Wall Drug

If you've been within 400 miles of it, you've seen the signs. It's sort of a mall made up of a ton of small non-chain stores and presented as though it were an old western town. Hard to describe. Fun to visit. Directly north of the Badlands and east of Rapid City. Google Wall Drug -- that might help the curious.

Mike in his new hat. The cowboy hat experts said a new hat should be snug, with about a finger-width of room above the ears.

They had $800 boots for sale, along with holsters, western leather jackets, and the like. There were many other hats, lots of them quite nice, but one kind that I finally had to ask about: cowboy hats that looked like they were made out of straw, but felt like they were made out of hard plastic, and cost close to $100.

I phrased my question as carefully as I could and asked it quietly, but I think the hat guys didn't like it anyway. They explained that a straw hat would deteriorate very rapidly without the heavy sealer it was soaked it. "So it loosens up later on?" says I. "No!" says they, looking at me as though I just drove in from Vermont. "If it cracks then the hat will be ruined," one of the experts said, just short of an exclamation point.

That was enough for me to stop with my questioning. Can any of you explain why someone would want to wear an absolutely rigid, sharp edged, plastic cowboy hat that can't fit anyone properly ... unless, unknown to me, there is some kind of head press that cowboys can use to reshape their heads to fit in those hats? (Unless, of course, they're used by bodyguards for the western equivalent of Goldfinger.)