Bad hat

Bad Hat

In the desert southwest hats are not just for cowboys. Not very many cowboys left anyway but if you’re gonna play outdoors around the Great Basin, you’re gonna need a hat. Not just any old hat, not just to keep the sun off your bald spot or lend you some fabled panache while wading a stream, flingin’ the fly.

My special hat needs were borne of hunting and fishing in rough and ready country usually untrammeled and untouched as I sought out solitude and heritage trout in the lost and lonely canyons of Arizona, Nevada and south central Utah.

Most of the time was spent in open Jeeps or pickups. In my Jeeps I had the design need to have something to keep the hat from blowing off – don’t care much for stampede straps so I settled for a heavy hatband. I found the perfect combination for my travel mode in a cheap but durable pressed felt fedora to which I added a three strand wrap of rusty barbed wire.

Once I got the hat broke in it suited me and my needs quite well. The breakin wasn’t easy. Since I already had that grizzled Willie Nelson look about me the hat needed to be, to look, well worn and tested; anything but new.

The process was casual but effective; to get the look I began by drinking from the hat --- beer, wine, muddy water began to change the color, the texture, the shape of the thing. The original felt dye leached through it after the first drenching and covered my head, neck and face with a purple brown Dibble that looked like tainted blood.

Camped solo up near Koosharem reservoir one balmy evening just at dusk I wasted a half a box of 22 shells throwing the thing in the air and shooting from the hip with my trusty Colt revolver. I saw it jump twice so I quit but in the morning I found that the heavy felt healed right over the small holes as though I had dreamed the whole thing up.

The inspection showed an inexplicable ragged crescent was missing from the brim as though somebody or something had taken a bite out of it. The next day’s end found me standing at the bar at a little Indian joint in Caliente, Nevada where I stood there grinding my boots into the thing at my feet while having a few shooters with the locals. A real cowboy type sidled up, pushed me gently aside, picked up the hat and sat it on the bar.

He said “You don’t treat a hat thata way.”
I put on the hat, pointed the bartender to the cowboy’s glass and gave the slightest smile as a tacit point of agreement. The hat was finished. The circle was complete.

Our Prez has one too