Towel Day 2011 or Dude, What's With the Towel?

I was a gangly sixth grader when my dad took me to Captain Blue Hen Comics and introduced me to the prodigious talent that is Douglas Adams. I'd told him earlier in the day that I wanted to read a new author and he knew right away what the correct choice would be. We piled into his dark green Ford pickup and made the ten minute drive, the death rattles of the ancient muffler sending vibrations through the floorboards and into my sneakers as we drove.

We walked into the store, passing wall upon wall of comic books, and made our way to the back where they kept the books. My dad walked straight to the 'A' section and after a moment, plunked a copy of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy into my eager hands. I looked uncertainly at the cover. A man's hand, thumb extended in the classic "Hitcher's Pose", a green orb with arms sticking its tongue out at me.

I arched my eyebrow, adopting that look of supernatural disbelief that only insurance attorneys and adolescents can pull off.

"Trust me," he said. "And don't panic."

I took his advice and bought the book. I carried it with me everywhere. I devoured it in two sittings. Then I proceeded to read it again. A "concerned teacher" (who was clearly living in his own Long, Dark Tea Time of the Soul) at the private school I attended forbade me from bringing the book into his class and encouraged me to throw it away with great haste as it was written by an atheist, the word atheist uttered in the same sort of voice one might expect to hear the neighbor next door use to describe the time when Ted Bundy, the Unabomber, and Boy George crashed their twelve year old nephew's birthday party.

I didn't listen.

Twenty-five years after my first reading, Hitchhiker's still makes me laugh. Over the years Douglas Adams, very much true to form, gave us a great trilogy...in five books no less. Each one a continuation of a most intelligent, bizarre, hysterical story.

Adams died on May 11, 2001 of a heart attack. He was forty-nine years old. Two weeks later a group of his fans declared that May twenty-fifth was to be called Towel Day. Fans of Adams were to bring their favorite towel with them wherever they went. They were to bring it and keep it close, to work or to leisure activities, for the duration of the entire day. They have repeated this practice every May twenty-fifth since that day, and in ever increasing numbers. If you are sitting there wondering 'Why towels?' it is clear you have not read any of Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's books. At this point I suggest you get yourself out of your chair, throw on some shoes, run a comb through your hair, grab your car keys (pay no attention to that big yellow bulldozer in your front yard), and procure the books for yourself immediately.

I will be displaying my towel proudly today. I hope that you will be as well. And should you find yourself suddenly confronted by an infinite number of monkeys who want to talk to you about this script for Hamlet they've worked out...well then just keep in mind the two magical words fixed on the cover of the most wholly remarkable book in all the known universe...

For those of you still wondering. "Yeah, but...why TOWELS?" I leave you with the words of the man himself, from chapter three of the first in the "trilogy of five", The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy:

The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy has a few things to say on the subject of towels. A towel, it says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitchhiker can have. Partly it has great practical value — you can wrap it around you for warmth as you bound across the cold moons of Jaglan Beta; you can lie on it on the brilliant marble‐sanded beaches of Santraginus Ⅴ, inhaling the heady sea vapours; you can sleep under it beneath the stars which shine so redly on the desert world of Kakrafoon; use it to sail a mini raft down the slow heavy river Moth; wet it for use in hand‐to‐hand‐combat; wrap it round your head to ward off noxious fumes or to avoid the gaze of the Ravenous Bugblatter Beast of Traal (a mindbogglingly stupid animal, it assumes that if you can't see it, it can't see you — daft as a bush, but very ravenous); you can wave your towel in emergencies as a distress signal, and of course dry yourself off with it if it still seems to be clean enough.

More importantly, a towel has immense psychological value. For some reason, if a strag (strag: non-hitch hiker) discovers that a hitch hiker has his towel with him, he will automatically assume that he is also in possession of a toothbrush, face flannel, soap, tin of biscuits, flask, compass, map, ball of string, gnat spray, wet weather gear, space suit etc., etc. Furthermore, the strag will then happily lend the hitch hiker any of these or a dozen other items that the hitch hiker might accidentally have “lost”. What the strag will think is that any man who can hitch the length and breadth of the galaxy, rough it, slum it, struggle against terrible odds, win through, and still knows where his towel is, is clearly a man to be reckoned with.

Hence a phrase that has passed into hitchhiking slang, as in “Hey, you sass that hoopy Ford Prefect? There’s a frood who really knows where his towel is.” (Sass: know, be aware of, meet; hoopy: really together guy; frood: really amazingly together guy.)

Stay hoopy, my friends.