Bird Songs of the Mesozoic: A Day Hiker's Guide to the Nearby Wild

Hopes is an engaging writer who's not afraid to look for the beauties of nature even in the most suburban of spaces. He advises us not to wait till we have time to make that long planned hike into the Swiss Alps or Andes, turn around and look in your own backyard. As he grows older, he remembers a time when he used to cut classes in college solely in order to exercise a new pair of hiking boots, but now he realizes with a start that all of last year he took only one other hike besides the present one. And you'll chuckle as he finds the body of an animal savaged by a catamount and to get over the shock he goes for the flavored vodka (that he brought along with him "to ward off the cold," yeah right). A professor by day and a poet by night, Hopes is also rather theatrical and Southern, and folks who enjoyed the grim Guignol of something like MIDNIGHT IN THE GARDEN OF GOOD AND EVIL should thrive on this one. One evening he gives into impulse and he decides to stay overnight in an unlikely destination, the mountain town of Princeton, West Virginia. We see this bustling little town through his eyes, share his surprise at the abundance and the optimism of a place he thought might be frightful. He sees churchgoers ushering each other into services with a gentle hand pressed into the small of the other's back, and he reflects that among his circle, such a gesture would be verboten, bound to be misconstrued in the edgy world of college life and its attendant harassment protocols. How long it has been since he's felt a gentle hand in the small of his back! A human gesture that comes with a certain prim grace. At night, sipping his vodka, the moon grows full and Hopes relaxes into the miracle of modern night. I love his descriptions of light and color, and the particular stillness of time. "[The moon] makes the hill the color of distant fire, then of linen and snow. Soon the dark is not dark at all, not black, but sivery cobalt, a line of shadow thrown behind every tree, every blade of grass." Description by accretion, by ringing the changes in the silvery hillside. "The million, million stars make still points on the face of the stream until broken by the body of a trout. Some really are red, some gold, one almost green among the blue-white diamonds." I couldn't figure out if he meant the trout or the stars by that point. And to tell you the truth I didn't care. It's an extraordinary synaesthesia of abandonment.

Well-written, but the author's grasp of "real nature" seemed rather slight and superficial. Clearly more literary than natural-historical. On the other hand, the doctored Polaroids that illustrate the book--very clever!

Besides professor of literature at the U. of North Carolina-Asheville, author Hope is also a painter, actor, poet, and theater director. He uses his senses, skills, and experiences in all of these in writings on nature. He doesn't go looking for nature by trekking into the wilderness or vacationing to exotic places, for instance. Rather he takes nature where he finds it in the rounds and occasional excursions of his ordinary life. As he has found, "nature finds us where we are." In addition to the fetching essays, Hopes wants to impart the lesson that nature is always at hand in some way; and can, and should be, recognized and appreciated on this basis accessible to anyone at any time.