On a snowy night in late February 2018, my lawyer son met me for the annual montage of flyfishing documentaries, those amphetamine-like films of women and men flitting around the world in search of sanity. I sat beside him in the theater, twitching and squirming like some Narcotics Anonymous flunky watching junkies snort coke on the big screen. The two-hour torture finally over, I punctuated my farewell with, “I’ve wasted my entire life,” to which my son lovingly replied, “Yes, you have.” 

I returned to work that Monday, whining for 14 days off in April, and before the week’s end had purchased a round trip ticket to Buenos Aires, Argentina.

It had been more than two decades since my first visit to Argentina, a nation stuffed with Italian and Spanish and all other form of immigrant, a land still blessed with only half the United States’ population density while remaining the world’s ninth-largest country. It’s a republic where people dine near midnight, consume an average of 130 pounds of beef annually, then toss and turn on the dreams and nightmares of Juan Peron…

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