Off the Top of His Head

Like every good fisherman, Dad had a sturdy felt hat. His was faded from the sun and discolored dark above a thin leather band. The molded crown had lost any of its previous features and was now a simple rounded dome. It had character gained over time, scars and splatters, the remnants of sunshine, rain, and live bait.

Whenever we went fishing, the gray-green hat went too. It came to symbolize one of our most precious possessions—time outdoors with our dad. It fit him and us; anytime we wanted to put it on, it was ours for the wearing.

It was atop his head for long hours at Alturas, our favorite lake in the Sawtooth Mountains of Idaho. His green plastic fishing creel was always there as well, smelling of hard marshmallows, pungent red salmon eggs, and traces of trout. The evening meal was often the fresh fish pulled from the lake earlier in the day.

The next morning, pancakes were cooked in the same electric frypan that had seared the lightly floured, peppered fish. While the pan had been carefully scoured, you could sometimes still taste a little of yesterday’s spinning reel success. And strangely, you didn’t mind.

When I was young, still in grade school in Buhl, Idaho, Dad took us out to Clear Springs to fish. There were large fish in there and plentiful as you were casting into a glassy slow moving stream near the fish hatchery.

As we fished, a brisk gust of air whooshed down the valley, snatching  Dad’s hat from his head and sending it top over brim right out into the water. Just out of reach, it then slowly began to drift away. As the hat moved beyond the shallows, we were still anxious to dive in and recover it. We were pretty good swimmers and it was still pretty close. But we would need to jump in quickly. Dad put out his arms and let us know he wasn’t about to allow any of us to venture into the undercurrents of that cold, clear stream.

Instead he tried once to cast in with his pole and retrieve the relic, hoping to snag it with his line. But it was in vain. The hat began to take on more and more water as it floated slowly away. A sense of longing and loss came over us as the fishing hat got smaller and smaller, bobbed one last time, then disappeared below the surface.

It seemed strange to let something go that had been a part of us for so long. At the time I couldn’t understand why Dad wouldn’t let us jump in and swim back with the hat.

But now that I’m a dad, I get it. It was just a thing, easily replaced. And while he often joked—when his children were in a situation with potential peril—that “it’s easier to get another one, than to worry about it,” there is good reason to believe he never truly meant it.