Setting Out to Sea in the Wake of Crisis

ALONG THE EDGE OF AMERICA by Peter Jenkins (Rutledge Hill Press, $19.95 ).

Peter Jenkins is a well-known landlubber. His first best-selling book, “A Walk Across America,” recounted a five-year odyssey he made in his 20s. Other hiking adventures followed in stride. Then, facing the big Four-O, he decided to try his sea legs.

In a 25-foot, twin-engine fishing boat, Jenkins explored America’s Gulf Coast. He started in the Dry Tortugas, a sprinkling of islets beyond the Florida Keys, and ended at the mouth of the Rio Grande. In between, he battled storms, sandbars and his own inexperience--he had never captained a boat before.

Like many journeys, this one began in the wake of a personal crisis (in this case, marital discord). A common theme throughout is Jenkins’ internal journey in search of peace and fulfillment. Fortunately, he navigates around the hand-wringing pretty well. Mostly, his heading is true: directly at the strange, powerful and funny characters that line the book like buoys along a harbor channel.

People like Peter Jenkins. They open up to him and sooner or later, they tell him their tales. The storytellers include Eric, the former dope smuggler; Scott, the Ph.D charter boat captain; Quinten, the pistol-toten’ Texas judge, and 82-year-old Daisy Durante and the other lovely old women of Wilcox County, Ala.

The most memorable of the Gulf characters are Billy and Red Parker, a pair of hardscrabble fishermen from tiny Goodland, Fla. Jenkins shows us the great dignity of these two brothers and helps us understand their despair as, all around them, traditional Gulf ways die off.

Billy is a Vietnam vet with violent memories and a violent past. Once, while reminiscing about the war, he tells Jenkins, “I used to write poetry, sometimes. One thing I remember I wrote went:

Thousands of outstretched arms

all lined up down a long road

all reaching out

none of them touching me.”

These Gulf people really touch us. And it is they, not Jenkins’ personal struggles nor his nautical mishaps, who make “Along the Edge” a wonderful, jumbled read.

CALIFORNIA DESERT BYWAYS: BACKCOUNTRY DRIVES FOR THE WHOLE FAMILY by Tony Huegel (The Post Co . , $14.95, spiral bound, maps, photos).

I own a sport utility vehicle (SUV) and I resent what you’re thinking. I have taken it off road. I swear. That’s not just freeway dust on the windshield. However, for the rest of you 4x4ers who haven’t taken the plunge, this could be a valuable book.

“Byways” includes 50 drives in three Southern California desert areas: around Death Valley, in the Mojave Desert east of Barstow and in the Colorado Desert around Joshua Tree National Park and Anza-Borrego Desert State Park.

The format is straightforward. The right-hand page displays a route map; the left lists how to get there, the time and distance of the excursion, information about additional maps and the relevant phone numbers. Most of the route details involve driving tips and distances; there is very little history or scenic description. Other books tell you why. “Byways” tells you how.

Routes are graded “easy,” “moderate” and “difficult.” Huegel assumes the reader is driving a normally equipped SUV and has no special driving skills.

The trips range from a few miles to more than 100. Most fall between 15 and 50 miles. For example, a round trip within Death Valley from Furnace Creek to Inyo Mine is 20 miles and takes four to five hours. According to Huegel, some of the routes are partially paved and most are on well-graded dirt roads. Only a few are potential axel-snappers. All, he says, are on established, public roads.

SOMETHING HIDDEN BEHIND THE RANGES: A HIMALAYAN QUEST by Daniel Taylor-Ide (Mercury House, $14.95, paper, photos).

In the 1950s, the Himalayas were abuzz with expeditions. Several explorers sent back word of seeing strange footprints in the snow, shuffling shapes in the distance. These weren’t the first such reports, but they reached a kind of fever pitch in the Western press. Something was up there. Locals called it Yeti and Western headlines shouted “Abominable Snowman.”

These reports fascinated 9-year-old Daniel Taylor-Ide, who was growing up in the Himalayan foothills of northern India. Unlike other kids, Taylor-Ide never outgrew his early obsession. For the next 30 years, he made periodic forays into the high country, grilling the locals, measuring marks in the snow, seeing Yetis behind every pile of panda scat. Beginning in 1983, he lead several semi-official expeditions into Nepal’s remote Barun Valley, hoping that this remaining bit of untouched mountain jungle would prove the home of his elusive prey.

In the course of his long quest, Taylor-Ide discovered three things: a possibly unclassified type of Himalayan tree bear that has Yeti-like habits and makes Yeti-like footprints; a metaphor that connects Yetis with the wholeness of life, and an abominable prose style that mixes the worst of “The Snow Leopard” with “The Bridges of Madison County.”

If endless conversations about comparative bear-skull anatomy don’t bog you down, watch out for the avalanche of metaphysical musings about life and the resilience of the natural world. The Himalayan lore is fascinating and Taylor-Ide’s half-American, half-Himalyan life is charmingly quirky. But it can be hard slogging getting to the good parts.

HAVANA (LA HABANA) photographs by Nancy Stout, text by Jorge Rigau (Rizzoli International Publications, $45).

On page 51 of this coffee-table book is a full-page photo taken at the entrance to the Palacia de los Matrimonios. It’s a study in shadows. On the threshold is the bride, her face obscured. Inside, ghostly in reflected light, waits the young groom. He’s smiling, maybe a little nervously, but seems happy in his anticipation.

It’s a rare moment of humanity in an austere essay that defines the Cuban capital by its buildings. The “vibrant center of the Antilles,” proclaimed by the dust jacket, and the music-mad, sports-mad Habaneros alluded to in Stout’s introduction, are almost completely missing. Instead, arts Deco and Moderne are discussed and cracked facades dominate the mostly black-and-white photos.

An architectural look at Havana seems like a soulless proposition. Especially since a dynamic mix of cultures and an explosive history isn’t particularly well-reflected in ornate columns. There are no kids. Havana looks empty and sad. It’s not the melancholy of economic blockade or broken ideology; it’s the melancholy of a stadium after the game is over. Where is everybody?

(The English text is consolidated and repeated in Spanish at the end of the book in microscopic type.)

Quick trips:

SAN FRANCISCO: THE CITY’S SIGHTS & SECRETS text by Leah Garchik, photos by various photographers (Chronicle Books, $14.95, paper) . A coffee-table book without shame or pretension. It’s like Grandma’s photo album, if Grandma were the San Francisco Chamber of Commerce displaying more than 100 pages of pretty pictures that make the city look great. In the intro, Garchik makes a half-hearted claim that the photos will reveal some surprising sides of San Francisco (hence “Secrets” of the title). That’s rubbish. Most Southern Californians will recognize these scenes. We tried to take the same shots on our last trip. Only the light was wrong, the cable car moved too fast and fog oozed over the Transamerica Pyramid instead of draping it gracefully.

SAN FRANCISCO BAY SHORELINE GUIDE by the California State Coastal Conservancy (University of California Press, $14.95, paper, maps, photos). The dream of the conservancy--a state agency--and a number of other private and public groups is to link the Bay Area’s dozens of shoreline trails into a grand 400-mile hiking and biking ring. So far, more than 170 miles have been established. Currently, pieces of the Bay Trail--which includes parks and undeveloped open spaces--are scattered from the Napa River in the north to the San Francisco Bay National Wildlife Refuge outside Santa Clara in the south. This invaluable guide outlines it all and includes innumerable snippets of the bay’s history, sociology, geology, architecture and biology. Did you know that a bunch of endangered California least terns nest at the Oakland Airport, or that in 1851 28 steamboats ran the Sacramento and San Joaquin rivers?

The guide’s format is a bit confusing. The brief, and occasionally vague, route descriptions are jammed between photos (historic and modern), illustrations, icons and maps. But it’s fun to thumb through and a boon to casual explorers.