Keeping Meaning Ahead of Miles

BLUE ROOMS: Ripples, Rivers, Pools, and Other Waters by John Jerome (Holt, $25).

There is an adage about travel. Anyone can venture far, but it takes genius to travel at home--”to make any progress between porch and gate.” Thoreau said that.

The observation returns to me, particularly that mysterious word “progress,” after reading late into the night, hooked on this small, placid, eloquent book, which is part memoir, part meditation and, for the attentive, part traveler’s lesson plan. Here, John Jerome suggests an antidote to the common addiction for motion over meaning in our wanderings.

The author, whose previous books include “Truck” and “On Mountains,” travels home waters in “Blue Rooms:” the Oklahoma fishing stream of his youth, the Texas river country of early adulthood and the New Hampshire canoe ponds of his maturity. Only sometimes does he make a getaway to a Caribbean beach or the moist woodlands of Canada.

Wherever, he seems to make progress.

He travels at ease, carefully, with open eyes. However, it is not movement that satisfies, but the “there.” The play of light on objects as detected by freshly aroused senses. The profoundly personal connection between memory and place. Nature’s dynamics. Wisps of history. Stray rumination--those internal conversations that come to us when we change surroundings.

All of this is to say that Jerome is enriched by his travels without regard to distance or exotica.

The author’s fascination is with water: on the physical workings of water and, more interestingly, how water works on us--not water in the global sense, but the small waters of one man’s experience. Perhaps you do not share his interest. But surely we all have a desire to gain more from our travels. Jerome demonstrates one way it can be accomplished.

ANTHEM: An American Road Story by Shainee Gabel and Kristin Hahn (Avon, $24, photographs)

While on the subject of traveling at home, here we have one of those search-for-meaning journeys that people daydream about: Let’s chuck everything tying us down and hit the road, seek out those people we admire, talk to them about the mess in the country, and have a blast along the way.

Which, at the age of 26, Shainee Gabel and Kristin Hahn did. The pair, who describe themselves as “veterans of the independent film and television worlds of Los Angeles,” set out with video cameras and a laptop to make a documentary about America. This book is a diary-like offspring of the one-year project, written alternately in each of their voices.

Hunter S. Thompson, Willie Nelson, George Stephanopoulos, singer Chuck D, George McGovern, Ben & Jerry--and nearly two dozen others--are on the authors’ list of people to track down as they venture coast-to-coast in a borrowed car.

This is a generational book arising from a generation not renowned for its social engagement. It is spirited, insightful and entirely worthwhile, marred only by a little youthful vanity and, I’m afraid, a noticeable shortage of historical perspective.

Quick Trips

DAY TRIPS WITH A SPLASH: The Swimming Holes of California by Pancho Doll (Running Water, $18.95, illustrated, maps).

Before summer gets away from us, here is an up-to-date effort to inventory some of the best of California’s swimming holes. Author Pancho Doll says he wore out two pairs of sport sandals while hiking to check each of them out. If you have been baffled by the how-to-get-there directions in other such books, this one is downright comprehensive on that subject, reprinting topo maps and GPS (Global Positioning System) coordinates.

MALDIVES (Lonely Planet, $14.95, illustrations, maps).

This is one of the smallest Lonely Planet guides I’ve seen. That’s because the Maldives are themselves about as small as things get. A scuba diver’s paradise, the Indian Ocean islands answer the question: Got any new ideas where to go?

FORD’S FREIGHTER TRAVEL GUIDE: And Waterways of the World. (Ford, $15.95, illustrated).

I learned this much: Freighter travel is not necessarily cheap. This revised guidebook, first issued in 1957 and updated scores of times, lists a $14,350, 104-day trip around the world. And more than 100 pages of other journeys aboard what seem to be the better quality steamships of the day.

GAY GUIDE To the Pacific Northwest by Andrew Collins (Fodor’s, $11, maps).

GAY GUIDE To San Francisco by Andrew Collins (Fodor’s, $11, maps).

Gay and lesbian networks are so strong as to render guidebooks superfluous for many. But for others, newcomers perhaps or those who travel anonymously, Andrew Collins gives an accounting of the current northern West Coast scene place by place with the authority of an insider. He knows the questions people ask.