Thanks to the materialistic nature of Americana, people own things.
One, or more, of those things may define who the person is.
The spectrum for this idea is vast--from the douche bag who lets his/her material things represent their vapid personality, to simply owning a prized possession, something that holds a place in your heart. And, in a creative writing sense, that thing thinks the same about you.
I fit into this spectrum. I am a noun in the machine known as Americana.
I owned a hat.
I own many hats--beanies, baseballs, fedoras, my Fresh Prince flipped-bill tribute. But one hat was my pride and joy. One hat had a special place atop my head and in my heart: the tan scout hat. It was military-esque. It had a short brim. It was molded to my head in such a way that it belonged nowhere else.
Now it's gone. Lost, by me, in a fit of haste, a rushing down a bus aisle to finally escape the hours of claustrophobia and nauseating twists and turns through the mountain roads of Ecuador's high sierra. I left it on the seat. Or maybe it fell off my knee while I was napping, and it slid beneath the seat in front of me. Who knows?
The point: It's gone.
One could think me shallow for this confession--"Prissy baby, whining about a lost hat, writing about it like a teenage girl in her diary, confessing to your materialistic weakness. Grow up."
That person would be correct.
That person would also be a person who doesn't know me very well, or know my relationship with this head wear.
I remember the day I bought the hat. Mike Robinson, a close friend of mine for many years, and I decided to make a trip to Crocker Park, an outdoor shopping mall just West of Cleveland, Ohio. It was early summer 2006. We took his Jetta. We listened to the new Gym Class Heroes CD and old Saves The Day songs. When we got to Crocker Park, we went from store to store, looking at overpriced shit neither of us would buy. We window shopped LaCoste and J Crew. We wandered into H&M. We made it to Urban Outfitters.
Urban Outfitters is a cool store, not only do clothes live there, but home decor, books and music, too. We stayed for a bit. I ended up finding the clearance rack. There were some hats. One grabbed my attention, a tan scout hat with a short brim. I tried it on. It was kind of small, made my head look big. It was $4. Couldn't pass up a deal. That hat was the only purchase I made that day. We slammed towards home in the Jetta under a balmy June sunset with the windows down, the music up and the ruffle of a plastic bag in the wind.
I didn't wear the hat. Ever. I thought it looked weird, so my self-consciousness prevailed. I preferred the shimmery look of gelled, spiked hair. That was my comfort zone.
Until one day, one random fall day when everything changed.
I got out of the shower, did my hair as usual. Then, I saw the hat sitting under more hats on my dresser. I grabbed it, put it on. I let it rest high on my head, the spot where a girl would push a headband to. I cocked it sideways just slightly. I liked it. That hat accompanied me out that night. Compliments were given. A new relationship was formed.
Before long, the hat became an extension of my being. It was synonymous with me as a person. People knew me by the hat--"Darren, we saw you coming. The hat." People told me it wouldn't look right on anyone else. They told me that it fit, me.
The best thing about the hat is what it did to an outfit, how it cultivated an attitude clothes couldn't achieve on their own. It gave a sense of completeness. To jeans and a T-shirt, the hat added a burst of color on top. To pants and dress shirt with a sport coat, the hat added a sense of style, an edge. In the summer it kept the sweat out of my eyes on the golf course. In the fall it looked great peaking its short brim from beneath a hood. It was fashionable and practical. It was perfect.
And it traveled well.
The hat was my companion on the road. It came with me when my band, Babybear, took our weekend trips to play a show out of state. It was thrown into the luggage when I went on extended stays.
Sweat stains permeated the fabric, which was so crumpled and broken in after about a year. Sweat from Nashville, sweat from Athens, sweat from Nassau. There was Macedonian sweat, Serbian sweat, sweat from Kosovo, Turkey, Pennsylvania, Montenegro, the Greek isles. Sweat so ingrained, unmovable salt lined the perimeter. Salt that remained after the hat floated in lakes and fell victim to torrential downpours on hikes. Just like the memories I've made in that hat, the salty sweat was unfading.
The hat has seen love and heartbreak, all the same. It's hovered above my head, like in a cartoon, when my lips have touched one of the many girls of my dreams' lips. It's fallen off my head and landed in the back seat of my car when I've passed out there after a drunken night's fight. It's heard the echoes of screaming, crying, vomiting. It's been knocked off my head, the receiving end of a slap across the cheek.
Damn. So many vivid journeys. To the roof of the abandoned hotel in downtown Kent, Ohio. Through the cliffs and caves of Hocking Hills. Competing with the jagged, razor sharp stone and holly of the Adriatic coast.
Its final journey was a good one. In Ecuador, it found a place on my head at 3 p.m. Friday, November 6, 2009. It accompanied me to the home of a man named Patricio, a farmer who I would be accompanying all weekend while he went and worked on his farm. I was documenting him for my project with the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting. Patricio and I caught bus number one near his home, taking that bus to a connecting point in an old section of Quito, Ecuador's capital. We hopped bus number two, which took us to the Nacional Soccer Club, a major bus hub. We chased bus number three down the road, sprinting to catch up to the man hanging from the door who was shouting at the driver to slow down so we could board. We got comfortable and rode for about 5 hours through the mountains of Ecuador, watching snowy peaks pass our windows. We felt the gravity and inertia of the curvy mountain roads, which spit gravel and dust from the bus tires. That dust found its way through every crack the bus had and eventually into my mouth and lungs. I chewed the grit as the chilly mountain air transformed into sticky humidity. The bus left the mountains behind, entering the eastern Oriente and a city called Tena. Tena is at the fringe of the Amazon Rainforest, it is the last place with concrete and ATMs. Beyond Tena, one is consumed by the sprawling, tangled green of the jungle.
That's where we ended up, Patricio's farm, a place that occupies more than 200 acres at the edge of the Amazon. The flora and fauna were an endless array of massive palms, yellow birds, red birds, white birds, singing insects, spiders dancing atop standing water, fresh papayas, mangoes, lemons. Patricio and I worked side by side during the day, hacking away at invasive plant life that threatened the feed crops for his 70 cows and bulls. At night we shared beers, cigarettes and conversation.
The hat never left my head the entire time.
By Sunday I was whipped and craving the luxuries of Quito--hot shower, internet, soft bed, lack of flesh eating mosquitoes and a decreased threat of yellow fever.
We caught the bus in Tena at 2 p.m. I removed the hat from my head and placed it on my knee. I drifted, hour after hour, in and out of sleep.
"Darren, wake up," Patricio said. "The stop."
"Huh," me, wiping crust from eyes.
Patricio was already half way down the aisle before I gained some sense of awareness.
I checked my back pocket for my wallet, grabbed my bag and raced up the aisle, making sure not to hit any elbows with my tripod or the cow shit encrusted boots I had strapped to the side of my bag.
Our feet hit the street, and soon I was back at my host family's house, showered and happily asleep.
Monday morning. Sunlight pierced eyes at six. Woke up. Pissed. Staggered back to bed. No electricity in the house. Decided to unpack. That's when it hit. The hat was gone, not with the rest of my stuff. I remembered racing off the bus. I remembered my knee. Sadness. Fuck unpacking. I went back to sleep.
Tuesday morning. Reluctancy. Denial.
Wednesday morning. I make my first confession, admittance. While talking to my beautiful girlfriend, Kayla, on Skype, I told her I lost the hat:
Kayla: AHHHH like the one you ALWYAS wear??
Darren J. D'Altorio: yes
Kayla: OMG yeaaa i bet you feel like lost
Darren J. D'Altorio: left it on the fucking bus coiming home from tena
Darren J. D'Altorio: i'm so broken by this
Kayla: awwwww D!
Darren J. D'Altorio: that hat has literally traveled the world with me
Kayla: i was just gonna say that
Kayla: well maybe this is a sign
This is why I love my girlfriend: "That hat is your traveling hat," she said. "It's meant to stay in one of your destinations...forever."
Kayla was leaving New York City that morning. After a long and strenuous job hunt, which has led her from coast to coast, forced her to spend way to much time sending E-mails, gotten her hopes up and broken her heart, she finally has a very promising interview with Abercrombie & Fitch in Columbus, Ohio. New York holds an immense place in her heart though. She found herself in that city. She's lived and breathed its energy. Having lived there for almost a year doing internships and studying fashion design, every time she goes back it's like her homecoming. Every time she has to leave, it's heart wrenching. She told me going back was like picking up right where she left off, like she never left at all. She said she knows it will be the next place she lives, even if it means working somewhere not so ideal for two to four years, gaining experience and saving up money. To do it, that's what it will take. But for now, she has to say goodbye.
I told her it was a day of coming to terms with losing something material, inanimate. It's a day to acknowledge the impending void, but understand that it's just meant to be.
Call it justification, call it whining, call it whatever, but know that materialism has a soft side And the things we own do become an extension of ourselves. This is one of the powers of commercialism, a byproduct of capitalism, an unconscious element of consumerism.
In this case, I was taken over. For the best.
