red wine. And he would wait, perfectly happy wherever we were, until I found an alternative or had another idea. He was perfectly content just to be. It didn't matter. To just be alive was the greatest irony of all. Beyond that nothing really mattered. To be alive and out in the woods or on the plains chasing fish or game was an even greater joke, on someone or something. Free meat. As long as we had enough bread and salami and wine, and Joe made sure we had enough, our "adventure" was only deepened from that base. And, and maybe that was the point, we always found something to pursue. And occasionally we poked around just enough to stumble onto the really great. The camper was always stocked with the essentials, a .22, fishing rods, shotguns, even a bow with a fishing arrow. We rarely ended up doing only what the trip started out to be. After the morning flight of doves we might fish for bass, or arrow carp, until the evening flight again. A potted grouse here, fish there, or a rabbit just at dusk. we ate our way across Washington. Or we might just sit in the shade of a tree by a river and talk. Joe, alone in the family, simply accepted me and my youthful craziness as a complete natural resource, without expectation or judgement. Joe just blew along with my adolescent whims and seemed to enjoy every minute of it. Joe always had a laugh. A meat fisherman by heart, Joe could really only catch fish when the conditions were just right for his simple trolling or plunking techniques, which was never if I was flyfishing. He knew nothing at all about that but loved to watch me learn the art, by trial and error mostly. As a hunter he was even worse, excitable and shaky. In a dove field he would take a some shots for the first half hour, downing one or two birds in a box of shells, then retire to the camper with a wave to start breakfast. In the end, I had enough energy and Washington enough fish and game that we always brought home meat to justify the trip to my father. To the old country mentality, anything that produced food was justifiable, even if it was fun. And Joe was, as I quickly came to learn, an unlimited travel ticket. If I was going with Joe, there was simply no way my father could refuse me without depriving Joe, which my father could not or would not do. In addition to being my cook and side-kick, Joe was the historian, creating perspective in the landscape wherever we went with stories of "the old days", the old towns, the old roads, the old hunting fields. He taught me to swear in three different fifty-year-old italian dialects, "just in case". And even if I didn't get the words right, the meaning was unmistakable. In italian profanity, like the Hula, the meaning is in the hands.
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