose my favorite things, and resolved that rather than trying to procure a new favorite hairbrush (a process without any glimmering prospects since I was overly attached to my old hairbrush), I would simply cut my hair. Short hair requires less everything. It’s more independent and self-sufficient, the qualities I look for in a haircut. Despite my resolve it’s still taken me over 20 days to pull the trigger…or squeeze the scissors, so to speak. Funny how attached we can become to a cascade of split ends. But they’ve been with me through so much! Each split end could tell you a helluva story.

Well, I did it. I satisfied a long-held (probably since childhood?) desire to cut my own hair…and I might just make a habit out of it. Turns out that hair is quite forgiving, as long as you have low standards. And really, the time to experiment with hair is now, while I’m not trying to uphold a facade of “put togetherness.”