Less than a year ago, for reasons perhaps best explored in a clinical setting, my friend Brendan McCarthy started to build parrillas, huge and heavy wood-burning grills of the sort common in Argentina, to a design of his own making. He welded together a metal cart and attached steel walls to three sides of it. He fabricated a fire cage to hold burning wood on one side of the cart’s top and hung a grill beside it, on cables that allow it to be cranked up and down over embers raked from the fire. You can cook six or seven racks of ribs or legs of lamb or an entire case of eggplants on the thing. The first parrilla took more than a month to build and weighs around 400 pounds.

McCarthy is not a cook, and only lately a welder. He is a professional fishing guide. As such, he is a student of behavior — of people as well as of fish. He figured those who like to stalk saltwater game fish in shallow water, or to chase them through the tide rips that mount off the islands of the Northeastern coast, might thrill as well to cooking on a parrilla, with its evocation of grilling in the wilds of Argentina, after a day hunting monster trout. He put the parrillas up for sale.

This was, I thought, a little crazy. Build grills? Why not just offer trips to fish in Argentina? He only shrugged. He wanted to build things out of steel, the way someone might wake up and want one day to write a poem, or to plant roses. And it turned out he wasn’t wrong. If you want one of his grills right now, you’ll need to wait in line. He can’t keep up production. (The fishing gets in the way.)