Most kids are embarrassed by their parents at a certain time in their lives. It’s a natural emotion. I’m sure I’ll embarrass my son, actually, I look forward to it like a fraternity brother looks forward to a hazing ritual. Although, however hard I try, I will never, ever be able to embarrass my offspring like my father did to me. He did so without ever opening his mouth, all he had to do was wear…”The Hat”.
We didn’t have cable when I was a kid so the only thing we could watch on television was the news or one of the three VHS’s we had. One was The Wizard of Oz, one was a very poor recording of a few episodes of Star Trek, and the other and most viewed belonged to none other than the King of the Wild Frontier, Davy Crockett. I am not sure how my dad got the idea to make “The Hat”, I am guessing osmosis from watching that video so much, either way, he set out to make a raccoon skin hat just as Crockett so tastefully modeled in his many adventures.
Any normal person would have bought such a hat if they wanted it bad enough. There are plenty of them at theme parks and kitschy trading posts throughout this great county. The only difference with those is they’re not made from real animal skin. If one were to shoulder the cross of adopting Davy Crockett’s persona, only a real animal skin would do.
You may be wondering when I’m going to get to the part where we ran out to the woods and slaughtered a raccoon. Fortunately, that never happened. There is no need to hunt for much of anything in Georgia because chances are you can find whatever you need on the side of the road. Rural highways would have been a nineteenth-century fur trader’s dreamland. They were also a twentieth-century crazy person’s fabric store. And that is why my brothers and I found ourselves cruising up and down highways and byways for the better part of our winter weekends one year as an animal mortuary service. Why winter? Let’s just say the ‘fabric’ is a little less aromatic in the cold.
There was a lot of trial and error as my father learned how to properly skin and treat animal pelts like the fur traders of old. We’d pick up deer, raccoons, we even got a beaver one time whose tail was put to good use as a makeshift whoopin’ paddle. After the animals were collected they were skinned and nailed to a sheet of plywood and treated with all kinds of chemicals. There were times we had upwards of ten different animal skins nailed to various boards in our garage. To us, this was very normal. I can’t even imagine what the neighbors or the garbage men thought was going on.
“The Hat” was made from the fattest raccoon ever ran over in the middle of the night. My dad painstakingly spent weeks massaging the dried, cured, mass of hairs into a soft, pliable piece of furry fabric. He then sewed it up using a mixing bowl as his head model. When it was complete it sat a good eight inches from the top of his head like a pagan king’s crown. The tail was so long in the back that he could wrap it around his neck to use as his ‘scarf’. And the feature he loved the most was the ‘visor’ which was the face of the raccoon tucked under the front of the hat that he would pull out to shield him from the sun or wind.
Can you imagine being a teenager and your old man waltzing into school to pick you up, dressed like he just settled the Yukon? I can. He wore that thing everywhere. Everywhere. Even in the summer. Jean shorts. T-shirt. Work boots. Racoon skin hat. Didn’t know if he was going to take you on a trip down to the Alamo or sell you boiled peanuts on the side of the road.
After decades of use, the hairs finally started to give out on the hat. The tail became bald and the nose fell off of the ‘visor’. I believe it was retired in a ceremony. Thrown on top of a pyre fitting for the crown of a pagan king. I truly doubt I will ever be able to embarrass my son in the same way, but I have to admit, every time I pass a squished trash panda on the side of the road I smile and weigh my options.
