In some years I tell students about the pathway I have taken to reach the podium from which I lecture. In other years, I do not, because such tales seem so un-technical, a singular sample, and more revealing personally than needed or safe. In the years in which I decide to give the lecture, I claim that I have perceived high interest and possible motivation for students. I still do not know whether such lectures should be given in the modern university. Time is so limited; there is so much to learn. Is the likely benefit worth the cost in time? I do not know. For some students, the professional odyssey is the needed personal touch, the relationship on which can be grown an entire course and career. For others, it is mere interest; for some a TV-blip between the "good stuff. "

Here at age 67 (2000), I re-think Sunday walks afield with my father, then remember scouting with active wildlife management work beginning on a campground in the early 1940's. I won several awards for such work; just what was needed for a youth as any psychologist will describe. My first magazine article was published in 1948. I now tally more than 200, scalp locks on the teepee.

In the university, I was challenged by a forestry curriculum but had plenty of time left over to become very active in extra-curricular affairs and campus politics. The threat of few jobs for wildlife managers kept me in forestry, although my key interest remained in wildlife. Talks with faculty displayed my interest; I was offered a place in the Virginia Cooperative Wildlife Research Unit.

In the summer of 1952, I rode a bus to Oregon, worked with the U.S. Forest Service as a smokechaser, trail crew hand, and fire tower guard. I hitch-hiked all the way home after the summer, arriving in Washington, D.C., without enough money in my pocket to telephone parents or friends there. In Oregon, I saw the western forests, tasted solitude, and began to grasp the meaning of wilderness.

Later, as a biologist with the Virginia wildlife agency (1958-61), I combined forestry and wildlife knowledge in my work in the George Washington National Forest. I read much of Olaus Murie's work in The Living Wilderness and also Leopold's Sand County Almanac and Sketches Here and There and fell under their spell. In my work on the G.W. Forest, I realized how limited I was. A Master of Science degree was inadequate for the job. I compared my needs to those of a specialized brain surgeon. I had the skills of a pre-med student. Leopold had discussed "a science of land health " and the doctor analogy worked well for me. He said that in land health, there was a need for a "base datum of normalcy. " I agreed and went searching for a school in which I could study wilderness ecology. There were few; getting financial support for school, essential for me and my family, was difficult.

I studied an old forest in Ohio, hardly wilderness, but I think very close. Radioisotope tagged pesticide was the methodology upon which I hung my studies of forest ecology. Isotopes were a means to the end: wilderness ecology, a concept of or standard for healthy land was a notion of normalcy.

I thought the gods were smiling when a job was offered at the University of Idaho. There I could do wilderness research! Not so. There I could teach, hustle for grant money, write programs, and do campus politics. Only 4 years later, however, I participated in developing a proposal with Dr. Paul Dalke for the university to acquire the Taylor Ranch, deep in one of the world's largest, dedicated, wilderness areas. Then I moved East, and my wilderness urges cooled. The need and importance remained, but the costs were too great, likely results too few and too long in developing, and the relevance of findings from the wilderness to daily environmental crises seemed then very unlikely. Questions of a "before-after " type are more important than "normal vs. abnormal. "

During the first years as an assistant professor at Virginia Tech, I taught techniques of wildlife management and worked with students on computer applications of various types.

In Idaho I had realized that great political, economic, and persuasive power is needed to solve wildlife problems. I had been very naive, somehow thinking research findings were the solid, flat, stepping-stones around which flowed the waters of wildlife problems. Next, I realized that if all of Idaho's environmental problems were miraculously solved, the situation may not even be noticed by the world. The problems were different in type, scale, and effect on people than elsewhere in the U.S. The population was amazingly low; federal land was great; the tax base was low. Clearly, all citizens do not share equally in the birthrights of a large diverse nation. Massive changes in wildlife management were needed nationwide. I felt limited in Idaho. It was a personal feeling since others there have had, and can have, great influence.

I had fairly inflated personal expectations. At least I asked, as I began my work and that with students: to whom should I entrust my wildlife resource and that of my children? Where is the expertise? Can we develop it?

There could be no controls or rigorous studies but I found it useful to think about my life spent "to make a difference. " (Scientists disparage single-sample "evidence. ") The criteria of a "real " difference were abundant (but not discussed here). I imagined a test, as if fertilizer was applied to a cornfield. Would the statistician's conclusion be, after I applied my life to wildlife management problems, "no significant difference? " or "merely a random event? " Over 20 years later at Virginia Tech, I can count hundreds of students taught, show shelves of handsome theses of my graduate students, flash a list of several hundred articles and cannot convince myself or anyone of the differences I have made.

"Ahead of my time, " I have often heard but I have known very well how far behind I have been. "Blue sky " or "idiosyncratic " I also heard about my ideas. Most, I found out later, were already implemented in other fields. Where were my evaluators? Who were they? New ideas need someone - just anyone - to try them. Once tried, they are no longer new. If useful, they can hardly be called blue sky any longer. Once my reason for acquiring Peculiar Manor, the family's cabin, was to have a place to implement some ideas. To students that tend to be as conservative as Neotoma (the wood rat), who asked "has that practice you recommend been tried? " I can now answer, "At least in one place. "

I developed a plan of research for the 7,000-acre Haven Wildlife Management area near the cabin and have tried to stick to it. I've been bought-off the pathway several times. Getting money is the means to help graduate students, to implement ideas, to write papers, and to put reports on annual evaluation forms - like bleaching scalp locks. [After one of my negative speeches at a public hearing on a proposed powerline, a colleague actually overheard a company representative say: "Get that guy a grant! "] The career pathway becomes better lighted the farther along one goes. It now seems more clear-cut; digressions are more easily passed by; blocks more easily jumped; weeds pushed aside where previously a barrier would not have been seen.

The dangers in a natural professional resource pathway being described, I now believe, are not the snares and problems; not the small, evil, or ignorant people in the field; but the danger of losing the magic. Most people enter the field saying something like "I like the outdoors " or "I like to hunt and fish. " They are inarticulate youth afraid of or unable to talk to you about smells of hemlock forests, how your skin feels upon hearing an owl, how water tastes from a garden hose, and how it feels to rub a beech tree trunk. They are embarrassed to describe their pleasure in jewel sparkles in rocks, spider webs, and leaf axils. They would never comment on the humor in a toad's eyes or the perpetual frown of a rattlesnake. The changing mysteries of a stream or a moss-dripping spring are what they like. All of these are the magic of the animals and where they live. The magic is in the surety of knowledge of the need for saving these things, protecting them, and using them all - with regret but with assurances for the future. When a fall-colored leaf stimulates thoughts of carotene and anthocyanins and not "Oh! beautiful!, " then the magic has been lost. (Magic can be found in other fields.)