02/02 © Ronald L. Moody (2002)
All rights reserved.
Reprinted here with permission.

Is Hunters' Homeward Journey
Moving Toward Old World?

"You can't go home again," opined Thomas Wolfe.

"If you do, you'll probably regret it," Ernest Hemingway implied.

Of course, I went anyway -- back to the territory of my youth.

Wolfe and Hemingway were both right. You can't really return to a home that is no longer there. And, seeing what has been done since you left is a sure recipe for regret.

Hemingway once wrote of returning to his small Michigan home town to find a hot dog stand and filling station where he had killed his first pheasant. I found a shopping mall and a thousand houses on the hills where I first discovered wild magic hunting squirrels among acorn oaks, hickories, and muscadine vines.

Writing nearly 70 years ago, Hemingway concluded: ". . . when you like to shoot and fish you have to move often and always further out and it doesn't make any difference what they do when you are gone."

Times have changed, Papa!

It makes a difference!

In Hemingway's youth, a Nimrod could still hope (perhaps) to move 'further out' and find a place that was still like home. But that was 200 million people ago; such frontier visions are extinguished for our hyper-tech generation.

Papa moved to Idaho; I moved to Montana where everybody tells each other this is the 'Last Best Place.' I believe them, but the hot dog stands finally caught up to Hemingway in Sun Valley -- now they are stalking me in the Big Sky Country.

The shooter and fisher of today will search in vain for a better place to which he or she can move -- this is as true for New Yorkers or Californians as it is true for Montanans. A hunter's options are clarified by progress. You can develop a liking for asphalt related activities -- or you can take better care of the wild places remaining to you.

A minority of American shooters and fishers have figured this out, and they have opted for better care for wild lands. Some promote fund-raising to buy habitat and save it from conversion. A gutsy few fight the bare-knuckle political battles for public laws, regulations and policies that support wildlife and its habitats. It's always interesting to see the expression on a hunter's face the first time he is called a tree hugger because he spoke out for preserving game habitat on public land.

Meanwhile...

The majority of hunters have followed one of two other paths. Some passively accept whatever is available to them. When their last hunting place is eaten by a hot dog stand or locked up by wealthier hunters they simply quit hunting.

Others -- those with more money -- adopt an aggressive "me first" approach. They use money to gain privileged control of privately owned hunting lands. Or they use their wealth to "buy a quality hunting experience" (that usually is available only because other hunters are locked out).

The last "farther out" place available to hunters is the public lands of America. These are the millions of acres of national forests, BLM lands, wildlife refuges and other state and local lands owned by the people and managed by government agencies.

Here again, however, nothing is safe much less sacred.

A constant political competition goes on between people, including organized hunters, who value the aesthetic and recreational values of public lands and those who cherish the money that can be made from the mining, logging, grazing or developing of these same lands. Disputes between recreational groups, i.e., motorized users versus hikers, further cloud the already murky public land battlefield.

One thing is certain, however. The hunter, or recreationist, who passively uses these public lands without investing a personal commitment to their future, eventually will be looking around town for something else to do with his or her spare time.

With all these mill wheels turning, some things are certain to be ground to dust. One such thing is the "First Place" of today's youth.

The army of affluent, urban, silver-templed Nimrods who make the market for today's privatized hunting opportunities all started off somewhere as a kid looking for a chance to hunt. Lucky kids found or were given a "First Place" to kill a pheasant or a squirrel.

Like their mother's kitchen, their bedroom or schoolroom, this first hunting place was the birthing room of part of their personal identity and character.
Chances are this place came to them through a visit to a family farm, or nearby creek and woodlot. It may have involved bicycling several blocks to the edge of town with a BB gun slung over the shoulder. 'First Places' spawned millions of hunters because they were open, accessible and close by.

Today, passivity and neglect by those now-grown kids are letting the 'First Places' for today's kids become farther away, too expensive and closed to all but a very few. The fruit of this milling will be that the word 'few' sums up the future of hunting.

Another value being ground to dust is the American tradition of hunting opportunities democratically allocated and open to all. We Americans believe some hilarious myths about ourselves. One is that we are a classless society of equal people. In fact we live in socio-economic castes so unequal as to make a Brahmin blush.

America's hunting fields have long resisted dominance by lords of wealth. But money will prevail where passion wanes. As ordinary citizens accept membership in a lower caste by losing the will to advance their democratic heritage they find, like their old world ancestors found long ago, they can only look across the fence at what was once theirs.

Another myth is that of freedom. How can you call a country "free" where a person cannot step off the pavement without paying a fee or asking permission.

Once upon a time, our ancestors found themselves in the situation of living in old homes where they could only look across the fence at a rich man's pleasure. Their salvation was a one-way ticket to a new world. When they got here they insisted on a new American idea: that ownership of wildlife be separated from ownership of land.

They hoped to build new homes where ordinary people could enjoy the benefits of owning private property while preserving a democratic tradition for all the people.

The question of the moment is: toward which future home are modern American hunters traveling -- the old or the new?