A Citizen of Emptiness : THE TELLING DISTANCE Conversations With the American Desert <i> by Bruce Berger (Breitenbush Books: $19.95; 243 pp.; 0-932576-74-5) </i>

This book says that it is about nothing. As Bruce Berger puts it at the start of this set of prize-winning essays (1990 Western States Book Award for Creative Nonfiction), “Drawing words to the vanishing point, speech about the desert is, quite literally, much ado about nothing.”

What does a book about nothing read like? There are essays about Colorado Plateau vagabond legend Everett Ruess, backpacking, the pros and cons of making fires, the meaning or non-meaning of hiking, the effect of good dope in a canyon, bird watching, the problem of sleep when a mocking bird sings, Frank Lloyd Wright, collecting rocks and oddments, an old hotel, the Lightning Field in New Mexico and so forth.

Things are observed but acts are seldom committed. Once in a while weird facts pop up--some birds’ eyes weigh more than their brains. Life becomes a process of contemplation; the conversations of the subtitle are actually more of a monologue, since to date the desert has yet to talk to anybody. Most decisions are about beauty, the very point where modern American desert books began with art professor John Van Dyke’s “The Desert,” published in the 1890s.

Subjects are considered at some length. Consider, well, the burner on a camp stove: “In the larger context, burners were made of metal that had to be prospected, mined, smelted, assembled and shipped. The gas had to be explored, drilled, refined and transported. The finished amalgamation was advertised and sold. The burner, one tiny wart on the corporate octopus, saved some exquisite backpackers’ corner while sacking the world at large. In currently chic vocabulary, the traditional campfire, using a local renewable resource, was soft technology, while burners embodied the massive, discredited hard stuff.” And here I just thought I was making a pot of coffee in the cool of morning.

The writing is very supple, the sentences flow one onto the next without a jarring note. The genre is nature writing, a fixture in our culture because we persist in the belief that something about wild ground makes us whole.

Berger does not stake out positions so much as consider the look and feel of things. But this stance is characteristic of nature writing, and in Berger, we meet almost the pure distillate of this outlook. A long set piece on bird watching ends with this conclusion: “The world of birds, like music, baseball or gin, can sift its way through a personality. Just as most people have sex lives, so do a few have bird lives. Briefly sighted, flashing out of sight, birds are bits of a puzzle we put together faster than it unravels. Spontaneous within limits we can recognize, birds help our eyes master the unknown. Wherever this rootless century sends us, we can begin to reorient ourselves through the common language that shares our air; like weather and sky, birds are a frame of reference. A more progressive referent might be rock bands, fast food or TV. But for some of us who are turning down the volume, it is, mercifully, still birdsong.”

There is a curious distance in the book between the observer and the thing observed. The skin does not get hot or cold, the ears do not grow large at sounds, the eyes do not strain, the tongue does not relish flavors, the heart seldom pounds. Nature tends to be a low-key pageant and the spectator watches like a calm, inert, invisible Emersonian eye.

This is all quite deliberate on the part of Berger, who explains: “Companioned by thoughts, associations, sensitivities, thick skin, protective coloration, and perhaps the right companions, the individual becomes the very citizen of emptiness. The wanderer may find that he is, in fact, the oasis he seeks. The exile becomes the exile-in-residence.”

I don’t really know what it feels like to be an exile in residence, but then, I suspect my understanding is irrelevant in this matter. “The Telling Distance,” like much of nature writing, is a contemplation of the beautiful, and the belching, snorting, seething desert that sprawls across the American Southwest, and deep into Mexico (a nation almost absent in this book), becomes more like the Faberge eggs that were created each year for the Czar--something to turn in the hand, admire, wonder at, and appreciate.

For those who yearn for this perspective, Berger has produced a prize-winning example. For those who tend toward coarser fare, well, there’s always huevos rancheros con tripitas de leche-- and please bring me some salsa and cerveza fria.