The Pulse of the Heartland : FAR FROM ANY COAST: Pieces of the American Midlands <i> by C. W. Gusewelle (University of Missouri Press: $24.95; 239 pp., illustrated; 0-8262-0720-0) </i>

Every so often gifted American writers come along to chronicle a particular part of Americana and in so doing leave a wondrous and indelible imprint in the reader’s mind. With the publication of these 15 essays on rural Midwestern life, C. W. Gusewelle elevates himself to the level of E. B. White, William Least Heat Moon, Willie Morris and other noted observers of the American scene.

For more than a quarter century Gusewelle has written a popular column for the Kansas City Star and all the while made it his business to peer into the odd and often difficult lives of Midwestern outlanders--the ones who work the coal mines in Illinois and Kentucky or try to farm hardscrabble Missouri land or eke a living out of the Ozark mountainsides. The picture he paints is as stark and real as the countryside itself: adversity, triumph, failure, success, waste, foolishness, wisdom--always with the enthusiastic eye and ear of a sort of modern-day Darwin, reveling in the discovery of some new proof of historical continuity, living or dead.

Take for instance the piece entitled “Moonrise to Mourning: Echoes of the Race,” written 20 years ago but updated recently. Here Gusewelle describes a foxhunt in Southern Illinois. Not the tally-ho kind of foxhunt on horseback, but a truly Americanized version of the sport in which, “Seldom is the fox caught. And never is he meant to be. So it is not truly a blood sport; there is innocence in it. The point is essential, and to understand it you should be acquainted with the country.”

Possibly the most beautifully written of these essays--and Gusewelle is a finely tuned lyrical writer--this story reveals a group of old men and boys in a remote part of the state who meet periodically around campfires on cold autumn nights to “run their hounds,” after foxes. They squat around, listening in the dark for the sound of their dogs, talking of hounds running and hounds lost and it is mainly in the running and the pursuit that they are consumed--not a kill.

In “Memories of a Country Neighborhood,” Gusewelle returns to a remote Missouri village that once housed three hotels, a bank, and other enterprises. “Gone, all of them, to one or the other of those two old friends, fire or rot.” “Before the Mountain Fell” recalls the ravages of strip mining on the people of a Kentucky hamlet and here he describes one woman who is battling the big mining companies and the government that permits them to ruin her land:

“She is in all ways a child of the mountains. She knows the hardship, the heartbreak, the violence there. She understands the greed and corruption of mountain politics. She is acquainted with the forces that have disfigured and would ultimately destroy the mountains themselves and the people who dwell in them. What distinguishes Edith Easterling is the fierceness of her belief that she and people like her, acting on their own behalf, can somehow prevent this destruction. The evidence to date suggests that she is wrong.”

“The Promise of Elysian” reveals certain truths about a little Minnesota town. In “The Fragility of Skepticism: A Report of the Mud Camp Expedition,” Gusewelle recounts the very funny story of how he and some friends camped for days in a dismal Illinois swamp called “The Scatters,” trying to capture or photograph a manlike creature reported to be living there.

“The Broken Twig” is a poignant tale of the downfall of the foreman on Gusewelle’s Missouri farm; how he helped try to save the man from himself, only to be mired in a sinister maelstrom of bitterness and violence. And after the foreman had finally gone, “Bringing in the Sheaves: A Harvest Journal,” is a hilarious chronicle of the author’s tribulations in trying to bring in a wheat crop by himself.

Finally, there is the bittersweet account in “The End of Loving the Land,” in which Gusewelle details the sad end of his attempt at a farming career and the loss of his life’s savings. Here he is concluding the last insult, a tax audit:

“In the end . . . it was demonstrated that I had not ruined myself for gain. But there remained, in the mind of the IRS, the possibility that the farm was a hobby and an amusement--in other words, that I had ruined myself for pleasure. To lay this last suspicion to rest I was invited to submit an informal statement. . . .

“I sat down to begin.

“Broken machinery. Broken men. Pig-eating sows. Bulls gone lame while breeding. Money-eating tenant houses. Fields of mown and rotting hay. Flash floods. Fires. Barren cows. Four-cent-a-pound grass seed. Rust in the wheat. Morning glories in the soybeans. Droughts that opened fissures underfoot. Threatened violence. Deceit and betrayal and disappointment without end.

“I put it all on paper, as I have done here. . . . It is a queer experience to write a summary of the last more than 20 years of your life and to watch as it unfolds into a fool’s story. The story of Job pales alongside the compendium of tribulations I set down, all of them perfectly true. When it was finished, we howled with laughter, my wife and I--the laughter of hysteria and heartbreak.”

Gusewelle has peopled these essays with common folk whom, with the touch of a novelist, he has made uncommon--alive. There are some uneven spots here and there--some of the stories don’t hold up quite as well as the rest. But by the end, my main wish was that the book was longer. I did not want to leave these folks so soon.