The Subaru Cowboy
The existential dilemma of buying my first cowboy hat
On the one hand, buying my first cowboy hat was uncomplicated and painless. Nearly eight years ago, I saw one I liked at a ranch supply store in Silverthorne, Colorado. I tried it on. It fit. I looked in the mirror and thought it looked pretty good, so I took a selfie and texted it to my wife. (Immediate response: “No.”) I decided to buy it anyway, because that’s what cranky old husbands do. I put it on the passenger seat of the car for the drive home to Granby.
On the other hand, sometimes a cigar isn’t just a cigar.
I was born in Alabama, raised in Pennsylvania, and moved west in 1985. I’ve seen a lot of the world before and since then, from North Africa to the Arctic Circle to Soviet Siberia to the Philippines, plus nearly all of the states this side of the Mississippi. But as soon as I made the American West my home, I knew this was where I belonged.
Why, you might ask? It’s complicated—and has little to do with lifestyle, weather, or Western mythology. It has to do with something deeper and more intrinsic: the freedom to be who you really are. Someone once described the West as a place created when a great force picked up the United States by the East Coast and shook it. People who were unattached, unstable, or willing to risk letting go found their way here. As a result, many of the Westerners I admire are people who navigated unusual paths to success and happiness, even if it meant doing things differently than anyone had done before. Here, we’re all free to pursue dreams and schemes without regard to reality as everyone else has defined it.
To me, that Western ethos is palpable, like a smell or a taste or the phantom tickle of something that brushes against your skin. It’s why I believe the American West persists as a boundless frontier, and why it seems populated by so many outstanding inventors and entrepreneurs and artists and athletes, as well as grifters and con men. The cowboy embodies the idea that you can live honestly and honorably by your own code. I think everyone aspires to that on some level, no matter whether you’re a bureaucrat, an accountant, an artist, a chef, or a musician.
Or an aging writer.
Problem is, a cowboy hat is so iconic that simply putting one on opens faux cowboys like me to the risk of ridicule. There’s real danger in presenting an image that could crumble into dust the moment someone asks, “So, do you actually have a horse?”
Before I left the ranch store parking lot, I posted the selfie of me wearing the hat on Facebook with the simple caption: “My wife says no.”
When I arrived home an hour later, I checked Facebook again. The responses to the photo couldn’t have been more emphatic, or polarizing, had I posted a picture of myself arm in arm with Jeffrey Epstein.
Many joined my wife firmly in the “no” camp. “I support her,” wrote our daughter’s former nanny from Oregon. “Your wife is a smart woman,” wrote a pal since grammar school. Another friend from San Diego declared I was “all hat, no cattle,” while another suggested I get “a timeshare on some cows.” A sarcastic niece wrote: “It totally goes with the fanny pack and the Subaru Outback.” One post included a reference to the Village People, and another to Robert James Waller’s “The Bridges of Madison County.” A concerned friend in Southern California cautioned: “Obey the hat or the wife? Choose wisely.”
Other comments were more encouraging: “Cool cat in a hat.” “You rock that Western look!” “It seems a natural progression. Don’t fight it.” God forgive me, but I gravitated to the positive comments from several women upon whom I’ve had distant, decades-long crushes, deluding myself with the idea that their kind words were about me rather than the hat. “HAWT,” opined one. “Definitely, yes,” wrote another.
It was difficult to parse the response from my longtime friend Pat Kiger, who simply posted a photo of Motörhead’s Lemmy Kilmister. In his black cowboy hat, Lemmy looked like a cross between Richard Petty in his prime and a wanted poster for a Texas Klansman. That post prompted a question I hadn’t considered: What if the me my new hat projected turned out to be much different than the one I intended? A distant memory surfaced, Kurt Vonnegut’s cautionary words in the novel Mother Night: “We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be.”
My wife shook her head when I stepped from the Subaru and struck a Marlboro Man pose, her face registering about the same level of contempt as if I’d rolled up drunk with a carload of hookers. Naturally, I began to second-guess my decision. By then I’d lived in the West for nearly four decades — admittedly, most of it in Southern California — but was owning a cowboy hat a threshold I was not yet qualified to cross? What had I done, really, to earn this hat? Did my impulsive indulgence forever mark me as a hopeless poser?
The doubts sent me into the closet, literally, where I hid the hat on a top shelf. Before I exiled it, though, I peeked at the hat’s label. The “Dakota” model was 100 percent wool and designed by a company in Sulphur Springs, Texas. I found the authenticity of that comforting. But the next line on the tag—“Made in China”—tipped my already-rattled confidence into a nosedive. The accusatory voice in my head was clear: Poser!
I tossed the hat up and out of reach. Weeks passed. It sat untouched until one day my wife went out for a few hours. I decided to take a chance. I pulled the hat down, put it on, and headed out for a walk with the dog.
Our hike took us along the ranch roads near our house, during which time I felt absurdly conspicuous, as if I’d placed Queen Elizabeth’s tiara on my head for a trip to the grocery store. We eventually passed a neighbor, who stopped his car and rolled down the window to chat. I braced myself, but he offered no comment about my headgear. So I prompted him.
“I’m trying out a new hat.”
His expression said, So? What he actually said was, “Looks good.”
Emboldened, I began wearing the hat on more solo hikes, all without incident. Maybe I’d come to embody the Westerner I’ve been all along? By the time our daughter visited that Christmas, I was confident enough to wear it on a family stroll along the Colorado River headwaters. I paired it with my barn coat which, if you squint, looks kind of rugged and manly. But I also was wearing hiking boots. It felt like an incomplete thought. And adding cowboy boots might just push me all the way into poser parody.
So I put the hat back in the closet, where it has remained for years. Maybe someday I’ll screw up my courage, get the cowboy boots to complete the look, and just go for it. If I ever do, you’ll probably hear my wife’s eyes rolling. But as of now, living among ranchers who really do have horses and cattle, I’m still not convinced I have a right to wear my hat. And if I do, I’ll gladly step out of their way as they pass.
Journalist Martin J. Smith is the author of five previous novels and five nonfiction books. Open Road Media will publish his sixth novel, “27 Knots,” in Fall 2026. This essay is adapted from one that first appeared in the July 2018 issue of Denver’s 5280 magazine.
My question is, what does a cowboy hat do? If it’s just to keep the sun out of your eyes, and the rain off your head so it runs down your back, then go for it. It’s clearly not to keep your ears warm. I looked up why cowboys wear cowboy hats and apparently it also keeps your head warm. But, I agree with your female friends, it does look kinda cool. And I wouldn’t worry about posing. Not everyone who wears yoga pants does yoga.
Dude, things evolve. Wear that hat whenever the hell you feel like it.