I haven’t read Douglas Adams’ brilliant and genuinely funny sci-fi parody novel The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy in years, but I still remember large passages of it — no doubt because my memories have been fortified by hearing them dramatized in various media formats over the years. Still, I can’t say that I remember chunks of any other books I read in high school, and that is probably reason enough for me to pass along the news about this somewhat silly gesture of tribute to Adams, who left us unexpectedly five years ago. I think Doug would’ve appreciated the absurdity of people carrying around towels in his honor…

(Incidentally, if you haven’t read the Hitchhiker’s book, listened to the radio show, or seen the TV series or last year’s rather disappointing movie, you may be wondering about the significance of the towel. Go below the fold for the explanation…)

From The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams:

A towel, [the guide] says, is about the most massively useful thing an interstellar hitch hiker 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 mindboggingly 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.