Holidays in Heck (12 page)

Still, I departed the Venice Biennale with joy in my heart—partly because I was glad to leave, but more so from learning that all the awful people whose oeuvres I had just endured have something to keep them busy. In another era such crackpots would have been excluded by sheer lack of skill and knowledge from any involvement with the fine arts, the way Hitler was. He retreated to grubby beer halls, compensating for his thwarted ambitions by concocting insane demagoguery. It wouldn't happen today. Hitler's complete artistic incompetence would find a welcome home at the Biennale.

It could be that all awful dictators are frustrated artists—Mao with his poetry and Mussolini with his monuments. Stalin was once a journalistic hack, and I can personally testify to how frustrated they are. Pol Pot left a very edgy photo collection behind. And Osama seems quite interested in video.

Stupid art saps stupid ideology. You could see it in the Chinese pavilion. One installation was a scrap metal and tin-foil contraption that a Chinese farmer built believing it could fly him to the moon. The farmer was included in the installation. Then there was a BVD of a crowded city street. Every now and then somebody the crowd couldn't see shouted loudly. Members of the crowd would look around as though a crazy person was loose, then go about their business. And China's supposedly most talented young architect, Yung Ho Chang, made a big, long tangle of bamboo poles. This was in no way as impressive, or for that matter as intimidating, as the bamboo scaffolding surrounding each construction site for the topless towers of Shanghai. If national pavilions are anything to go by, the fearsome Communist juggernaut of Asia is headed toward being an Iceland of ideological power.

And what of the
demos
who fall for demagoguery? Venice is certainly full of these this time of year. Hosts and swarms of them come in a state of idiocy evident in their dress and bodily form—so much so that a certain well-known span to the ducal palace should be renamed the Bridge of Thighs. But the masses were giving the Biennale a good leaving-alone. The few visitors to the pavilions and exhibition halls were people who looked like they make what it looked like they liked, or will make some when the drugs wear off. It is a hopeful sign for worldwide democracy that even the dull, vapid summer tourists of Venice are too smart for art.

Brays Island Plantation, South Carolina, February 2006

M
rs. O. is afraid of birds—not terrified, not “chicken,” as it were, and not exactly phobic. She just considers birds to be air lizards, icky velociraptors in bad boas. The Galápagos trip with George and Laura would have been a misery for her. When we were looking at the Lindblad Expeditions brochure, Mrs. O.'s reaction was, “The blue-footed boobies waddle
right up to you
? Ugh!” I'm not saying she got pregnant with our youngest child, Buster, just to avoid the Galápagos cruise, but . . .

I, on the other hand, love birds. I spend a lot of money every year and travel thousands of miles for my love of birds. I trudge across acres of muddy fields, push through tangles of forest underbrush, and hunker in swamps at dawn simply to find birds—and kill them. Call it tough love.

Every good marriage is a compromise. For years, Mrs. O. displayed no nervous symptoms about mallards in the freezer, as long as the gutting and plucking had been done somewhere other than her kitchen (or laundry room, as I had occasion to be reminded). And I didn't go after pheasants in South Dakota on our wedding anniversary. Then one day Mrs. O. said, “I want to learn to shoot. I want to go bird hunting.” Why? A more recently married person would have asked that aloud. But if I suddenly said, “I want to learn to empty the dishwasher. I want to get up in the middle of the night when the kids cry,” Mrs. O. wouldn't check the medicine chest to see what I'd been taking until later. She's say, “Great!”

I said, “Great!” But I was worried. Mrs. O. wanted to learn to shoot. I mentally reviewed my recent behavior. I was pretty sure she was using “shoot” as an intransitive verb. I didn't think I detected an elision of “you” at the end of the sentence. Maybe Mrs. O. had been listening to me. It's always worrisome when a spouse does that. I'd been telling her that the way to get over her fear of birds was to go hunting. “Shoot at them,” I advised, “and after you miss the little SOB's three or four times in a row, you wont' be scared, you'll be angry.” Did I really want an angry wife?

Or maybe something had happened on a recent trip to London, when I'd dragged Mrs. O. to the Holland & Holland store. While I'd been drooling over shotguns, perhaps she'd realized that the field sports present a whole new head-totoe wardrobe opportunity. A flash of pain ran through my Visa card.

Also, I was concerned that if Mrs. O. tried bird hunting, she'd end up hating it. I privately suspect that men and women are different. They don't always enjoy the same things
or enjoy them in the same ways. No doubt, when our children came along, Mrs. O. had similar anxieties about gender-based tastes and inclinations. Probably she was secretly relieved and surprised that I didn't eat the kids. I thought I'd have to make bird hunting somehow posh, festive, and feminine. How would she, I asked myself, go about convincing me that changing diapers and singing lullabies at four AM is as much of a good time as sitting shivering and soaked in a duck blind at about the same time of day?

Actually, with proper application of Jack Daniel's, either can be fun. But women, in my experience, are not quite so easily convinced that they are enjoying themselves. I called my friends Perry and Sally Harvey and wangled an invitation to Brays Island, a swell quail plantation in South Carolina.

Brays Island is 5,500 acres of tidewater landscape on the Pocotaligo River not far from Hilton Head. It's pretty much how I picture heaven, with, in the first place, a membership too exclusive to include me. The vast woods and fields and the miles of waterways and marshes are full of wildlife. Besides the quail there's shooting for Hungarian partridge, chukar, pheasants, doves, ducks, turkey, and deer. Largemouth bass lurk in the freshwater ponds. The Pocotaligo is replete with redfish, black drum, and flounder. In the nearby blue water are sea trout, stripers, bluefish, and tarpon. If these pleasures should pall there are skeet, trap, sporting clays, an eighteen-hole private golf course, tennis, a pool, a twenty-five-stall boarding stable, and forty miles of equestrian trails. The weather is admittedly less like paradise and more like the opposite during the summer, and Brays probably has more gunfire and dead animals than heaven does. Maybe it's the heaven that dogs go to, which, truthfully, is the one I'd prefer. The plantation has forty bird dogs, in kennels larger
and cleaner than my old bachelor apartment ever was. I suppose Brays isn't heaven for quail and redfish, although, on my previous visits, these critters seemed immortal enough when I would blast or cast.

I usually hunt in places that are, frankly, more purgatorial. But I figured that Mrs. O. has years to learn about bird season accommodations of the “Fur Seasons” and “Itch Carleton” kind. No need to introduce her immediately to the toilet facilities of an Arkansas duck shack. She doesn't have to know, yet, that the most productive woodcock cover in New Hampshire is an old town dump.

The entrance to Brays is a mile-long avenue of white board fences without a paint flake or knothole stain in sight. The meadows are so well-tended that only the presence of real stable grooms instead of the cast-iron kind distinguishes the fields from suburban lawns. Ancient live oaks rise, arboreal castles with green baileys, green keeps, green crenellations, and—to strain a metaphor—heraldic banners of Spanish moss. This doesn't look like a place to shoot birds. This looks like a place to marry off Scarlett O'Hara, except without the liberal guilt. General Sherman's troops, on their flamboyant (in the root sense of the word) march to the sea, burned the original Brays Plantation Manor and distributed some of the plantation land to emancipated slaves. Instead of a ticky-tacky Tara of doubtful provenance, the main house at Brays is a handsome white-brick Federalist-revival spread built with modern plumbing and laborsaving kitchen appliances in the 1930s by Francis B. Davis Jr. of the firmly Yankee United States Rubber Company. The Davis home has been converted to guest quarters, dining rooms, and a bar for the Brays Island members. And (heaven again) the
food is worth dying for. Only one thing was wrong with Brays Island on our first morning there—pouring rain.

“Darn,” said Mrs. O. “We'll have to go shopping.”

“Fortunately,” I said, “I brought an extra pair of rain pants. Put a hand towel inside your Barbour coat collar so the water doesn't run down the back of your neck. We'll have to kick the birds up a bit. They won't be flying very well in this weather. Don't shoot at them if they just hop; you don't want to hit the dogs. And don't worry about rattlesnakes when we're stomping around in the brush; when it's chilly and wet like this they're not very active. Let's get going.”

“Why?” said Mrs. O.

And I have to admit, she had me there. I thought about all the time I've spent hunting upland birds in inclement weather, usually getting skunked. “So we can be wet and uncomfortable,” I said. “And not have very good shooting and probably catch cold.”

“Are you crazy?” said Mrs. O.

We went shopping. The nearby town of Beaufort, South Carolina, is very cute and quaint. It has a large, large number of antique stores. As near as I can tell, shopping is, for women, what hunting is for men. Except that they never get to use the remote control, battery-operated electric-shock dog collar on misbehaving store owners who are supposed to be helping them hunt for antiques. Also, as far as I'm concerned, a lot of antiques look like somebody's shot them already.

Then we toured Brays with Sally and Perry Harvey. The former cattle ranch was sold to the Pingree family in the 1960s. They turned it into a development centered on hunting and fishing. The land-use concept was based on an idea of Frank Lloyd Wright's. Each of the 325 house sites is a
one-acre circle surrounded by common land. The sites are screened from one another. Membership in Brays Island is limited to lot owners, and the members own the plantation.

A few sites were still for sale. One looked out over the river toward a bald eagle sanctuary in the distance. I could see Mrs. O. eyeing the spot with a hunter's—a house hunter's—rapt gaze. Imaginary swing sets and fictive bikes and Zip scooters were beginning to materialize in the rain.

“I came down here from Aspen to visit a friend,” Perry told me. “And I fell in love with the place. I was out all day, fishing in the morning and shooting quail in the afternoon. When I got back that night, Sally had bought a lot.”

“Sally and I are going over to look at the new tennis courts,” said Mrs. O.

“And I'm sticking right with you,” I said.

The rain stopped about four, and Mrs. O. took a shooting lesson from the manager of the Brays shooting club, Greg Freeman. I stepped aside on the theory that spouses should never get pedagogical with each other. We've been through this at home with Mrs. O. trying to teach me to unload the dishwasher. Greg went through the rudiments of gun safety and put Mrs. O. on the No. 4 pad on the skeet field. He launched a clay pigeon from the high house. She missed. Greg stepped forward and spoke to Mrs. O. briefly. He launched another speedy pass shot from the high house. She broke it. And the next one. And the next.

After forty years of shooting I get a hit on No. 4 high house about as often as Ozzy Osbourne gets one on the Billboard top forty.

“I've noticed this before,” I said to Greg. “Women are good at learning to use a shotgun. Even if they've never shot before, it only takes a little bit of instruction. Why is that?”

“Women listen,” said Greg.

And I try to listen too, except after forty years of shooting I don't hear very well—as I've explained more than once when I didn't get up in the middle of the night when the kids were crying. “You hear the little ‘ping' from the microwave OK,” said Mrs. O., “if burritos are defrosting.”

When Mrs. O. had rendered the clay pigeon a pretty much extinct species I asked her, “What did Greg tell you?”

“He told me to put my weight forward and quit thinking about it. He said, ‘Lower your IQ to fifty.' ” No wonder men don't listen. My IQ has been down there since puberty, and if I put any more weight forward I'm going to have to give up on Brooks Brothers and get that artist, Christo, who draped the Pont Neuf in bedsheets, to wrap my gut as an art project.

The next morning was cool and bright. Brays Island has a picturesque mule wagon that carried Perry, Sally, Mrs. O., and me into the quail fields. The guides and the dogs followed, less picturesquely, in pickup trucks. We could have ridden horses to the covers, if we'd wanted to be over-the-top picturesque.