All Hat, No Cowboy
Greater love hath no man than for the perfect cowboy hat.
There are two kinds of people sucking oxygen on our planet: those that wear hats, and those that don't. Not that the choice of wearing a hat or not has any great social significance; it's just that some people wear a hat and others prefer to go about hatless. For those who do opt for headgear, however, the attachment between a man (or woman) and his (her) hat can be a powerful force.
Personally, I never really considered myself a hat person. Even so, I have accumulated a great number of hats over the years, mostly the free "gimme" ballcaps from feed stores, beer companies or inattentive relatives. I admit to keeping a ballcap somewhere in my truck for occasional emergency use, but it generally stays wadded up on the floor, hooked over the gearshift lever. The only use I ever seem to come up with is as a visor from a low-setting sun, because a ball cap doesn't exactly produce an oasis of shade in the desert.
For that unique duty, I have a cowboy hat in my closet. I still vividly recall the moment I decided to take this step toward appropriate regional attire: As a young man, frequently outdoor recreating or working, my ears were constantly sunburned, with the appearance of pieces of dried pink apricot taped to the side of my skull. I didn't think too much about this kiss of the sun until I noticed that the cracks in my burned earlobes would peel and bleed, and I grew a mole the size of a Fordhook lima bean on one. Suddenly, skin cancer was something that wasn't just for geezers anymore.
Ballcaps don't shade ears. Floppy hats look like something you'd expect to see on a stuffed bear in the toy store. But a properly shaped cowboy chapeau–ah, now there was something that would actually have function and style. So I bought my first straw cowboy hat from Kmart, a dazzling whitish-yellow affair with a thick layer of protective shellac and a faux Indian belt-style band with a silvery conch for a hatband. The only problem was, it looked new. This, my friends, would not do.
Within the week, I was caught in the rain. I used the saturating affects
of the water to begin shaping my new sombrero, going for a shape like early
cowboy-punk Dwight Yoakam's. This was the start of a beautiful relationship,
as I painstakingly molded this straw crown into a genuine, weather-beaten,
working hat over the next 12 years. That hat went everywhere outdoors with
me, and was never babied. It blew off into Elephant Butte Lake once, and
we circled back and retrieved it because straw floats. It was dipped in
the Pacific Ocean and the Gulf of California. It shaded my brow on the streets
of Juarez, and gathered dust when I did tractor duty. It kept flies off
my face when fishing (sleeping) and kept sweat out of my eyes. I collected
pecans in it a time or two. Best of all, it protected my fragile little
earflaps from undue solar insult. It was the perfect hat, and adopted a
shape you might derive from an unholy union between a taco and paralyzed
fruit bat. It had holes and stains and battle scars, and w
as just as comfortable when digging holes as it was sitting on the tailgate
quaffing cold beer.
That lovely hat met a tragic but not unexpected demise one fateful evening while operating the tractor in the pecan orchard. A malcontent tree limb reached out and snagged the dirty, bent old hat and deftly flicked it under the revolving tines of the tiller attachments. Before I could clutch the tractor, the hat was inextricably intertwined among the silvery blades of earth-polished steel. I gingerly removed the tatters of straw, and felt like I had just tilled up my best dog. The hat was fully and completely beyond repair, and was laid to rest later that night in a private ceremony.
After observing the proper mourning period, I went to the local hattery to interview a replacement. Little did I know that straw cowboy hats were not cheap commodities any longer: The lowest price I found was about 40 bucks! So I decided to wait, knowing the right hat would come along–and it did, in San Antonio, Texas. It was a great big broad-brimmed leviathan, not unlike the one Gus wore in Lonesome Dove. For the mere pittance of 20 bucks, I adopted this fine hat. But the love affair quickly cooled as I noticed a strange acoustic side-effect of the extended brim: I could hear my own voice, which isn't appreciated in cell phones or hats. So I grudgingly picked up one of those quasi-fashionable, pre-distressed straw hats that look like leftover props from a Toby Keith video, which I tend not to wear around people because it's so damned fake. I've even grabbed a ballcap one or twice, because I just can't find a hat that suits me anymore.
So I'll continue to casually search for the perfect hat, and once I find it, will commence the long, arduous process of breaking it in. Undoubtedly, it too will eventually meet an unsavory demise, whether from rotating tines of steely death or being sat on by some drunk (me). Once I find this hat, however, it will become my friend, and will return my love and affection by shielding my tender friable ear lobes from the harsh desert sun. Now that, my friends, is kismet.
Henry Lightcap hangs his hat in Las Cruces.