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P A S S T H E B U T T E R W O R M S: remote journeys oddly rendered BY TIM CAHILL | VILLARD, 283 PAGES, N O N F I C T I O N when Tim Cahill began writing about his encounters with strange landscapes and people, back in the 1970s, literate travel writing was something of a novelty, and writing about "adventure travel" was largely confined to macho-man magazines with titles like Action for Men and Amazing Men's Stories. Cahill's small if significant attempts to move beyond the limits of this genre were certainly welcome. As he put it in "Jaguars Ripped My Flesh," his ironically titled first collection, it was a real accomplishment at the time to "report the facts and write an evocative English sentence about, say, shark diving, without a lot of gratuitous chest pounding." But this collection of "remote journeys oddly rendered" seems, for all of its oddness, a rather formulaic affair. We are now in what some would call a golden age of travel writing and what some others (notably Sallie Tisdale, in a contentious 1995 Harper's essay) would call a glut. And Cahill is still churning out the wry, witty and ultimately inconsequential essays he's always been writing. Cahill's destinations -- from the isolated Queen Charlotte Islands ("the Canadian Galapagos") to the Mongolian steppes -- are novel enough, but his writing no longer really is. Cahill, one of the founding editors of Outside magazine (where most of these pieces originally appeared), is an entertaining writer, to be sure, and several of the pieces in "Pass the Butterworms" -- like his account of a trip to the North Pole on a Russian icebreaker and his personal reckonings with malaria -- are genuinely moving. But this collection of magazine pieces seems haphazard and almost deliberately shallow. Cahill tends to go for easy jokes over the sort of genuine introspection that can lift the best travel writing to the level of real literature. We never get a sense of any of the other characters in Cahill's quests -- including several regular companions whom Cahill is constantly reintroducing to us in one essay after another. (Annoyingly, Cahill's made no effort to edit out such redundancies.) And we never get much of a sense of what drives him, beyond the promise of interesting scenery and a nice paycheck from Outside. Perhaps next time Cahill will take notice of the scenery inside his own brain; his travels, and his writing about them, would be much richer if he did. -- David Futrelle BOOKMARK: http://www.salonmagazine.com/sneaks/sneak.html