Charles Hood - A Salad Only the Devil Would Eat: The Joys of Ugly Nature

Copyright 2021 by Charles Hood

All rights reserved. No portion of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from Heyday.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Hood, Charles, 1959- author.

Title: A salad only the devil would eat : the joys of ugly nature / Charles Hood.

Description: Berkeley, California : Heyday, [2021]

Identifiers: LCCN 2021013502 (print) | LCCN 2021013503 (ebook) | ISBN 9781597145459 (paperback) | ISBN 9781597145466 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Nature--Miscellanea. | Nature--Humor.

Classification: LCC QH81 .H728 2021 (print) | LCC QH81 (ebook) | DDC 508--dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021013502

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021013503

Cover Art: Craig Cutler / www.craigcutler.com

Cover Design: Ashley Ingram

Interior Design/Typesetting: Ashley Ingram

All photographs by the author, except bobcat (), Amber Hood.

Published by Heyday

P.O. Box 9145, Berkeley, California 94709

(510) 549-3564

heydaybooks.com

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For Abbey, the still point of the turning world.

Once upon a time I lived at the beach, and not just any beach, but one of the good ones, Newport Beach in Orange County. A hashtag search delivers 2.3 million Instagram hits; if you stand at the end of Newports wood-planked pier on winter mornings, Catalina Island looks close enough to touch. I was not there the day a masked booby showed up, but I have seen a sea turtle, a bloom of moon jellies, and a stout man paddling a paddleboard completely naked. Coffee in hand, sitting on the front steps of my rental cottage, I would admire the early surfers jogging past in neon-trimmed neoprene, shortboards clamped under blond arms. I envied their urgency and zeal. According to their wet suits, their names were ONeill and Rip Curl. Their girlfriends were even prettier and more fit than they were. I had a surfboard too, but it didnt do me much good. Any wave obvious enough and slow enough for me to catch just petered out in the kelpy slop thirty seconds later. Mostly, I used it to prop open the door when I brought in the groceries.

Newport was beautiful, but life there was complicated since I was married yet separated and we had a baby on the way and no real plan. We also only had access to the rental house for nine months out of the year; in summers we had to move out, putting everything in storage and living out of our truck. With the baby and all, a tenure-track job seemed like a good way to start over. Rumor had it a college in the Antelope Valley would be hiring two, maybe three English teachers. This is the Joshua tree highlands part of the desert, north of the Inland Empire, east of Los Angeles, south of the High Sierra. The tall, vigorous mountains of Angeles Crest separate the Antelope Valley from the rest of Southern California. It is (and probably always has been) a bit lost in time, like a down-market Shangri-La. My hope was to be invited for a campus visit, and if so, before the interview I could bird the nearby town of Mojave (checking for spring migrants), and afterwards, if I got out in time, take a quick cruise through the Lancaster Sewage Ponds.

Water in the desert is a rare thing, and rare places attract rare birds. Among the most legendary of these, a shorebird called a Polynesian tattler had been discovered at the sewage ponds one July day by Jon Dunn. I dont know what Dunn said out loud in that moment, but if it had been me, I would have said holy shit. The Polynesian tattler breeds in Siberia and winters in the South Pacific, and Dunns how-lucky-can-you-get sighting was the first record south of the Aleutians. Would there ever be another one? The only way to know: keep looking.

My job application made the cut and I was told to show up on a Friday in May. I drove out the night before and stayed at Motel 6. The day started great, with perfect temperature and no wind, the trees dripping with birds. I logged eleven species of warbler by midday, including two rare ones for Californiaa black-and-white warbler and a northern waterthrush. I drove Highway 14 back to Lancaster, had lunch, then changed into my suit in the restaurant parking lot. I took out my earrings and put on my wedding ring. I pushed my fingers through my hair. Show time.

The committee was cordial but skeptical: I had a quirky CV that included everything from ESL to photography to a Fulbright in ethnopoetics. There was some tech writing, volunteer work in a marsh, a letter of reference from a poet laureate. It didnt add up. They needed somebody to commit to a lifetime of teaching remedial English. The Academic VP wanted to know, had I taken the wrong exit? Did I even know where I was?

I understood why she had to ask. It has a bad rap, the Antelope Valley. The Antelope Valley is the place where old sofas crawl to the ends of dirt roads to die. Fame touches the Antelope Valley rarely, though Tom Selleck was part owner of a shopping plaza and came out to cut the ribbon. In the 1920s, Judy Garlands family had a house here; it later became a homeless shelter and then was gutted by fire. Frank Zappa grew up here and that should count for something, but once he got out, he refused to come back, not even when offered a pile of money to give a single speech. In Senegal I was once asked if the antelope in my valley were good to eat. Yes, and in fact so good that we ate them all. Even the Pacific Crest Trail goes around the valley instead of crossing it, sticking to the high ground like a matron avoiding a load of spilled manure.

I took a risk and told the committee the truth, that my next stop was the sewage ponds, and talked about birds and deserts and how that afternoons target species, Franklins gull, was named after Sir John Franklin, a polar explorer who died of scurvy in 1847. According to campus legend, I ended by standing on the table, flapping my elbows and imitating bird calls.

Soon enough the job came, and so did the baby; the marriage came back together and then went away again and finally stayed gone for good. Years passed. I learned that xeric landscapes suited me. Not just the Mojave where I have lived thirty-odd years, but all the othersBlack Rock Desert in Nevada and Atacama in Chile, the Gobi and the Namib, the Kalahari and the Taklamakan. The desert is where God is and man is not, or so explains Victor Hugo. Challenge accepted.

Rather than hosting the nomads of Burning Man or the architecture of John Lautner, my desert is more about cars that dont runall my neighbors own at least oneand mailboxes wallpapered with lost dog announcements. Thats why this is the very best place to be a nature writer. The birds are here at the sewage ponds (and the sod farms, in the case of wintering mountain plovers), while back in Newport Beach, people are still trying to find a place to park. I have always been attracted to the idea of making art from trash, perhaps because I was raised by the generation carved from the stob wood of the Great Depression. They slid directly from that experience into the communal frugality of the Second World War. In that way of being and making, an empty Maxwell House coffee can might be reincarnated as a flower vase or a sorting bin for bent nails, or as the chalice into which one pours bacon grease, to be stored on the back shelf of the fridge. You can use bacon lard to grease a skillet or top off a bird feeder. A world in which I wait for perfect light in a perfect meadow before taking a picture of the perfect bird is going to be a world where I can only do nature for ten minutes once every twenty years. But when I embrace the cactus wren singing from a hillside that includes dirt bike scars and ragged mounds of old carpet, I can have all the birds and nature I want, every day of the year.