The road stretched ahead dead straight as I peddled along, heading for the hunting grounds on my bike. Early fall in Northern Illinois on the margins of Chicago’s far northern suburbs, where cornfields and woodlots clearly defined the boundary between town and country, with oak, maple and sumac resplendent in autumn color lining the county road.

After a half hour’s hard pedal under the impetus of anxious expectation, I turned my bike left into the dirt driveway leading to the abandoned quarry. Someone had mined clay there many years earlier, curing the blocks in a large kiln in what must have been a brick-making operation. The tall structure that had housed the kiln stood empty – forlorn and decrepit in an advanced state of decay, windows long ago smashed, with several roof sections open to the sky. At least four stories tall, the upper reaches of the hulk teemed with feral pigeons, swirling in and around the structure in their dozens and hundreds.

I quickly undid the old towel in which I had wrapped my shotgun and assembled it, a single shot hammer .410 with a plastic stock that I had purchased a few months earlier at the local hardware store for $17, the saved earnings from many hours of cutting grass and raking leaves in the neighborhood. I had become reasonably proficient at busting clay targets off a hand trap my father used – but the pigeons in the old kiln building had always bested me.

After four fruitless visits and the expenditure of two boxes of shells without cutting a feather, the matter had taken on the tinge of vendetta. I was bound and determined to nail one of those elusive varmints on the wing and mount it with the mail order taxidermy kit I had bought from an ad in a sporting magazine. Five was my lucky number. The fifth trip would prove a charm with two kills to show my somewhat disgusted Mom when I returned home that evening.  The mounts didn’t turn out particularly well, but I learned and hoped to do better on the next victims.

Such were the aspirations of a 16 year old in 1950, a time when a kid could ride down the street of a suburb of a major city, on the way to an abandoned quarry, in pursuit of pigeons, with a shotgun in his bicycle basket – without prompting a host of 911 calls or citations for multiple transgressions. I enjoyed several memorable outings at that quarry – and countless hours of daydreaming about it during advanced algebra and French language classes at high school.

One day while tromping around in the tall grass, trash and debris next to the old building, trying to get a clean shot at some of the buzz-bombs overhead, I nearly stepped on a magnificent cock pheasant that exploded from under me with a frightening rush and derisive cackle. I watched him fly off, counting the few days that remained before the opening of the pheasant season.  During the previous three or four years, I had marked the date, almost as sacred in Northern Illinois as the deer opener in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. It had been an abstraction of unfulfilled yearning, as I had no one to take me and no place to go.  But now, it seemed that my pigeon spot held more intense allure.

It should go without saying that I never killed that rooster, but not for lack of trying. Got two good shots at him and flat missed both times, rendered stupid by adrenalin overload.  Thirty years later, a renowned shooting instructor informed me that squeezing the gun didn’t make the shot go faster and tended to put a hitch in the mount, making it more than likely that the shot column and the target would fly on non-intersecting trajectories.  Wished I’d known that. As a wise old German philosopher once said: “too soon alt, too late schmat.”

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I had subscriptions to Sports Afield, Outdoor Life and Field & Stream in those days, reading them avidly every month. I came to feel that guys like Jack O’Connor, Ted Trueblood and Havilah Babcock, among others less prominent in the memory bank,  were personal friends, instructing me individually with their advice, regaling me with their stories, one on one. I followed their guidance whenever I got the chance and carried their experiences with me as fitting grist for the daydream mill during interminable school days.

Truth be told, those publications typically filled their pages with pieces I came to think of as “Me and Harry Went [fill in the blank]” stories. They all started out more or less like this:  “A puff of feathers answered the bark of my 20 gauge Remington 870 as the dove plunged to earth in the stubble field, kicking up a small puff of dust where it fell. `Good shot, Jake,’ Harry yelled from where he stood under an oak tree a hundred yards away.  `’Bout time you hit one.’ And on and on about how me and Harry got there and how long we had known each other, how often we had hunted together and how we got access to Pagolodtcz Farms where the action took place, with the good dog Belle joyously retrieving, etc., etc.

My Mom concluded that I became an avid and more proficient reader – and by that avenue a passable writer – through intense interest in a field to which I could only have vicarious access by reading, with actual experiences few and far between. That palpable result overcame her mild distaste at my manner of achieving it. I think about that often as I watch one of my grandsons become a math whiz through intense study of the New York Times sports pages everyday, computing the vital statistics of his beloved baseball and hockey players in his head – proving once again that learning comes easiest when one cares about the subject. And caring about a subject helps one acquire skills of more general utility, by accident. In this way, one ventures willingly where no teacher could flog the unwilling to go.

In retrospect, a key issue stands out: those publications had almost nothing in them about conservation or a hunters’ duty of stewardship for the game and the habitat they required for survival. Not too many folks paid attention to that stuff then. Leopold’s writings had been published, but for a small and select audience, a radical audience. Rachel Carson and Silent Spring – the clarion call of environmentalism for the masses --lay at least fifteen years over the horizon.

We assumed apparently that we would always have the game, with no need to worry about anything other than to hone harvesting skills. Every page in those publications every month seemed to have one or more pictures or ads featuring a guy or guys holding guns, in a grinning pose behind a pile of dead birds or a large dead animal – the bigger the pile or the animal, the wider the smile – and presumably the greater the interest to be engendered.

But even at that, another fact stood out: persons who aspired to hunt in those days understood that it took effort and skill, with no guarantees of success. One did not acquire – or expect to acquire – marshcraft over night. That was the teaching of Trueblood, O’Connor, etc., etc. I spent the time learning the hard way because the outdoors obsessed me, fishing, hunting and camping, singly or in combination and my mentors extolled the virtues and difficulty of the requisite skillsets. No mastery without pain. Frustration before achievement. Perseverance over time provides the only road to fulfillment – a fulfillment having all the more value for the frustration endured in attaining it.

When I reminisce with men of roughly my own age, we discover comraderie in a shared commitment and history of hard won skill that I find in few young men today, no matter how exemplary their character and lofty their achievements in other fields of human endeavor.

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Today, we read about the decline in hunter numbers portending a loss of our sport.  Commentators speak gravely of declining habitats and declining opportunity.  I can speak with a degree of authority on the waterfowl situation in California -- and I beg to differ.

We have more land managed for public hunting today in this state than we had thirty years ago and fewer hunters using it.  Rice field blinds are available for rent at prices for a 100 day season that are less than the cost of a one week family Hawaiian vacation.

True enough, one cannot drive twenty minutes to hunt a prolific salt marsh on the margin of San Francisco or San Pablo Bays as I used to do fifty years ago – but opportunity awaits those willing to seek it. No. The problem finds its root in structural changes inherent in our society.

First, before you start cringing in disgust over another perceived curmudgeonly appeal to the good old days -- when men were men before the world went soft -- let me state that this is an observation, not a criticism. Indeed, the human race owes its survival down through the ages to an ability to create new tools, to enhance productivity, to diversify and capitalize on the differing talents of the citizenry.

Consider the progression and impact, for example, of the “personal” computer, a tool invented in the ‘70s that has totally transformed modern life. Invention proceeded from curiosity to experimental use, then widespread adoption, exponential expansion of capability to the point where the devices have become absolutely indispensable to modern life, at home and in business.

In the process, we have lost the ability to get along without them. If you doubt it, consider: when was the last time you heard of a researcher, student or professional actually using books instead of a terminal and a monitor to conduct his or her studies?  Who writes letters anymore when one can email or text message?

Demands for speed and performance in the business, legal and academic world have increased to match or exceed the pace of increased productivity. A depressing number of us are now “wired” 24/7/365 – on call and equipped to respond, with edited documents sent from a remote server if need be, on a moment’s notice. We are expected to have that capability and use it to the full. There is no such thing today as “bankers’ hours” in the traditional sense of that term. People in the securities business who used to run their lives on the schedule of trading hours on the NYSE now must cope with markets open 24/7 and the expectations of clients to match.

When I started wilderness backpacking, no one had cell phones, two-way radios, global positioning systems. You used a USGS or Forest Service map, a feel for topography, rudiments of celestial navigation techniques ( as in if the sun is setting, then that must be west) and dead reckoning. Today, when no one goes into the back country without all sorts of electronic gadgets, very few people would know how to do it the old way, even if their lives depended on it. The same applies to bass fishermen, as another conspicuous example.

The gadgets represent impressive strides in the annals of human ingenuity, of course. But just as surely as they supplant the need for the old skills, we lose those skills. They become useless artifacts, the counterpart of spoken Latin. And as the pace of life quickens, we also lose the capacity for anything other than the quick solution because everyone “needs it yesterday” and that need drives us to the quickest answer, an imperative fore the quickest answer.

I think about all this as I ponder the drumfire of voiced concern over our need to stem the loss of hunters – in which the loss is uniformly attributed to lack of opportunity. But even if we had ample opportunity (as I believe we do) how would we recruit new hunters, assuming that certain basic skills are required?  To be specific, who among the public land hunters will step up to train potential competitors for the hotspots it took years and hard work for them to find and understand?  How else are you going to get recruits if you know that they will not take the time or put in the effort to become proficient because they can’t get there by sitting at a computer terminal or thumb punching a Blackberry – nor can they readily shed that mentality?

Guys who will spend hours practicing golf seem disinclined to burnish hunting skills in the same way because of distance, time and the fact that they don’t know what they are looking for. If I need to clean up my short iron game, I can hire a coach and go to a range and hit two hundred shots right near where I live. Who do I call to tell me where I can rent the best blind, the upsides and downsides of that location as opposed to others, the hazards associated with it, the best times to hunt it, etc.? Who can tell the novice which of a series of competing locations is likely to be the best and why?

No one, that’s who. Only field “research,” trial and error – and above all, persistence will work. And we confront a bit of impenetrable circularity here. How can we hope for that persistence without a bit of motivating obsession? And how do we generate that obsession without first providing the experience that can be acquired only through the impetus of obsession?

I have no answer. But I am convinced that we are asking the wrong question. No amount of habitat enhancement or increase in perceived opportunity will address our current problem.

*        *        *

Every Thursday night during those high school days, I listened to an outdoor show on the radio, interrupting homework to do it. The show consisted of four guys from southern Illinois and Kentucky answering questions submitted by members of the listening audience, introduced with a little bit of background music and a recording of mallards and Canadas calling.

They had tips on everything – how to catch catfish, bass, bream, hunt deer, quail, ducks and geese.  They knew about rifles and pistols and shotguns. Those who had their questions addressed on the air got a prize of some sort – a pint of stink bait for catfish, a predator call, a hunting hat, something of that nature urgently wished for by a teenaged fanatic. Sponsored by a popular brand of “chawin’” tobacco, the show went off the air during my senior year. By that point, I had a three ring binder of notes taken during the shows more detailed than any notes I ever took at school. Wish I could find those notes today.  Not important really. I’ve lost interest in catfish. But I bet they would be good for a chuckle or two.

We now have a number of outdoor shows from which to choose on the thousands of TV channels available. I’ve watched a few and found them pale imitations of the reality, a bunch of variations on “Me and Harry Went . . . (fill in the blank).” Although some are interesting, I don’t see them as motivating any one to go afield who is not already committed.

If we have to recruit new blood to save our sport, then the question is not opportunity or habitat so much as how do we kindle obsession?  How can we ignite the level of interest required to set aside the imperatives of modern life and give the sport, the game and our stewardship obligations their just due?  Whoever finds the answer to that one deserves our accolades.