Journeys

By Peter Stoler

THE RIVER WORLD AND OTHER EXPLORATIONS by Berton Roueche

Harper & Row; 246 pages; $8.95

No subject seems beyond the interest or knowledge of Berton Roueche. An amateur gourmet, he writes lovingly of bananas, "the humblest fruit," but with their comprehensive range of minerals and protective germ-battling skin, a near perfect food. He delves into history to recount the tale of garlic (the early Greeks and Israelites learned about it from the Egyptians). He waxes more poetic about apples, rejecting the notion that this was the fruit forbidden to Adam and Eve. "The apple--the apple I know, the apple of country cider and the autumn roadside bushel--would be out of character in so sinister a role."

Roueche is no less provocative when he turns to more animate objects. Elwood Schmidt maintains a solo medical practice in the lonely little New Mexican town of Jal. With a few carefully chosen quotes, Roueche brings the doctor to life and makes the reader care about him. "Here's a man with nothing wrong with him except he's drunk by noon every day of his life," laments Schmidt to Roueche after his dinner has been interrupted by a would-be patient. "Goddamned people in this town who think I'm like that light switch over there on the wall. Switch it on. Day or night. Rain or shine. And I'll come running."

The other characters described in Roueche's full-length portraits in this collection of 13 pieces that originally appeared in The New Yorker move with a similar ease through the routines of their lives. A Congregational minister visits the aged and tries, without notable success, to counsel the young. Residents of a West Virginia hill town adjust to living in an environment better suited to mountain goats. "How many places do you know," one of the townspeople asks Roueche, "where you can stand at the basement door and spit on the roof of a three-story house?" Visiting a small German-colonized town in Missouri, Roueche reveals that the passage of more than a century has left the place astonishingly unchanged. If the little community of Hermann were to be picked up and set down somewhere in Germany, Roueche convincingly shows, most of its residents would hardly know the difference.

The super-reporter is at his best describing locales and the means travelers use to get from one to another. His chronicle of a voyage in an umiak, an open skin-covered Eskimo craft, from Nome to a fragment of rock called King Island, is a masterpiece of terse narrative and clinical observation. Without wasting a diphthong, Roueche captures the look and feeling of the gray ice-choked sea, the pleasant bite of whisky and the new taste of muktuk, or whale fat: "The blubber looked like a block of cheese--pale pink cheese with a thick black rind. It was very tender and almost tasteless. The only flavor was a very faint sweetness."

Even more evocative is the title piece of this collection, an account of a voyage by towboat down the Missouri and Mississippi rivers to New Orleans. With a style that occasionally echoes Mark Twain, Roueche records the banter between pilots of passing barges, remembers the gargantuan meals consumed in the boat's mess (fried country ham and red eye gravy, sweet potatoes, succotash, okra, banana cream pie) and recaptures as well as anyone has ever managed to do the awe that all great waterways evoke. "The river was unmistakably the Mississippi now," Roueche writes. "It stretched a mile wide and infinitely on ahead. In the thin white early-morning light, it might have been a lake. But the banks were still riverbanks -- sand bars and willow flats, wil low slopes and high cottonwood bluffs."

Roueche leaves no doubt that he hates to see any journey, any visit, any encounter end. Readers who pick up The River World are likely to have the same feeling about his book.

--Peter Stoler

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