Bassholes

Stop culturally appropriating, or, a meditation on the importance of fishing hats

Influencer, boxer, and cultural appropriator, Jake Paul

Whenever I’m lecturing in journalism schools, eyeing row upon row of tomorrow’s Tom Wolfes and Janet Malcolms - or as editors like to call them, future listicle writers - I tell the kids, “Journalism is easy, I just make it look hard.” It’s a joke, of course. But since irony died on college campuses around 2012, I wouldn’t expect them to comprehend it.

Though why would they listen to me? After all, I’m a bad example. For instance, I just made the above story up (a journalistic no-no), since I’d rather memorize the collected tweets of Marjorie Taylor Greene than have to participate in public speaking. (I once told my dad that he should let me go before he does, since I have no intention of giving the eulogy at his funeral.)  But if I were the sort of person to inflict my knowledge on classrooms full of impressionable youth, I would tell them that the truth is, journalism is kind of hard, especially if you’re a generalist:  You’re always on somebody else’s turf. You’re often trying to frame order out of chaos. You’re forever attempting to sound authoritative about things you knew next to nothing about five minutes prior, other than what you read in the papers like all the other schlubs. That is, if schlubs still read newspapers.

So as a rule, I don’t like picking on particular journalists. Journalists, these days, have it hard enough. But rules are made to be broken it says here in my Handbook of Journalism Clichés, so let’s go ahead. The other day, a friend forwarded a piece from theWall Street Journal.  It was written by the paper’s style-trends columnist/men’s fashion editor, who usually contemplates mysteries such as “why men are wearing leggings {meggings} outside the gym” or “is a $2,000 puffer jacket worth it”? (Umm, no.)  Now, the headline on his piece was informing us “how a $6 Bass Pro Shops hat became a fashion trend…….you don’t need to fish to wear this hat, in fact many of its fans have never touched a fishing pole!” (Exclamation point, added.)

Perhaps I’m just shooting the guileless messenger, but as a rabid fly fisherman, I hadn’t even gotten past the headline before I’d turned  into a tetchy old man. The breathless news got worse, though. It turns out fishing is a “pastime that can be enjoyed in blissful, socially-isolated solitude.”  But many of the people buying the mesh-backed trucker hats, with the fishing’n’hunting retailer Bass Pro’s gaping largemouth logo featured prominently, couldn’t catch a fish in the fish-sticks aisle at Safeway.

Still, they will not be stopped. Demand is now so high for the ugly, unfashionable hats that the $6 crudities  - which come in every color from solid white to orange camo - are now being flipped for three times the price on eBay.  We meet one customer - his name is, appropriately, Pierre – who snatched up a Bass Pro Shops hat at an L.A. thrift store because “it comes off as masculine” which he found “super cute.”  Another added, “On TikTok, it’s all you see,” as if this were a good thing.  A 26-year-old North Carolina account executive explained that though he grew up hunting, “he now likes to pair the hats with Chelsea boots and skinny jeans.”  If a buck saw him coming, the poor thing wouldn’t have to worry about getting blasted – the deer would likely laugh itself to death first.

A 34-year-old account manager for a marketing firm in Austin found deep connection to the hats, wistfully recalling the golden era of the early aughts, when rugged outdoorspersons like Paris Hilton and Justin Timberlake popularized Von Dutch trucker hats, which was itself, a retro trend at the time. But this is our culture, now. The tail-consuming ouroboros is so out of fresh food sources, that we are nostalgizing our nostalgia.

God help us

I threw this annoying trend to my fishing circle, who was predictably disgusted by it. (Birds of a feather….) My fishing buddy, the Cool Refresher, not only hates the hats, but Bass Pro, period. It is, after all, the McDonald’s of fishing retail outlets, that also, in the opinion of many, helped ruin Cabela’s, which Bass Pro acquired in 2017. Cool Refresher misses going to the fly shop owned by Maryland fishing legend Joe Bruce (now defunct – the shop, I mean, not Bruce) which “would have everything I needed, even arcane fly tying materials. It was always worth a twenty minute drive. And I got to hang out, bullshit with the guys, and learn a few things.”

When he goes to Bass Pro, C.R.  says: “Despite being the size of the QE2, it never has what I’m looking for….ever. On top of that, I am assaulted by the worst of redneck culture (pink camo shirts for the girls, camo bedspreads for the ladies) in a department store setting (I hate shopping). Finally, there’s nowhere to park, which pretty much sums up the future to me. I feel nauseous after spending a half hour there, and I didn’t get what I came for.”

While C.R. is a switch-hitter (he fishes with both a fly rod and a spinning rod), I have no personal connection to Bass Pro Shops as someone who solely fly fishes. At the outlet nearest me, their fly shop within their larger shop has so-so selection and inflated prices, so I never go. But I do have a strong attachment to my fishing hats, so I hate to see people cavalierly adopting them who have no interest in fishing.  It’s like watching Angelina Jolie adopt yet another child. You assume it’ll get  proper care and feeding, but you kind of want to sneak it some calorically-rich snack bars just in case she goes off to a movie shoot or a meeting with her divorce attorney without lining up a sitter.

In my former journalism life, I spent a decent amount of time poking fun at wokearati hustlers, who are now legion. I might have, say, profiled a microaggressions consultant. Or hung out with military diversity trainers trying to teach men who shoot things for a living to participate in embarrassing role-playing exercises while taking inventory of their feelings. Or I might have covered a government contracting conference where everyone was trying to shake the money tree by advertising their “disadvantage” or preferred minority status. (“How! I’m Chief Jumping Bear, CEO of Arrowhead Industries, I’m a non-binary Native American with bad asthma.”)

The earnestness was off-putting. The euphemistic crimes against the English language made you want to bludgeon them with a hardback copy of Elements of Style.  They made me hate words like “cultural appropriation.” I openly scoff at such notions when say, our Latinx (as nobody except equity-beat writers say) hermanos or hermanas get touchy if I celebrate Cinco de Mayo in my party sombrero. Or when our Indigenous Peoples get sore if I do a rain dance. (I don’t need the rain – I’m not a farmer – I just like movement through space while wearing headdresses.) Or when the Irish get their Irish up if I, say, drink too much and start fights.

And yet, this dopey Bass Pro hat trend has me feeling culturally-appropriated.  (Shhh, don’t tell anyone I just used that word unironically.)  And it’s not just that I resent people wearing my fishing uniform when the closest they ever get to moving water is while giving their Kohler a vigorous flush after dropping the kids off at the pool.

For me, my fishing hats are living things. I love them like I love my children – differently, but with equal intensity.  They aren’t just fashion statements.  In fact, many of them are quite unfashionable – their bills wearing thin like the hair on the crown that they cover.  They’ve sprouted pinholes or are caked with dried fish slime. They are instruments of utility – sheltering me from the sun and rain and occasional bird splat. They are fishing companions, bearing silent witness to my triumphs and defeats, my 30-fish days and my fruitless skunks.  They often come with back-stories, or remind me of my favorite places or people.

There’s my long-billed olive green Backwater Angler hat, which makes me feel like Hemingway when I wear it, except instead of catching billfish with Castro, I’m catching 10-inch brown trout in the scenic but overworked tailwater that is the Gunpowder River. It comes straight from my favorite fly shop in the world in Monkton, MD, where the proprietor, Theaux Le Gardeur, tells me what to fish and where, plays old-timey music from back in the motherland (Louisiana), and regales me with tales of his latest wars against tubers.

There’s my Dozhier’s Rainbow Landing hat from a fishing camp in Hot Springs, Arkansas, once run by Parker Dozhier. It used to be cream-colored, with a navy blue bill. But it’s now light blue and yellow, after all the sun-fading over the years. Beneath the Dozhier’s insignia is an embroidered fly rod with a leaping rainbow trout lunging at a dry fly. I’d come to know Parker through a minor Clinton-era scandal. (Everyone in Arkansas is tangentially related to a Clinton scandal.) A raconteur and Renaissance Man, he bore a strong resemblance to Jack Elam without the scary goggle-eye.  His life, he told me, had been “like a damn explosion in a career-day class.”  Before running his fishing camp and becoming one of the world’s foremost fur experts (if you needed to know what mink pelts were going for, Parker was your man), he’d been a TV reporter and a trapper, a columnist for a fur magazine, a publicity man for casinos in Istanbul, and a bridge detonator.  He even dated Gennifer Flowers before Bill Clinton did, “back when she was still a brunette.”  Parker and his fishing camp are now long gone. But I still have the hat.

My lucky dog in my lucky Troutfitters hat

Then there’s my Montana Troutfitters trucker hat, named after the fly shop in Bozeman where I bought it while out doing a fishing story on Marines with PTSD. They’d been shot up and blown up and every other up you can think of.  They now needed to get a little piece of the peace that all fishermen know, however elusive and fleeting. While we were fishing together, they’d relax and open veins, telling me stories about things they’d lost. About their dead friends and mangled limbs and broken marriages. They stuck to me and humbled me. I didn’t even mind when they outfished me, which I don’t say easily. I can’t put on that hat without thinking of them.

A few years ago, in The Drake magazine (the best print fishing magazine in America, and one of the best magazines, period, of whatever’s left, run by the great Tom Bie), I related the tale of how I almost lost the hat in a much longer story about loss, which I’ll partially repeat here. Because if we don’t repeat ourselves, who will? (I’m repeating that line from an earlier column, incidentally.)

Three years ago, I’d lost a lot. Nothing like my Marine fishing buddies. But I lost the job I’d had for 23 ½ years. My magazine had been shuttered by its corporate overlords.  Almost simultaneously, I’d temporarily lost the use of my left knee, after blowing out my ACL and tearing my meniscus when jumping seven feet off a boat.  I even lost a tooth – my front cap from an old basketball injury was jarred loose by the breathing tube in the surgery I’d had to repair my knee.  I spent three months getting it fixed, but it was extra expensive, considering I’d lost my health insurance, too.

I needed to fish that year like I’ve never needed to fish before - to get on the water to wash the world away. I ended up at one of my favorite places, Fletcher’s Cove on the Potomac River, where I cast standing up in a rowboat, holding in the current with a rock anchor, swinging double darts into the seam to entice the hickory and American shad that run plentiful there, just as they did in George Washington’s day.

As I was casting in the zone, catching fish after fish, my trance was broken when I noticed three teenage gents attempting to row by, the oarsman facing the wrong way.  They were clearly rookies, and I try never to give advice on the river unless someone asks – people fish to get away from know-it-alls. But I felt sorry for them, watching them beat against the current, and yelled out that it might go easier if they turned around and rowed while facing the stern.  They nodded appreciatively, then ignored me, until they couldn’t hold any longer and blew a hundred yards downstream.

I was still feeling satisfied with myself, on account of my shad bounty, pulling silver bullet after silver bullet, writhing wildness that I needed to hold before letting go. The kids looked upstream with envy, seemingly unsure of how to even thread a nightcrawler. But they weren’t about to ask for pointers. All of the sudden, a strong wind whipped up behind me, and blew my lucky Montana Troutfitters hat into the current.  I dropped my rod and pulled the heavy rock anchor off river bottom as fast as I could hand-over-hand the rope.  I locked the oars, and started rowing, my hat still riding the film since it was not yet waterlogged. But by this time, it was a good 70 yards downstream.  I rowed furiously in its direction, and by the time I caught up, it had just submerged below the water line.  I leaned over the bow, and retrieved it with two fingers just before I was about to blow past, snatching up to my feet in triumph and relief, putting it sopping wet back on my head where it belonged. I tripped over the boat bench as I did so and fell into the hull, nearly snapping my 9-weight.

The three wiseguys looked upstream at me again, this time less in envy than bemusement, and applauded.  I doffed my wet hat from a prone position, since ridiculousness-wise, we were all in the same boat, now.

I’m wearing that hat at this moment, for good writing luck. It’s ugly and beaten up, turd brown with sweat and fish-slime stains.  It looks like something a long-haul trucker might wear if he was trying to remain faithful to his wife, and wanted to assure fidelity by using it to repel lot lizards at the Flying J.  But I had to save that hat. I’d lost too much, and couldn’t stand to lose more.

Am I little fast on the trigger, taking aim at TikTok influencers who just want to wear a $6 fishing hat? Maybe I am a tad touchy. But sometimes, a hat isn’t just a hat. And if that’s all it is, maybe it shouldn’t be.

Bonus Scene:  Here’s a man who knew how to wear a hat. Gabriel Byrne in Miller’s Crossing, the very best Coen Brothers film of all time. (This is not up for dispute. If you come for me, I will drub you in the comments section – this means you, Sonny Bunch.)  Haunting score by Carter Burwell:

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