The Spanish Ambassador to Trump Country
I set out to train my dog, but he’s been training me — to take off the cultural blinders that prevented me from enjoying a large swath of the country.
When you drive north on U.S. 93, crossing the border from Nevada into Idaho, there’s a large billboard that proudly proclaims, “Welcome to Trump Country.” Most of the time, however, there are neither signs nor borders when you enter “Trump Country.” To paraphrase a cliché, Trump Country is not a place, it’s a state of mind. And in my opinion the phrase is a poor moniker for any particular place, even those locales where nearly everyone voted for Donald Trump. I arrived at this opinion after realizing that very few people who voted for Trump actually behave like Trump. Trump voters typically aren’t greedy or power-hungry like Trump. They’re almost never as thin-skinned or as prone to lying as Trump. And they usually aren’t as persistently pessimistic as Trump. More often than not, they’re honest, decent, hardworking people, just as I like to think I am.
I didn’t always feel this way. I used to avoid places that might now be considered Trump Country. I didn’t take road trips much, preferring to fly to my destinations, which were typically major cities and often not even in the United States. Trump country truly was “flyover country” to me, and I snobbishly thought that I was successfully avoiding exposure to a dark underbelly of American society. It was only after I got a dog — a Spanish Water Dog with a thirst for activity levels that are impossible to satisfy indoors or on an airplane — that my feelings about rural America and the people who live there started to change.
An occasion that highlights my shift of perspective was a road trip that my wife and I took with our dog Paco, one sunny weekend in early March. My wife had agreed to go hunting with me and Paco for the first (and quite possibly the last) time. How I had become a hunter, after disavowing firearms for over 40 years and not eating meat for over 15 years, is a story for another blog post. The short version is that I had taken up hunting as part of my quest to reacquaint myself with a part of America that I no longer understood.
The bargain I had struck with my wife was that I would take her to Napa Valley before our hunting outing on Sunday. On Saturday we drove up to Napa to sip wine and picnic alongside tourists from all corners of the globe. We followed that with a sunset hike for Paco at a dog park that could only exist in Napa, with Irish Wolfhounds and Wirehaired Pointing Griffons rollicking amidst vineyards. To cap off the evening, we had dinner (and more wine) at a very frou-frou restaurant where my wife had once sighted Gordon Ramsey and David Beckham dining together with their families.
On Sunday morning we drove from Napa to Garcia’s Hunting Preserve, in California’s Central Valley. The rolling hills of Napa, followed by rice fields scattered with elegant egrets and great blue herons, provided no discernible indication of the cultural and attitudinal differences between the dilettantes of the place we had just left and the hard-working farmers of the region we were entering. As we pulled into the hunting preserve, I was suddenly self-conscious about the Biden/Harris bumper sticker on the back of my Toyota Highlander.
When I took up hunting I thought briefly about finding a sticker I could use to temporarily cover the Biden/Harris sticker when I went to hunting preserves and sporting clay ranges. I bought a Googan Baits sticker that I thought would make me look sufficiently outdoorsy. But it was triangular, and if I had put it on my bumper over the Biden/Harris sticker it would have left two blue edges exposed on either side. I felt like that could leave me easily exposed as an imposter. It would also look a bit tacky, and would be inconsistent with my self-image as a liberal but buttoned-down, neat, and organized sort of guy. I eventually decided it was better to leave the Biden/Harris sticker in plain view. “Stand tall, stand proud,” I told myself. My compromise was to put the Googan Bait sticker above the Biden/Harris sticker. “Moderately liberal, yet outdoorsy in a sufficiently masculine, hunter/fisherman way,” that said to the world, or so I told myself.
The parking lot at Garcia’s Hunting Preserve was much smaller than I expected. There were only three or four trucks, and Jim Garcia and his family were sitting in lawn chairs beside a small shed. I got out of the car and checked in with a blonde woman who I guessed was Jim’s daughter-in-law. It was apparent that Garcia’s was truly a family-run business. The grandkids were doing homework and assisting in counting harvested birds, dad gave instructions to hunters and handled the California Department of Fish and Wildlife paperwork, mom answered emails and phone calls, and Grandpa Jim supervised, while shooting the breeze with a buddy about recent hunting experiences.
Once we got started, our chukar hunt was somewhat uneventful, at least in comparison to my first hunt with Paco a couple months earlier. In January we had hunted for pheasant, and Paco was surprisingly good at it, especially when considering the fact that his only training for his job as a bird dog came from someone with no hunting experience. I had done my best to teach him the basics, running practice drills I had learned from books, YouTube, and an online video course. But when we got out in the field, it was Paco’s instincts that saved the day. When I told him “find the bird,” he expertly homed in on a pheasant. He flushed the first bird a bit too quickly and I missed the shot, but he happily bounded through the field and found another. Eventually I winged a pheasant and we saw it go down in deep cover, about 150 yards away. My first thought was we would never be able to find the bird, since our view of where it had landed was obscured by both trees and distance. But Paco charged forward into the brush like a man on a mission, and within a few minutes he came strutting back with the pheasant dangling from his mouth. He repeated the sequence again about an hour later, and with two pheasants in the bag, we considered the afternoon a success.
Chukars are a type of partridge and are much smaller than pheasants, which allows them hide better from nosey bird dogs. They’re about the size of a well-fed pigeon, but while a pigeon will do it’s best to get in your face and ruin your picnic in the park, a chukar will often stay hidden under a small clump of grass for hours on end. This makes them well-suited to their role as practice birds at hunting preserves.
At this point I should provide a brief sidebar to explain what hunting preserves (less formally known as hunting clubs) are, and how they work. Hunting at a hunting preserve is not real hunting. At least it’s not the type of upland bird hunting that our grandparents and 19th century ancestors would have practiced in forests and prairies across North America. In some ways the experience is like the hunting equivalent of glamping, often featuring a clubhouse where they butcher and clean birds for you after a hunt, fresh water buckets and showers for your dogs, and other modern conveniences that grandpa would have scoffed at as frivolous and unnecessary. But what really distinguishes hunting preserves from true hunting in the wild is where the birds come from and how they get to the fields. Game birds in hunting preserves are raised by farmers in large pens called “flight pens” — fenced areas with netting on top to keep the birds in and predators out, while allowing enough space for the birds to learn how to fly as they grow. The mature birds are then released into fields in the morning, before the hunters arrive with their dogs. Some hunting preserves are less regimented than this, but at the two preserves that I’ve been to, each hunting group has to stay within clearly delineated boundaries during their hunt. If your dog flushes a bird and it flies outside the boundaries of your field, it lives to see another day.
At this point you may be thinking that all of this sounds like a cruel contest akin to the Hunger Games, with birds playing the role of the district tributes, and orange-clad shotgun-toting humans the capitol game-makers. I can certainly understand this sentiment, but this is another example of how Paco has changed my perspective. Pre-Paco, I would have been disappointed to learn that the red-blooded pastime of hunting had been reduced to a game, with carefully prescribed prerequisites and rules. But with Paco as the newest member of our family, I had a renewed appreciation for safety precautions. Paco reminded me of my daughter at age four: rambunctious and seemingly ready to conquer the world, but in need of scaffolding, both to encourage success and to prevent disaster.
Bird hunting preserves provide that scaffolding, both for new hunters and new hunting dogs. To hunt at a preserve you first need to get a hunting license, which requires you to take a hunter’s education course and pass a fairly rigorous test covering not just firearm safety, but also ethics, wildlife habitat, and conservation. The preserve managers and fellow members provide additional guardrails, advice, and encouragement. Next, as anyone who has trained a dog (or raised a child) well knows, learning requires both failures and successes. Setting your dog up for success at each step in the training process is crucial to keeping him or her motivated, and this allows you to successfully shape the desired behaviors. Allowing a dog to track, flush and chase several birds in one day at a preserve can accelerate the learning process dramatically compared to learning in the wild, where you might go days without encountering a game bird. And since hunters at a preserve are not under the same psychological pressure to hit a “bag limit” of a certain number of birds, they also learn more quickly. A hunter on a preserve can calmly pass on risky shot, knowing that another opportunity is likely just around the corner. So while my long-term goal is to be able to hunt for wild birds while enjoying the natural beauty of this country, hunting preserves made the learning process much less intimidating and frustrating, both for me and for Paco.
I’ll offer one final point about hunting preserves in response to the argument I often hear (from my wife, among others) that it’s just plain cruel to kill birds. If this argument came from a vegan I would not presume to rebut it. To my vegan friends, I salute you for doing your part to end factory farming and reduce the environmental footprint of the food that you eat. You are better men, women, or non-binary individuals than I am. But for the carnivores, omnivores, “pescatarians,” and “poultry doesn’t count as meat” vegetarians who make this argument, I put forth this counterpoint. As I mentioned earlier, the birds released at preserves are raised in relatively large spaces, and they have reasonable odds of surviving well past their release date. Contrast this with the life of the factory farm-raised chicken that you might buy in a restaurant or grocery store. After growing up in cages so packed with birds that their beaks are often clipped to keep them from pecking each other to death, they are shuttled to their death on a conveyor belt with no chance of escape. My firm opinion is that birds harvested from hunting preserves live a more “natural” and humane life than most of the poultry we get from grocery stores.
After that circuitous verbal detour about hunting preserves, let me return to my story of our March road trip. At the end of the day I had shot just one chukar. Paco had flushed six of them over the course of a few hours, but either my poor marksmanship or the subconscious pressure of my wife watching had caused me to miss all but one. Since my wife had gone back to the car by the time I finally got one, I’ll go with the subconscious pressure theory.
With bird in hand, Paco and I headed back to the parking lot where the Garcia family was waiting for us. I gave Jim junior the chukar to tag for the California Department of Fish and Wildlife, and started to ask Jim senior about whether they could clean the bird for me. It was only at this point that I noticed that Jim’s camouflage-color hat was embroidered with the words “Trump 2020.” The letters were embroidered in the same camouflage colors of the hat itself, so I hadn’t noticed it earlier. It was a subtle MAGA hat, but a MAGA hat nonetheless.
My heart skipped a beat, and I started to stumble over my words. In the back of my mind I had been thinking that with a name like Garcia, they might be politically center-left like me. This was, after all, the land of Cesar Chavez, the famous labor leader and civil rights activist who had organized migrant workers and stood up to wealthy California grape growers in the 1960s and 70s. On the other hand, I also knew that many Hispanic families are socially conservative, and naturally skeptical of latte liberal political leaders who claim to have the best interests of Latinos at heart, but then mostly act to preserve the status quo once in office.
After explaining that the bird cleaning facilities were at his house about 15 minutes away, Jim asked me how many birds I had that needed to be cleaned. “Um, just one,” I said meekly. Jim paused and looked at me with steely eyes. Was he shocked that I had shot just one bird in three hours? Had he noticed my Biden/Harris bumper sticker and was now mulling over how this city-slicker liberal standing in front of him had the gall to ask him to drive 15 minutes to process just one bird?
“Maybe it’s not worth it?” I offered nervously.
“That depends,” said Jim. “Have you ever had chukar before?”
I had eaten chukar before, at Christmas a few months earlier. Two days before Christmas my daughter and I had gone on our first-ever hunt, paying the owner/handler of a trained bird dog to help us find the birds. The seven-year-old Brittany named Sky had found and pointed several pheasants and one well-hidden chukar, holding his point so staunchly that even a beginner like me couldn’t miss them. I remembered Sky’s owner saying that chukar are a real delicacy, much better than pheasant. To be honest I hadn’t noticed the difference when we cooked and ate them them on Christmas, due perhaps to my underdeveloped taste buds after rarely eating meat for 17 years. But I sensed a chance to use this knowledge to scramble out of the hole I had dug myself into.
“I have had chukar before, at Christmas. I think they’re even tastier than pheasant,” I said, in as confident a voice as I could muster.
“I think you’re right,” Jim said, his expression brightening. “Here, let me have that bird. I’ll skin it for you, behind the shed. It’ll take me two minutes.”
As Paco and I waited for Jim to return, I chatted with Jim’s family. “Are there many Spanish Water Dog breeders in California?” they asked.
“No, not yet. They’re mostly out east or in Canada,” I explained. I neglected to mention that we had flown all the way to Spain to get Paco, picking him up after a mini-vacation in Spain. I figured that information might damage my newfound rapport with these good citizens of Trump Country.
Jim returned with the freshly skinned bird, and Paco trotted up to him with his nose sniffing in the air and his tail wagging. Jim smiled at Paco, and let him take a whiff of the bird. “Be sure to rinse it off well when you get home,” Jim said, as he handed me the chukar. He had probably broken several health department rules in skinning it for me there onsite, but I was grateful for his help, as I would have had no clue how to do it myself at home.
We thanked the Garcias and said our good-byes. As we drove back home, I mulled over what I would say to Paco, if he could understand more than one or two-word sentences. I think my ode to Paco would go something like this:
“Gracias, mi amigo, for leading me on this journey to better understand America and Americans. You intuitively know that pausing to smile, and giving you a scratch behind the ears, is a better indicator of the character of a person than who they voted for, the clothes they wear, or the color of their skin. You’ve already taught me more than you’ll ever know, and I hope we’ll share many more adventures, for years to come!”
Postscript:
The chukar was indeed delicious, thanks in part to a spicy clay box chicken recipe that an Indian friend recommended when he heard I was going hunting for game birds.
