The Hat

For several years now, the wife has been strongly advising me, more like ordering, to wear a hat to protect my scalp from sunburn due to my thinning head hair. I have worn out one hat, and so bought another for daily use earlier this summer. Both hats were what I would call a khaki green color, with the newer one a slightly darker green, at least at this time. The new one has the word Papa with a small bear symbol below. It is difficult to find a simple, plain baseball-style hats with a minor symbol or wording. I like the khaki-green color for a hat, and the symbol and wording are small and sufficiently innocuous that they do not draw attention. I bought the hat and have been wearing it for regular daily use this summer.

Me and my 2022 purchased hat
Photo by Chris Hovel

I also wear this hat when we camp. When I am camping I am outside, so much, with the hat on, that I sometimes forget that I have it on my head. During a camping trip in early August I went swimming at a boat landing adjacent to our campsite. It was warm and windy day when I went to the pier, laid my towel down on the pier and settled myself in the clear water with many minnows, or small fish swimming around the base of the pier all watching and waiting to bite my toes. As I was walking out to deeper water, I realized I had my hat on and so walked a few steps back to the pier and threw it up on the pier next to my towel.  Off I went swimming, doing varied strokes, and later just relaxing in the water laying on my back, with a gentler stroke looking at the beautiful sky and the lakeshore. About 30 minutes later I get out of the water and I grab my towel to dry off, and then look for my hat. No hat is around. I first wondered if when I grabbed my towel the hat fell off, so I looked around, but no hat. I got back in the water to look under the pier--no hat. "Hmm," I thought, "I am sure I had worn it to the pier," but I got up and walked and checked the campsite--no hat.

Hat pretty much worn out
I still wear it at times doing yard work

I then went back to the pier and knowing the direction the strong wind was blowing, I walked along or near the shoreline to see if I could spot the hat in the water. This is where the khaki green color of the hat worked against me. The edge of water contains a great deal of some weeds, and in particular detritus from leaves and other vegetation that has rotted over time, not to mention the trees that have fallen in. I then walked back to the campsite, and Land Girl and I take the kayak down so I can get in the kayak and check the water and shoreline from the water craft.

Lake area where I swam, red dots
indicate location of the pier

For a few times, I paddle over from the pier to the small bay, the direction in which the wind was blowing. I paddled the area between the pier and the shore. I was about to give, up, but then said a prayer to St Anthony and made the trek again. Still no hat. I decided to check once more, with one more prayer to St Anthony, and there I spotted it. It was on the floor of the lake, around some weeds and a tree that was down. I know it was windy, but its distance from the pier surprised me. I paddled closer and reached the paddle under the hat. I was successful in retrieving the hat, but it was full of a lot of silt and detritus, I washed it off in the lake water.

2022 hat, up close

I then hung it on our clothes line, and when that became shady, stuck it on a rock in the sun. And because we were camping, if of course rained. It poured and stormed a great deal that night, so the hat got a nice washing from Mother Nature. Us being the Rainmakers, certainly helped clean up my hat on this camping trip. I am not sure how much rain the area got but another camper told me he heard from someone in town, which is about 7 miles away, through all of July there was only .3 inches in that small crossroads town. The rainfall that night probably more than tripled that July rainfall given how wet everything was. By the middle of the next day the hat was nice and dry and once again wearable.

I do keep a hat in my car, for those instances where I may have forgotten to grab a hat, such as occurred on our recent trip to Kohler-Andre and Point Beach. As time has passed, and I am usually not as forgetful about grabbing a hat, so I don't really know why I forgot one when we departed Tuesday morning. The spare hat, I now know, is for when a hat may get lost or be out of commission for a time.