There’s something oddly disconcerting about packing up a bunch of shotguns and traveling halfway around the world to kill things. As I enter the Memphis airport with two 20-gauge over-and-unders as non- chalantly as if I were carrying a box of cannoli or a baby stroller, I realize I have maybe been at this a little too long. Actually, there’s a perverse satisfaction to busting open the hard case at the ticket counter to show the TSA that your guns aren’t loaded, if only because you can walk into an airport with an ostensibly unloaded weapon when you can’t take a bottle of water or tube of toothpaste through security anymore. (Note to self: guns, good; bottled water, bad.) Plus, it’s always fun to know you will get a wider swath cut by other passengers because someone behind you in line is thinking you are a complete psycho. (Note to reader: Macho as the whole “guns in the airport” thing might seem, this is not a good way to meet women — at least not the kind you want to spend any sober time with.)

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.