 
I grew up a child of the oil and gas business in New Orleans. My father worked his entire life in the oil service support industry in South Louisiana, a business peppered with hard-drinking, fun-loving outdoor types, and incentives that included much more than a fair share of sporting trips. When I was a teenager we fished for marlin in the Virgin Islands, ran with the bulls in Pamplona, dragged in tuna off the shores of Eleuthera, and bird hunted more regularly than I did homework, it seemed. The arrival of duck season elicited the same anticipation and excitement that Christmas morning did for most “normal” kids, but bird hunting of any variety quickly grew to rival that early love of duck hunting. Getting Hooked In the late seventies my dad organized a father-and-son dove hunting trip to north central Mexico, which at the time was the gringo destination for high-volume bird shoots. It became a tradition that lasted a decade. These trips had the added appeal of guaranteed time swilling tequila in one of the border towns while we waited for the Mexican authorities to clear our arrival, which could regularly take anywhere from two to twelve hours, depending on their “motivation.” It was during these years that I began to recognize my dad as good company rather than an ogre, and to understand the trips to be as much about camaraderie as about the kill. Over the decade or so that we made the annual sojourn to Mexico, though the fun never waned, the bird population did. Every American bird hunter with a disposable income and the slightest touch of adventure seemed to be heading to the Rio Grande Valley, and while the pockets of the Federales swelled, the bird population suffered visibly. Rides from the camp to the fields along insanely poor roads went from half hour to two and a half hours, and the “tolls” came more frequently. The trips suffered a steady demise through attrition until they finally wheezed their final death rattle in the mid-eighties. After a hiatus of a couple of years, Dad called one day to say that he was considering putting a trip together to Argentina. The word from a couple of friends who had been way south was that the dove hunting in South America was beyond anything we could ever dream of in Mexico, so Dad gathered the remnants of the old group and a new trip was born. Since 1996 we have been a half dozen times, and the shooting only gets better: A hunter shooting at a relatively leisurely pace with an accuracy of 65 percent can easily bag eight hundred to a thousand birds in a day. And it doesn’t take much of this kind of shooting, combined with an extremely affordable price tag, to quickly get addicted. September 2006 was our most recent trip. The group, largely from New Orleans, was reassembling for the first time since Hurricane Katrina. The storm had caused the cancellation of the 2005 trip, so our gathering shortly after the storm’s one-year anniversary was somewhat bittersweet, but joyful nonetheless. We rendezvoused, as usual, at the Miami airport, a particularly loathsome cattle barn of a launching point for international travel. A couple of drinks and a plate of airport food later, we were sandwiched into a South American carrier for the ten-hour flight to Santiago, Chile. As much as I have difficulty with the claustrophobic nature of air travel these days, being squeezed into a seat next to my dad makes it tolerable and, with a couple more drinks, makes for interesting conversation as well. There are invariably a rambling lesson on family history, the occasional questioning about personal and business finances — and, without exception, observations on and critique of anyone in our general vicinity who does not pass his particular Republican muster. This trip, though, the conversation stayed largely on New Orleans. The City that Care Forgot The city is suffering a grotesque lack of local leadership combined with neglect at the federal level that is inspiring talk reminiscent of that of the 1860s. I am involved in a rebuilding project that has occupied every bit of time I have had in the past year, and I have spent a disturbing amount of time making the three-hundred-and-fifty-mile trek from my home in Oxford, Mississippi, to NOLA and back, sometimes as frequently as twice a week. A group of us, organized by the Southern Foodways Alliance in Oxford, are helping a ninety-year-old friend rebuild a twenty-seat fried chicken joint in one of the worst neighborhoods in the city. My father’s line of questioning revolves around the same frustrated nexus, which is “What is the real point of what you are doing?” Dad has spent more than his fair share of afternoons at the site as my sole lackey, helping with demolition and framing, and so he knows precisely how arduous the job has been. His questioning embodies the more prevalent attitude in New Orleans: We are on our own; there isn’t going to be any cavalry; the problems we had before the storm are getting worse; how do we start to fix this, and what should the priorities be? He and I see the answers from completely different angles, as we always have, but as adults our differences tend more and more to breed respect rather than the contempt they did in my younger days. For me, the answers to his questions are very simple: every bit we can do to help the community helps the city as a whole. Dad, the ex-CEO of a worldwide marine-based oil support company, sees, as most dyed-in-the-wool Republicans do, the answers from the top down. We arrive in Santiago bleary-eyed in the early hours of Friday morning, and we begin the regular exercise of beating our poor Mexican street Spanish into shape. It always starts with someone asking how to say “aspirin,” then “coffee,” and finally “plane to Córdoba.” A crowded two-hour flight on a second South American carrier and we begin our descent into Argentina. New Country, Same Old Gringos Córdoba, Argentina, sits flatly on the Pampas, a bustling good-size town where it is hard to tell what actually happens. The countryside is beautiful in a way that is difficult to verbalize: pastoral yet hardscrabble, slightly impoverished but manicured with pride. The faces of its people are etched with the story of a challenged life, and every time I go abroad I am invariably washed over with a thin layer of guilt for being another American well-heeled enough to come a continent’s distance for sport killing. (This lasts exactly as long as it takes to get those first two shells in my shotgun and snap it shut.) Our outfitter is magnificent. We are met the moment we gather our luggage and guns, and are whisked through Argentine customs and immigration with an efficiency that should be a bureaucratic model worldwide. We pack into a pair of fifteen-passenger vans, brimming with our weaponry and gear, and are taken on a short drive through town and into the country, where we will shoot for the afternoon. We arrive to an unbelievable lunch cooked over an open fire under a canopy of low-hanging fruit trees. Linen tablecloths, rustic hand-carved wooden plates, and crystal are the daily setting for the two-or-so-hour lunch served by an attentive and extremely adept commissary crew. Lunch quickly becomes a high point of the trip. Each day a bacchanalian spread is laid out: a selection of grilled local sausages straight off the fire with bowls of coarse ground mustard and fresh chimichurri; a green salad; a quiche modeled after blue-ribbon state-fair apple pie filled with some manner of roasted vegetable or ground meat; and finally a selection of grilled meats. One day we are treated to skirt steak and chicken thighs, the next to pork ribs and lamb loin. The real beauty of the meal is that there is nothing overreaching about any of it, though I am amazed daily that these guys produce, over an open mesquite fire, a quiche better than I have ever had anywhere. I understand from experience the inherent obstacles of cooking over a campfire: I spent a particularly whiskey-laced evening doing just that with a pair of outdoor writers who were researching a piece on campfire cooking. It was surprisingly hard work — especially considering that I cook every day for a living — but that night I was all thumbs. We managed to bring some edible victuals from the flames, but with nothing approaching the ease and grace the guys in Argentina exhibited — daily. Everything here comes off the grill with little more than a thin veneer of salt, black pepper, and garlic powder, and arrives at the table perfectly cooked, without exception. Momentarily revitalized, I am ready for the first afternoon’s hunt. |
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