A tug of morose nostalgia pulled me off the highway onto the county road bending to the south, in search of a distant fragment of the past. Perhaps it wasn’t so much a quest as an escape from the endless stream of traffic and what it symbolized, thousands of sorry wretches who commuted an hour and a half or more to jobs in Silicon Valley from their homes in the San Joaquin, forced that far out to find housing for their families at prices slightly lower than totally obscene. For that daily commute, they earned the privilege of living in a flat plain with bad air quality, 75 summer days or more with triple digit temperatures and damp, foggy winters.

In the old days, the San Joaquin was almost exclusively farm country, some of the best and most productive in the world. Now, more and more of the communities there have shed their agricultural identity to become suburban satellites of the greater Bay Area, land of Google, and Apple, and E-Bay, and Cisco, and H-P, and Oracle, and Intel, etc., etc and so forth – communities as poster children for urban sprawl, leap-frog development and gaudy strip mallery.

I had spent a long, boring day in Merced County Superior Court on the east side of the San Joaquin, protecting the interest of a party who was not the main player in the litigation. I spoke up on those rare occasions when the fight between the main parties threatened to affect my client in an accident of collateral damage. A non-event in the making, the proceeding had lived down to expectations from my client’s point of view, i.e., no harm, no foul – except that he had had to pay me to sit and do nothing for a full day, plus travel time, plus mileage, with no boredom premium added.
 
You couldn’t exactly call it a wasted day – but it was the next closest thing. Now, I faced a two and half hour drive home to San Francisco with the lowering sun in my eyes the whole way, against an endless stream of oncoming commute traffic returning to endless rows of faux ranchettes, just in time for the evening Little League or soccer game, while the local vector control officials laid down their fog of insecticide against the threat of West Nile Virus and the mosquitoes that carry it.
 
How could we have done this to ourselves, I wondered?  Who had been in charge  and what could they have been thinking?

The county road that pulled me off the highway led toward an area known as the Grasslands, an area that had hosted great clouds of wintering waterfowl when I first arrived here in the mid-50s. I had had a sudden urge to look for the spot where I had leased my first blind, after a couple years as strictly a refuge and public land hunter. I had been a third year law student during the ’58-’59 season with a heavy workload and I needed a place to go where the hunt would not take all day, which could easily happen at the refuges. Sometimes you had to wait to get on and then spend a lot of time finding a good spot to set up. After all that work, refuge hunters hated to feel the pressure of a deadline.  I know that I did – and I assume that the same holds true today.

Moreover, Mendota, my favorite refuge at the time, was another thirty minutes drive further away from home than the North Grasslands. So I needed a default location, a place where I knew I could go for a quick two hours in the blind when there were no birds on the margins of the bay or the coast, much closer to home.
 
I found a spot through a friend, $100 to rent a pair of concrete barrels sunk in alkali ground, low grade pasture land with greasewood and sage scattered about. Three other hunters had similar setups on the property, a holding of about 250 acres.
 
Our blind rent earned us the right to shelter in an aluminum equipment shed located on the unpaved county road frontage, a shed filled with tools, barrels of lubricant and pesticide, sharing space with one hard-used Ford tractor and a variety of wildlife, spiders of all sorts, roaches, colonies of wasps and ants, various avian species in the rafters and the occasional rodent darting furtively through our belongings. Rain added another interesting dimension – like being trapped inside a drum. Water found its way under the siding to dampen our sleeping bags and equipment.
 
No problem.  Who could argue with a hundred bucks for two barrels for the whole season, plus a roof and walls to keep out most of the weather? It sure beat trying to sleep in the car or on the ground, particularly when a grad student’s budget didn’t include the cost of a local motel, no matter how modest.

A partition at the back of the shed walled off a rudimentary “apartment” where an ancient Portuguese immigrant resided, more of a presence then a caretaker. I learned that he had worked for the landowner for twenty years and had been a skilled heavy equipment operator before arthritis and a bad back forced him into more passive roles.  Gustavo spoke with a thick accent despite his long residency and left us pretty much to take care of ourselves. He could offer no clues as to hunting or weather conditions.  “Lotta ducks, lotta ducks,” he would say when the pond held nothing but coots, referred to out here as “mudhens.”  “Weather good, plenny good,” he would say during week long episodes of the worst, bone-chilling tule fog.

Gustavo’s cat loomed much larger in my memory, that recent day of the southward turn on the way home from Merced. A yellow striped uncut tom, old Sam  weighed at least twenty pounds – the biggest cat I have ever seen outside of a zoo. He ruled the place, taking no crap from anyone or anything – dogs included – yet friendly, always looking for a head rub and a sleeping bag to enter, whether invited or not, with a purr you could hear twenty yards away and a challenge yowl that might carry a full mile.

Every night, Sam sallied forth into the marsh to hunt mudhens.  He had no apparent aversion to water and no sensitivity to the cold.  Most mornings, the body of his latest victim, deftly slaughtered but otherwise undamaged, would adorn the concrete step at the entrance to Gustavo’s modest corner. Gustavo accepted the offerings, skinned and breasted them for incorporation into the various dishes that he cooked on a hot-plate to maintain the union of body and soul, with enough garlic, onions, peppers and spices to lift the roof in that corner of the shed. Sam, meanwhile, would curl up in front of portable heater, ignoring the mice that infested the place. He was a one-trick pony – and mudhens were his trick.

Most nights before a hunt, Gustavo offered us huge helpings of his spaghetti concoction. Nothing could disguise the mudhen, the foundation of the odiferous offering.  Aptly named, those birds. Nothing could overpower the taste of Mother Earth. Worse, if you ate any of Gustavo’s creation, sleep was out of the question. The hot ball in the high gut lasted for at least six hours, sometimes longer. We became quite creative in our excuses for rejection and surreptitious ditching when that didn’t work, trying not to hurt the old man’s feelings.
 
In the meantime, Sam delivered more raw material for the pot with clocklike regularity. I regret that I never actually saw him catch and kill one – while fervently wishing that he would forgo the swamp for the resident rodents in the more normal way of his kind.
 
I often scolded him when he lay purring in my lap.  “Be a cat, damn you.  Do something about the mice around here. Give up this wannabe land-shark crap. It’s killing me.”  Occasionally he would cock a critical eye – but he never changed.

  *        *        *

We had a lot of fog that winter, much more than we seem to have these days, thick tule fog that built up day after day until it filled the whole valley from the ground up to 1200 feet or so, 300 miles from north to south, 40 miles from east west.  It closed the Fresno, Bakersfield, Stockton and Sacramento airports for weeks on end.
 
It grounded the ducks. They couldn’t get above it and wouldn’t fly through it.   But sometime in the late morning, enough of the sun’s rays would fight their way through that evil blanket to warm the earth’s surface just enough to lift the fog perhaps fifty feet or so. When that happened, you needed enough shells – and you needed to be able to bend your trigger finger despite the cold. For the lifting of that damp, chilly malevolent blanket got the birds moving with reckless, urgent abandon, looking for the food they needed to survive through another night.

I recall several hunts during that winter when I huddled around a portable heater in the shed until the fog started to lift – and had a limit of eight bull sprig (could’ve been seven that year, I don’t recall exactly) within fifteen minutes after climbing into the blind.  I didn’t pace myself in those days.  But occasionally I lingered in the blind for awhile after the shooting stopped to watch the show, wave after wave of pintail, coming from all directions, jinking and jiving over the property, some in a hurry, some not, all on the move in homage to their restless nature, trying to expiate the fog-imposed immobility. 
   
According to the experts, we had a continental population of 10 or so million pintail then. Now we are down to under 3 million.  What happened to them?

A few years back, we spent about $20 million of government and private money on a “pintail study” seeking the answer to that question. The studiers spent the money and came back without an answer other than the recommendation that they be funded for further study.  Hasn’t been much written on that subject since.1
 
In the meantime, we clients of the studiers, the prospective consumers and users of their deathless insight, seem to have accepted the decline as though it’s the way things are supposed to be. We accept our loss as inevitable and irreversible, the memory of better times having faded so far into the rear view mirror of history that we can barely see it. The ten or nine or eight bird sprig limit has fallen into the same category as a five-cent candy bar or a twenty-cent gallon of gasoline – an artifact of the remote past that serves no purpose other than to fertilize the musings of old folks.
 
But the five-cent candy bar and the twenty-cent gallon disappeared under a tidal wave of geo-political and economic forces that do not apply to our pintail. The lands and waters those birds need still exist today.  The birds have declined to a minor fraction of their previous numbers nonetheless.

Last year, we had a few days of sprig concentration that looked like old times in short bursts of frenzied activity. With a one sprig limit, hunters who got out during those days killed their “limit” in about 45 seconds. Those who abide by the law then stood watching in varying degrees of awe or frustration as bird after beautiful bird gyrated within easy range for hours on end.  “Used to be like this damned near every hunt, when the limit was ten, or nine or eight,” I would say, glorying in the curmudgeon’s role to the disgust of my companions. “Back when I was your age, son etc., etc . . . [fill in the blank].”  I hate to think of how many illegal birds died during those episodes. Even the generally law-abiding would find it difficult to restrain themselves in the face of such momentary and unusual bounty.

In this case, unlike the typical old man’s fantasy, the truth is the tragedy – and what we have lost is the truth. While the studiers study, spending the money, and answers dance tantalizingly out of reach, as they have for the last three decades, we celebrate those years when things stay the same rather than getting worse. We’re like the guy who used to be a millionaire, lost all his money for reasons he can’t figure out and is now trying to make the best of it on social security – unwilling to accept even the possibility that that too may fade away someday.
 
Is it better for mental health just to forget the past, or should we strive to recreate at least some respectable fraction of it?  After all, most of the inputs remain intact, at least so far as the human eye can discern.  But how do we keep from pouring more treasure down the rathole of futility?

   *        *        *

After a few wrong turns, I found my old hunting spot. The unpaved road had become a paved suburban collector, with curb, gutter and sidewalks, lined with three and four bedroom nearly identical homes typical of the region. The size of the street trees and the general look of the place announced that the development had been there at least ten years, maybe longer. I drove past at least a quarter mile of strip mall to get to the final turn off into the residential neighborhood. Every house seemed to have at least six cars associated with it, two in the carport, two in the driveway and two parked in the street in front.

I found a cul-de-sac with a locked gate at the end, blocking a dirt road that seemed to lead to the place of memory. A structure that looked like the old shed stood about two hundred yards behind the gate, surrounded by the eucalyptus trees that I recalled. The flat land stretching away from the shed seemed familiar as did the featureless horizon. I got out of the car, trying to recapture the vision, trying to shut out the changes.

A middle-aged man of the neighborhood accosted me after a few minutes, wanting to know what I was doing. A nearby schoolyard had the neighbors alert to an alien presence, an elderly gentleman with no apparent business. Another sign of the times, I guess.

I told him why I was there.  As a hunter himself, he seemed to believe me. We shared a few reminiscences – and I left, swimming upstream against the commuter traffic most of the way.  I drove with a heavy heart, a sense of loss that has not left me. And little hope for the future.  That is the most troubling thing of all.

I write this at the beginning of July, the time of year when hunters start to give thought to the upcoming season and those in charge start the process of “spin,” the creation of unrealistic expectations to deflect criticism, to assuage lawmakers who represent those who profit from hunting, to appease those who thrive on the booking of hunts and services to hunters. At this time of year, our associations and other “official” spokespersons have genius for conjuring silver lining out of the darkest cloud, hoping that we will only look forward, not back, rejecting all recall of recent disappointment, unburdened by the distant memory of better days.

The meal they serve us reminds me of Gustavo’s spaghetti sauce, the finest locally grown garlic, onions, tomatoes and spices, yet nothing could overpower the taste of mudhen. The truth resisted all creative attempts at camouflage. Sam provided the only unblemished truth in that picture, and he was just doing his thing with no intellectual capacity to do anything else.

To my mind, we stand at a fork in the road with two choices: continue as we are, acting out the slow moving decline of the boiled frog syndrome – or we could try something radical and different. The radical move would be to junk all aspects of the management and regulatory system that has been in place over the last twenty years replace those who have presided over it.

After all, if you had a financial manager who had lost most of your money, wouldn’t replacement and a different investment regime be in order?  Why is this so different?

In the meantime, I still go out to my current marsh whenever I can, enjoying it immensely despite the decline. If they cut the daily bag to one spoonbill and limited hunting to Tuesdays after lunch during a greatly shortened season, I would still go out, so long as I am able. The fact that the sky holds only three birds when it should hold three thousand is regrettable but does not rob the experience of all value to me. It represents an artifact of the times, a tribute to failed management and a blurring of institutional memory under a fog of false hope and false hype, perpetrated by those unwilling to admit to failure, with a vested interest in the status quo.

Time for a comprehensive rethinking, if anyone still cares.