A WATER-LOVER'S H - The Washington Post

BLUE ROOMS Ripples, Rivers, Pools, and Other Waters By John Jerome Holt. 241 pp. $25

Periodically throughout this modest but engaging meditation on water in all its myriad forms, John Jerome writes about traveling in search of swimming holes, rivers or Caribbean vacation spots that remain relatively undiscovered. Unpolluted by powerboats, Jet-Skis or tourist trash, these afford special pleasures. In some ways, I think of Jerome as like one of these unspoiled places -- too few people know about him and his work, but I wouldn't mind (and, I suspect, neither would he) if he suddenly enjoyed an influx of readers. His work (unlike a beach or wilderness area) wouldn't suffer and besides, Jerome deserves it.

"Blue Rooms" is his ninth book. I've read three others (well, four, if you count "Staying Supple," a paean to the pleasures of stretching): "Truck," about rebuilding a 1950 Dodge pickup; "Stone Work," an account of building a stone wall on his New England property; and "The Writing Trade," an account of a year in a freelance writer's life.

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That last is the one that stays with me most these days, as its stories of battles with editors and encounters with the freelancer's dilemma -- do I accept this small assignment, one that will delay the longer project I really want to work on, or turn it down and risk not getting called again? -- are important cautionary tales. But I recommend all with only minor reservations. (Come on: As a reviewer, I'm allowed my quibbles.)

"Blue Rooms" follows the pattern of the first three above. Jerome takes a seemingly ordinary subject -- in this case, water -- and gradually exposes how extraordinary it is.

Jerome loves water. "When I was a child," he tells us late in the book, "it was an entirely other world, a different place, that I needed, or thought I needed, badly. I had the luck to discover it early, and found it manageable in ways that the dry-land world was not. . . . Now, in late adulthood, I dream of waters almost every night."

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I suppose the literal explanation for Jerome's water obsession lies in his history. His father was "an alcoholic and a fisherman, in that order." His parents' was "an abusive marriage," from which his mother "escaped" when he was 4. Her second marriage incurred Jerome's "enduring Oedipal displeasure."

While recollections of family are threaded throughout "Blue Rooms," rest assured that they don't dominate, and that this isn't a painfully intimate memoir of dysfunction. Memory may be the vehicle, but water is always the destination in this celebration of Jerome's wonder at "physics made visible."

The man is mad for water. He loves to look at it, to canoe on it, to swim in it, to learn (and share with us) how water works. Here he is, for example, on the physics of nature: "Downhill is not a river's only slant. It bulges in the middle, for instance. Flowing water is slowed by friction with the bottom and the banks; the drag pushes water toward the center of the stream, actually making the surface of the stream slightly convex. . . . Surface tension also slows the flow, so the zone of fastest water -- what zealous canoeists refer to as the river within the river' -- is a little below the surface and equidistant from the banks."

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My favorite of these musings, which doesn't involve water, is the revelation that "for every degree of latitude you move north, winter comes four days earlier and spring four days later." In another of his books, Jerome expresses the concept in terms of the number of miles spring moves north daily. Ever afterward, I've dreamed of starting in Florida and driving that distance north each day, enjoying a prolonged but (alas!) not perpetual spring.

As you might guess, Jerome is fascinated by how things work. The book is full of these kinds of gems, insights into how the world works. More than that, however, it's chock-full of reminders that the world isn't in our living rooms, mammoth shopping malls or oversize TV screens, but a breathtaking mammoth outside, a place of some dangers, true, but one of great beauty.

This is a wonderful book. The writing is clear and graceful, old-fashioned in a pleasing, meandering way, like taking a walk through the woods with an old friend who's happy to share his knowledge. Ultimately, I think John Jerome is writing for himself, and he'd continue to do so, even if there was no one to read it. We ought to be grateful we can. The reviewer, a Washington writer, can be reached at nicholsd@clark.net.

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