Here’s an Off the Shelf book feature I wrote for the Ojai Quarterly this winter about a delightful and quite unconventional SoCal birder and writer named Charles Hood, who refuses to play the role of the “High Church” nature writer, but insists nonetheless that we should stop for a minute, and take a look at nature, and ask it a question or two. Turns out we’re all the better for his informality.
The magazine software version of the story, which is called Wild Nature: Waiting All Around Us to be Seen ,asks that you virtually turn the pages. Here for my blogging records and for those who would rather scroll, is an online version of this same exact story, with some of the graphics too copied over.
Author pictures on the back of book covers tend to feature poses of sitting people staring intently into the camera lens, sometimes displaying what appears to be a snooty attitude. Not Charles Hood’s author pictures. Though Hood has published no less than seventeen books over the past thirty years, from birding guides to essays on natural history to poetry and novels, Hood in his recent books looks more like an explorer than a distinguished author and poet.
Here he stands in a Texas river at night in his hiking pants, a flashlight piecing the night, grinning crazily.
Here he stands in a frozen white landscape in a bright orange safety parka, smiling cheerfully into an icy Antarctic wind. Here he displays a large spider inside a datura blossom, consuming its unwary prey in search of pollen.
He’s an adventurer in words, not an austere authority, and fittingly his CV reads more like an explorer’s than an English teacher’s. Hood has worked as a bird guide in Africa, a translator in New Guinea on a Fulbright scholarship, and as an artist in residence for the National Science Foundation in Antarctica. He has birded in all of California’s fifty-eight counties, and routinely explores the Mojave around Antelope Valley, where for decades he taught English and creative writing at Antelope Valley College.
Hood has a considerable writerly pedigree. He went to graduate school at UC Irvine in the late 1980’s with many notable writers to be, including future poet laureate Robert Haas and future Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Michael Chabon. He was taught by the late Nobel Prize Winner Louise Gluck, among other noteworthy poets, and yet — despite publishing more than one book of award-winning poetry, and innovative experiments in writing — his writing life now focuses on the natural world, where his life-long birding practice turns out to have a surprising future.
A 2019 book published with three co-authors and the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles, called “Wild L.A.,” proved to be a hit, and recently went into its fourth printing. Hood said he wrote that book in large part to empower people to get out into nature, people of all sorts, from all places in the city. Not just the privileged folk with expensive birding binoculars. For people without cars, “Wild L.A.” included a field trips possible via public transportation, such as a beach trip to see sea turtles. For single women, the authors thought carefully about where it would be safe to go out, including parking at night, and they worked hard to find walks within twenty minutes of nearly everyone in the city, and tested every one of their field trips thoroughly.”
“People are now afraid of nature, they’re hesitant to go there,” Hood said. “I see a younger generation now finding their community in online games and TikTok and Facebook and such, and I really wonder about that. I don’t think it’s really good for people, personally, and I think people who learn how to read and find wonder in nature are living potentially richer, healthier and more productive lives.”
In that vein, despite the long-winded title, “A Salad Only the Devil Would Eat” reveals itself to be a book of essays in charming but straightforward language that finds surprising beauty and delight in the soírt of “hidden nature, ugly nature, abandoned nature, holy nature” one encounters often in Southern California, and especially in the deceptively empty-looking Mojave.
One of Hood’s favorite nature moments, he says, comes when meeting with the completely unexpected, as when he and his collaborator on “Nocturnalia,” photographer and bat scientist José Gabriel Martínez-Fonseca, come across an eyeless Texas snake at night, a small blind snake that looks like a giant, juicy earthworm.
“The surprise created one of my favorite moments in nature study,” writes Hood. “An instantaneous collision of “Wow, how cool,” followed by “What the heck is it?”
Hood lives in the Antelope Valley, when he’s not traveling, and because most of the book is set in the desert, it features plenty of vacant lots, crows and coyotes, palm trees and concrete. Hood sees it all, clear-eyed and without any sort of “High Church” wilderness rhetoric or gauzy sentimentality. Hood grew up in a working-class Atwater, which is near the L.A. River, and part of greater Los Angeles, and though well-acquainted with the city and its ferocities, he sees as well the generosity of its environment — for people and for wild creatures.
In his cheeky essay “Fifty Dreams for Forty Monkeys,” Hood points out that “it may seem impossible, but the birdiest place in all of North America, at least during spring migration, is Los Angeles County. Not Florida, not Alaska, not Monterey. In a single weekend, in a nation-wide competition, Los Angeles County ends up with the most bird species tallied — often exceeding 270. As a site it can cheat in the sense that it has a mountain range and a desert, but it also has something on the order of twenty million people driving sixty million cars or whatever, and so to achieve hundreds of bird species in one weekend, finger snaps for the collective productivity of urban jungles, vacant lots, stony ridges, and muddy culverts.”
In conversation, Hood again and again returns to the idea of reaching out with gifts from the natural world to ordinary people — people who haven’t had the experience of nature, not because they don’t care, but because they’ve never been shown how to find it. That’s why he chose, he said, to teach the night shift at his college, to reach people who didn’t know English growing up, and to teach them to use English professionally for power in their own lives.
“I hope I can be the voice of the disenfranchised,” Hood said. “The reality is that, by conventional standards, I grew up in a very disadvantaged community. There was a lot of food insecurity. There was a lot of abuse. I was sexually abused. At one point I was homeless and living in my car — blah blah blah. The reality is that nobody expected me to go to college in my family. So I want to tell everybody that you get to have a slightly better life. You may not be able to afford a house in Ojai, but you can always go to the park.”
When it comes to Ojai, where Hood had a reading at Bart’s Books in November, he points out that residents now “have experienced both fire and flood. So you’re seeing a system that is out of balance. That phrase now is a cliche, but it’s true. We once had Native American stewardship of the fire ecology in California, and when we did, we didn’t have the fires that we’re having now. That’s just a reality, but it’s also a reality that the land is not “destroyed” by fire. A house may be destroyed, but not the land. That is the narrative we often hear, but all the fire does really is rearrange the pieces of the puzzle on the land.”
Unlike a lot of nature books today, Hood — an enthusiast for all that can be seen around us right here right now — avoids any discussion of possible grim futures.
“As somebody engaged in a public conversation about nature, I really am tired of the entirely negative narrative,” he said. “I gain nothing by using the phrase “climate change” in my books — it will just make people uneasy. Add that to the already existing insecurity about nature and you have fear. And one thing I can promise you, is that nature will be here next year. There will be plenty of nature here long after we’ve moved on to the Happy Hunting grounds.”
Hood brings a playful quality to nearly all his writing. Though he knows well that invasive species are anathema to biologists, he points out that parrots, to cite one example of an invasive species, have escaped and formed colonies in places such as Telegraph Hill in San Francisco, causing no apparent harm. Hood suspects that such “blended ecologies” may be an important part of the future of nature around us, and maybe that might be okay?
In one sentence, along these lines, he will state plainly that it is bad — “very bad” — to release pets into nature. In the next, he will admit to enjoying the thought of a flock of wild monkeys living freely in California.
“I wish that the same careless dolts who let their parrots escape accidentally let their squirrel monkeys escape too. Not hundreds, but enough so that they could have met up, formed a self-sustaining colony. Can you imagine the thrill of it?” he writes. “How utterly supercalifragilisticexpialidocious it would be if you were by Golden Gate Park or the L.A. River, if you were out birding or walking the dog or doing a slow, struggling five-mile run, and suddenly you came across a frisky, scampering troupe of thirty or forty squirrel monkeys, feral and happy and chittering excitedly as they raided an abandoned orange tree.”
Hood in his exuberance might overlook the flaws in a possible California future with wild monkeys, but nonetheless he’s going to enjoy the vision, no matter what people say.
“Somebody’s gonna complain,” he said. “But I don’t care.”
Kit Stolz 