Stephen Bodio - Querencia

Copyright 1990 by Stephen J. Bodio

Introduction copyright 2014 Malcolm Brooks

First Skyhorse Publishing edition 2014.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

ISBN: 978-1-62873-696-0

eBook ISBN: 978-1-62914-056-8

Printed in the United States of America

TO STEVE AND KATHE GROOMS

Letter Writers, Letter Readers

In particular, I thank Dutch Salmon for inviting us to New Mexico, Steve and Kathe Grooms for giving me access to Betsys letters, and Jamie Potenberg for being a real and patient editor. And of course all our friends in Magdalena; without them, there would have been no story.

Q UERENCIA:

The word doesnt translate. It is used in Spanish to designate that mysterious little area in the bullring that catches the fancy of the fighting bull when he charges in. He imagines it his sanctuary: when parked there, he supposes he cannot be hurt.... So it is, borrowing the term, that one can speak of ones querencia to mean that little, unspecified area in lifes arena where one feels safe, serene.

W ILLIAM F. B UCKLEY

R ACING T HROUGH P ARADISE

Introduction

I remember with absolute clarity the first time I encountered the name Stephen Bodio in a Sports Afield essay titled Me and My Shotguns and Why.

I was in my early twenties, trying to figure out exactly how a dyed-in-the-wool bookworm went about balancing hunting and fishing with wistful young notions of worldly sophistication. I wanted to be an intact version of Jake Barnes, bellying up to the zinc bar with Lady Brett to plan a shooting trek in British East Africa... except I lived in northern California, had no money, and the young women I encountered who read real books tended to be proudly if not violently vegetarian. Even Hills Like White Elephants went out with the bathwater.

Id never heard of Grays Sporting Journal, which legendarily put Bodio on the map early in his own writing career. But Sports Afield in the mid-90s took a similar tack, publishing unabashed writing about blood sport by serious literatiMcCarthy, Ford, Mametand was, for me, what the early incarnation of Grays must have been for a prior generation.

The title of that piece on fine shotguns echoed an early Thomas McGuane essay on motorcycles (Me and My Bike and Why). I had a nascent if uncultivated interest in Bodios subject matterEnglish-pattern bird gunsand the standard-issue, literary trout bums mania for McGuane. I plunged right in.

Gun writing all right, but not in any dumbed down, never speak-ill-of-an-advertiser formula. This was a man with an actual thesis, who cited the Victorian visionary Augustus Henry Lane Fox Pitt-Rivers to explain how the precise synthesis of form and function found in century-old British doubles resulted in the most logical implement yet designed for the hunting and killing of wild game birds.

He wrote with passion, erudition, and wit, and seemed himself a sort of one-two combination of aesthete and pragmatist. Right down to raw economicsrather than blithely presume every reader would have the budget for a Westley or Purdeyhe cheerfully noted, even reveled in his own perpetual financial high-wire act, and made a case for moderately priced provincial guns that nonetheless retain the same syncretic magic.

I came away from that essay lusting not only for a gun that felt like a wand, but even more for this kind of writing, this kind of life. One accompanying photo, captioned Bodio and Friend, captured the author with an enormous, glaring hawk on his fist. Another showed him seated on the step of a Southwestern abode with his lithe little English 16, the gun as lethally and elegantly evolved as the bird. Who was this guy?

I looked for the answer, of course, in his books; from his full-blown treatise on sporting arms (Good Guns Again), to his earliest, deceptively topical works on pigeons and falconry (Aloft and A Rage for Falcons). But I found what I was looking for most completely in the title you now hold.

From the wide angle, scanning for movement on the cultural plain, the figure of the old-fashioned Renaissance Man seems to have taken his toys and gone home, driven off the field by such dubious polarities as the Gamer, the Hipster, and the Metro sexual. I guess it must have seemed so as well in the 1970s, the era of the Punk, the Granola, and the Disco Duck. That was also the formative era of Boston native Bodio, who was in those days a wild-haired, wild-hearted, nature and literature-obsessed polymath with interests and enthusiasms as varied as etymology, entomology, evolutionary biology, book collecting, big game hunting, and The Beatles. I liked my life, he recalls, but I had no one to talk to.

That changed, along with his life, upon introduction to Betsy Huntington, herself a fusion of the classical and the cutting edge. Born late to prominent New England parentage, she spent her early childhood in China, was educated in a series of boarding schools, and ditched Wellesley to roar around Europe instead. A self-supporting journalist, lifelong equestrian, and literary sophisticate, she was two decades older than Steve, which somehow mattered not at all. Indeed, she may well not have made as perfect a match otherwise. For the first time in either of our lives, he notes, we each had someone whom we could talk to about everything.

Now, many years hence, anyone whos even partway through the initiate phase in the cult of Bodioand there is onefeels the presence of Betsy. Its ineffable, but unavoidable. I think of it like this: they met and a domino fell, and the dominoes fall still.

Hungry for adventure, they traveled west together and settled, on little more than a hunch and a whim, in Magdalena, New Mexico, the geographic querencia of the title; a place of nearly mythical serenity and shelter. They found their own union of form and function as well; a place where adventure and study and discovery, science and art and sport, great books and gorgeous guns and native food, horses and dogs and hawks, could all be woven into a single existence. The Renaissance Man went home all right, and home was way out west. Three-plus decades hence and counting, hes still right there where he belongs.

Eventually, a life with many angles produced a book with many angles. Querencia reads as memoir certainly, but less in the po-mo, creative nonfiction fashion where memory and reality almost deliberately fail to align, and more in the manner of the classics of the form A Moveable Feast , say, or Out of Africa . Like the latter, its a love story with the power and sweep of the very backdrop it unfolds upon. Its a biography of a place, observing flora and fauna, light and landscape with the wonder of Aldo Leopold, sights and scents and people with the elegant appreciation of Patrick Leigh Fermor.