“The South smells of red cedar and red dirt…She tastes of Gulf shrimp and coarse-ground grits. She sounds like shotshells at a Saturday dove shoot and is seen through live oak boughs draped with Spanish moss. The South moves slowly enough to be known.”

—Flip Pallot.

In the south, two things come to mind this time of year: It’s almost college football season and dove season.

To me, these things are intertwined like high school and crushes, baseball and peanuts, and the smell of a two-stroke engine on a cold morning at Crooked Creek Marina. One of my earliest memories is sitting in a dove blind on a five-gallon bucket that didn’t let my feet touch the ground with Pop (my mother’s father) and watching my uncle Randy Quintrell shoot a triple with an old Remington semiauto 12-gauge. All while Larry Munson called the Georgia game on someone’s radio in the field. Sardines, Vienna sausages, crackers and red rind cheese were on the menu with cold “Co-Cola” from thecooler.

Dove season used to be something akin to what I imagine gala season was in the old world. It was typically the social event of the community and one where a lot of us used to go back to the same fields, shoot the same old guns, and tell the same old lies every year. Someone would alwayshave a BBQ or breakfast. If you were in the low country, there would be an oyster roast.

Most of the men would dress in lightweight cotton and vented fishing shirts, some in shorts and others in flip flops, Costa sunglasses and wide brimmed hats for the sun.

Your granddaddy’s shotguns would come out. Yeti coolers were indeed a status symbol, but one as useful as that Beretta shotgun.

My next best dove hunting memory is of our first home with a garbage disposal in it. One night, I cleaned a limit of doves in that sink and, never having had a garbage disposal before, I figured it would be OK to use the disposal for the feathers and guts. In my defense, this was early September in Bluffton, S.C., so it was close to furnace temps outside. Imagine the words my wife said to me every time she used that disposal for the next week and feathers shot up in her face. It’s amazing she didn’t divorce me.

These memories are priceless to me and many others. Opening day shoots and the cookouts that followed are the reasons so many of us love the outdoors. For a lot of us, it’s the first experience of hunting we received. That’s in stark contrast to those today who only sit in deer stands or over bait piles. The dove shoot and a five-gallon bucket are where I learned to be among men, handle guns, and frankly tell tall tales. It’s important to the very foundation of the South.

I’ll leave you with a story about my uncle Randy. Randy pitched for Newton County High School in the early ‘70s and then at Clemson. He was a natural athlete and the best shot I ever saw. His son, Bailey, likes to talk about Randy shooting doves once in shorts and flip flops on the edge of a field and limiting out quickly while hitting birds no one else could. He was that good.

Most of us have “that” one uncle or one cousin. Randy was mine. Whenever I think of dove season, I see him swinging through a triple and hear Pop saying it just wasn’t fair.