Caught in the Rain: How a Columbia Glennaker Saved Our Saturday Hike

The last Saturday in February I took Hattie to Mammoth Cave in sneakers. She is eight, she is my granddaughter, and she spends every Saturday with me while her parents work. I had a tote bag over one shoulder, a plastic bottle that had begun leaking somewhere near the trailhead, and a thin poncho folded at the bottom of the bag. About a mile in, the sky opened.

By the time we turned around her socks were wet through, a blister was starting on her left heel, and the poncho had torn on a branch. She stopped every few minutes to ask me for water. That night I sat at the kitchen table and ordered five things in one Amazon order: a pack, a pair of boots, binoculars, a bottle, and a Columbia Youth Glennaker rain jacket. They all arrived within the week, the Columbia among them.

I bought the Columbia jacket in Youth Medium, a size up on purpose, so a fleece would fit underneath on a cold morning. The sleeves run a little long on her, and that is the trade for the size up. It is a nylon shell with a hood, a zip front, two slant pockets, and it goes in the washing machine. That is the whole of it. Columbia did not line it, and I think they were right not to, because a lining is what leaves a child clammy on a mild wet day.

Then came a Saturday in late April. The rain arrived when we were about a mile from the car, and it was not drizzle. We had roughly twenty five minutes of walking to get back. Her top half stayed dry. Her pants were soaked through, because I had not thought about rain pants for a child who is still growing out of everything. She laughed the whole way back to the car.

I have thought a good deal about that poncho since. It did what a sheet of plastic does, which is keep rain off until it tears, and it tore on a branch. The Columbia is a shell with a hood and a zip, and it has made it through a season of branches, a limestone wall she leans against, and being stuffed into a bag while still damp.

In February she cried on the walk back to the car. In April she laughed the whole mile.

That is where it lives now. Rolled up in the main compartment of her pack, on every Mammoth Cave walk, whether the forecast says anything or not. It takes up almost nothing in there. I have stopped checking the weather on Friday night, not because I trust Kentucky weather, but because the jacket is already in the bag.

The two slant pockets have mattered more than I expected. Hattie keeps a folded leaf and the stub of a pencil in one of them, and I pretend not to notice her reaching for it mid walk. The zip front she has managed herself from the first Saturday. The hood is the weak spot. Without a hat underneath it sits loose on her head, and on a windy day it slides back until she is walking with one hand holding it down.

Two things it does not do. It gives no warmth on its own, which is the reason for the size up and the reason a fleece goes under it in March. And on a warm rainy afternoon it goes clammy inside after a while, the way every nylon shell I have ever handled does. On days like that she peels it off the moment we stop moving, and I do not argue with her about it.

On ordinary drizzle days, the kind we get most of, she wears it open over a sweatshirt and the rain simply does not reach her. That is a smaller thing than a downpour and it is the reason the jacket earns its place in the bag. Most wet Saturdays are drizzle. You plan for the ordinary day, and the one big rain is the day it saves you.

What I'd Tell You If We Were Sitting at My Kitchen Table

I would tell you to buy it a size up. I would tell you to keep it in the pack and not in the coat closet, because the jacket you have with you is the only one that counts. I would tell you plainly that the jacket is not the whole job. Rain pants are the gap in our setup, I know it is a gap, and I have been putting it off since April.

I would also tell you that a child who is dry from the waist up is a child who keeps walking, and a child who keeps walking is a child who notices things. Hattie's journal is at thirty one birds since March. Not one of those entries happened in a downpour. All of them happened on walks we finished. And do not wait on a forecast. Put the shell in the bag in March and leave it there until the cold comes.