NONFICTION - Feb. 20, 1994

BAREBACK! One Man’s Journey Across the Pony Express Trail by Jerry Ellis (Delacorte: $21.95; 307 pp.) It would be heartless to knock “Bareback!”--author Jerry Ellis is so vulnerable, so ingenuous; at 42, the last innocent American. Heartless, but not impossible. Start with the title. Would you believe “Clothedback!”? In tracing the storied Pony Express mail route of 1860-61 from St. Joseph, Mo., to San Francisco, Ellis gets on a horse approximately once (it runs away with him). Otherwise, he walks, hitchhikes (!), canoes. None of which the Pony guys did, but what the hey. Oh, he also joins a hokey “wagon train” for a short spell, peeling off when nobody will speak to him. He tells us, often, that he has broken up with his girlfriend, and even more often how he misses his parents (“How comforting it is to me to envision my mother and know that she is alive and well.”) Throughout, he feels very alone--or, in his words, “I feel very alone.”

In prose pedestrian enough to raise corns, Ellis records every thought (“Life’s too short to throw love out the window”; “I may get a Milky Way the next time I find a grocery store”); every conversation (“Is Mike in? Just a minute. Hello, says Mike. Mike, it’s Jerry. Oh, he says.” Not that Ellis’ travels are lacking in incident. On seeing a bull in Nevada, he confides that “adrenaline jars my system to rush fear to every muscle.” In Berkeley, moreover, “I find myself facing a man with a beard and a bottle in a bag.” Now there’s a sight!