SECOND OPINIONS : Volunteering Serves Your Community and Yourself : Somehow, the idea has dropped out of vogue. But lending a few hours of your time--at a museum, library, wherever--can prove a mutually beneficial experience.

It happened again last weekend. I was standing behind the counter in the Chilao Visitor Center in Angeles National Forest, assisting tourists by pointing out great hiking trails and camping locations. Someone came in wearing a literary agency T-shirt so I mentioned that I was a client. He was confused. No one told him that Hollywood agents had begun representing forest rangers.

I assured him they weren’t, that I was in fact a writer who happened to also be a forest service volunteer. We talked for a few minutes about how much fun working in the forest was and then he bought a book and left for a hike. But I kept thinking. This happens almost every time my husband and I head up to the mountains for our monthly volunteer day. And we’ve been doing this for eight years now.

Everyone assumes we’re full-time employees. Whenever I say “volunteer” it seems to set off a few memory synapses. Volunteering . . . isn’t that what housewives used to do in the ‘50s between sending Beaver off to school and baking a cake for Ward’s dinner? Or perhaps today it’s just something that really rich people such as Elizabeth Taylor do with favored charities.

Somehow volunteering has dropped out of the mainstream and that’s a shame. It’s part of what makes the community of Los Angeles feel so splintered. If we don’t meet in our offices or on the sidewalks of our neighborhoods, how will we ever get to know each other? My answer is by volunteering all across the city. Instead of continually complaining about budget cuts in libraries, shortened hours at museums and violence in schools, volunteer to help. You’ll be providing the extra assistance our city needs to survive current budgetary problems and you’ll be showing that people do care about the greater community of Los Angeles.

As for the volunteer, after a few weeks in a high-rise off Wilshire Boulevard with recirculated air and fluorescent lighting, I relish the chance to drive up into the chaparral early on a weekend morning, smell the Spanish broom and see the yucca plants. I can’t tell you the interesting people I have met in years of work at the visitor center.

Sometimes I am called upon to occupy the time of a child who bicycled too far from his parents’ campsite and has been brought in by a ranger. Sometimes I lead nature walks for families and am asked the most profound questions by young city children. Then there was the time the retired bird-watching couple came all the way from Maine just to see a California quail. As I was showing them where to point their binoculars, two accommodating quail raced across the trail. You’d think I had given them box seats at the Hollywood Bowl. Those are the times when I learn as much about my home as the visitors do. Even when I’m just operating the center’s cash register, selling books to support the Big Santa Anita Historical Society, I meet visitors from as far away as Australia and Russia.

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In fact, the only sad thing about volunteering in the forest is that I’ve learned how few Angelenos come to visit. So many of my business associates have never heard of the area, and it’s just 20 miles north of La Canada. When my husband and I stumbled upon Angeles Forest after only a few months of living in Los Angeles, we were hooked. We realized it was a place we wanted to return to again and again. But we knew that the everyday work world would demand much of our time and that it would be difficult to force ourselves to make the drive “just for fun.” That’s when the volunteering bug hit us, and it’s been a mutually beneficial relationship ever since. As a measure to relax stress in us all, I highly recommend finding a place that makes you feel good about yourself, whether it’s the local library, county museums or community gardens, and answering the call for volunteers.