Humberto Fontova - The Hellpig Hunt: A Hunting Adventure in the Wild Wetlands at the Mouth of the Mississippi River by Middle Aged Lunatics Who Refuse to Grow Up

H ad Dante seen it, wrote Frances Trollope of the place, he might have drawn images of another hell from its horrors! Indeed, in Dantes Upper Hell, the lustful, gluttonous, and avaricious are blown by strong winds, stung by insects, and put to useless labor. Dante described both our trip and us pretty accurately, but he left out: chomped by alligators, menaced by poisonous serpents, pursued by brutal game wardens, blinded and stranded by hellacious fog, stomped by a four-hundred-pound wild boar, chased by a cloud of deadly poison gas, and enticed by exotic dancers.

We spent our Christmas vacation in Hells very gizzardvoluntarily. This book follows the cast of The Helldivers Rodeo on a three-day hunting-fishing-boozing trip to the wild wetlands at the mouth of the Mississippi River, one hundred miles below New Orleans.

Heres a three-day orgy of blood-lust, booze, and lechery; a three-day indulgence of our primal passions in primitive splendor, free from the finger-wagging of pecksniffs, the scowls of moralists and busybodies, the nagging of wives. Three days of shameless boozing, of blasting ducks, of arrowing deer, of chasing (and getting chased by) huge wild boar, of jerking fish from the water, and of drunken campfire reminiscing about the magnificent disco era, our glory years.

Males have only a brief period of exhilarating liberty between control by their mothers and control by their wives, writes Camille Paglia in Sex, Art and American Culture. Indeed! And that was the disco era for us. Just off the nest, in our early college years, no thought of jobs or familyhell, not even a majorjust pure partying.

A colorful crew live, work, and play down here in the Mississippi Delta. This area of Louisiana was always a legal limbo, a no-mans land where pirates, smugglers, cutthroats, power-mad political bosses, sleazy politicians, assorted wastrels, and outlaws traditionally fled for cover or carved out little empires, duchies, and hideouts. Convicted murderer Jack Henry Abbott, author of In the Belly of the Beast and Norman Mailers pin-up boy, was finally snared by the authorities down here in 1985 after escaping prison. Hed just returned from a ten-day stint working on an offshore oil platform.

Jean Lafitte started the tradition that continued through the notorious Leander Perez (they even have properly banana-republic sounding names down here), and it is kept alive by scores of drug smugglers and poachers to this day. Plaquemines parish political boss Leander Perez scoffed at George Wallace as a softie and a sellout and prepared the dungeons in an abandoned Spanish fort at the mouth of the Mississippi, not far from our campsite, for any Yankee communists and anarchists who dared set foot in his parish (we have parishes in Louisiana, not counties) during the civil rights struggles. Perez even climbed atop the fort and posedwith a defiant Pattonesque scowl and clutching a shotgunfor the local papers.

In his defiance of the feds, Leander Perez brought even Louisiana Governor Earl Long (Hueys brother) to the edge of apoplexy. Come on, Leander! Uncle Earl bellowed at the perpetually scowling Caudillo in 1961 after a particularly stupid outburst. Whatcha gonna do, man? The feds have the Bomb!

Some game wardens down here still owe allegiance to the Perez dynasty. Family and friends get away with slaughter, but woe to any outsiders (us) who try anything cute.

Actually, Frances Trollope didnt know the half of it. She was on her way to New Orleans with lips curled and snoot raised, observing these fetid expanses of tropical brush, squishy mud-flats, and decaying slop from the comfort of a ship. She couldnt see (or feel, or swat, or inhale) the clouds of stinging insects. She never saw the snakes and alligators crawling through the putrid slime. She never got bogged to her waist in its vicious quagmires while stalking a deer with bow and arrow. She never baked, steamed, or sweltered in its foul miasma.

This expanse of prime duck-, deer-, and hog-hunting ground remains surprisingly less than crowded winter long. Its a pain to get here, a pain to travel through, and a bitch to hunt. Primitive camping, they call it. No roads, RV hook-ups, or even trails in this watery wilderness. The nearest road ends twenty-five miles away. Get home from three days of this camping and dont expect a big hug from the wife. Prepare to hear her screech and flee from the bristly, smelly, mud-spattered apparition.

Primitive, indeedhence, still pristine. Even better, heres the very tip of the Mississippi Flyway funnel, Americas main thoroughfare for migrating waterfowl. For millennia, the Mississippi and its tributaries have served as a network of highways for migrating ducks. A third of North Americas wildfowl winter in these marshes every year.

They find the place, to quote Robert Palmer, simply irresistible, and with good reason. Maps show how Louisiana juts out into the Gulf below the coasts of Texas and Mississippi. A little sliver of a peninsula bordering the river below New Orleans juts out even further. That was the rivers doing, at least until the levees shackled it. For ten thousand years, this father of all waters, as the Indians called it, whipped back and forth across the landscape like a huge (but somewhat lethargic) water wiggle, depositing its fertile cargo of sediment. The river robs Peter to pay Paul, in a sense. Iowas loss was our gain, until the levees went up, that is. Most of Louisiana below Interstate 12 thus sprouted. In geological terms, something sprouts in ten thousand years.

These fertile mudflats sprout in thick orchards of prime waterfowl fodder every spring, and stay thick and green year-round. According to figures from Ducks Unlimited, Louisiana hunters kill more ducks than those of hunters in the next three states in the rankings combined.

The Birdfoot Delta, they call this area, where the levees that straightjacket the Mississippi finally stop and the main river splits into channels like the toes of a chicken. That fertile cargo of sediment spreads out here to build marsh, or wetlands in fashionable lingo. One hundred thousand acres of it are public, open to any hunter for the length of the duck and deer season.

I never beheld a scene, continues La Trollope, so utterly desolate as this entrance of the Mississippi River!

Well forgive her. After all, wetlands werent much in vogue in 1832 when this English harridanthis nineteenth-century version of Anne Robinsonpublished her hissyfit of a book entitled: Domestic Manners of the Americans. Frances wasnt much of a duck hunter have, a deer hunter, or a fisherperson, or shed have sung a much different tune.

Even then, this areas natural bounty attracted sportsmen from as far away as Europe. Louisiana owes its license-plate motto as Sportsmans Paradise to this hell and its horrors. They also account for the states top position on Fund for Animals Cavalcade of Cruelty. This famous animal rights organization ranks states in a Cavalcade based on the number of animals killed by hunters as reported by their fish and game agencies. Yep, Louisiana is number one! In the following pages, Ill explain why and how.

The habitat down here is hell on the hunters themselves. Except for the river and the major passes, everythings shallow. The famous Higgins landing craft, the boat that won World War II, as reported by Stephen Ambrose, was actually born down here. The factory was built in New Orleans in the 1930s, when nobody dreamed wed need such a craft to disgorge soldiers on Omaha Beach or Iwo Jima; the craft was designed for oil exploration crews to navigate the shallow marshes of the Mississippi Delta. Andrew Higgins finally sold the plans to a skeptical Navy in 1942.