This is the tenth in a series of twelve monthly posts in which I’ll reread my three favorite travel books – Edward Hoagland’s Notes from the Century Before (1969), John McPhee’s Coming into the Country (1977), and Ian Frazier’s Great Plains (1989) – and compare them. Today, I’ll focus on their many original, beautiful figures of speech.
One of the tools these three great writers use to describe their subjects is figuration, i.e., metaphor and simile. In Notes From the Century Before, Hoagland says of a band of wild horses, “They have the corrupt, gangster faces of mercenaries.” He describes a mountain range as “a thicket of peaks, like a class holding up their hands.” A wolf’s mouth is “like a bomber’s undercarriage – like the bomb bay doors.” A man stands in his garden, “bent in the wind like an oyster shell as he looked at his beans.” A woman has “eyelids like poplar leaves.” Old-timers “pull the human language like a sticky taffy out of their mouths.” Of thousands of salmon trapped in a river canyon, he says, “I thought of shark fins, except that there was a capitulation to it, a stockade stillness, as if they were prisoners of war waiting in huddled silence under the river’s bombarding roar.” A fence “squanders the cleared trees in a zigzag course end to end and atop one another like clasped fingers.” The rib cage of a butchered cow “looked like a red accordion.” The smell inside a tent “curled, as violent as a fire, lifting my hair, quite panicking me, and seemed to be not so much that they didn’t bathe as it was the smell of digestion failing, of organs askew and going wrong.” How about this beauty, a description of the interior of a smokehouse: “The smoke comes from small piles of fireweed burning under two washtubs with holes punched in them, but the red fish make the whole barn seem on fire – salmon from floor to ceiling, as thick as red leaves.” And this: “His lips are so swollen from the sun that he can’t adjust them into an expression. They’re baked into testimonial form, or a sort of art form, like the curve of a fishbone on a beach.” One more: “The dog shambles off like a huge bottled genie with a bland, soapstone face.”
Hoagland’s words call up vivid pictures, as do McPhee’s and Frazier’s. In Coming into the Country, McPhee describes a map of Alaskan mountains as looking “like calves’ brains over bone china.” He says of a grizzly, “His teeth would make a sound that would carry like the ringing of an axe.” He likens salmon to zeppelins (“Looking over the side of the canoe is like staring down into a sky full of zeppelins”). He says of caribou antlers: “Bleached white, the antlers protruded from the tundra like the dead branches of a buried tree.” Of a fisherman: “With his bamboo rod, his lofted line, he now describes long drape folds in the air above the river.” Of the sound of a river: “In a canoe in such a river, you can hear the grains of mountains like sandpaper on the hull.” Of Labrador tea: “The leaves of Labrador tea, crushed in the hand, smelled like turpentine.” Of a bear getting ready to hibernate: “On a bed of dry vegetation, he lays himself out like a dead pharaoh in a pyramid.” Of arctic char: “They were spotted orange and broad-flanked, with lobster-claw jaws.” Of a grizzly: “His brown fur rippled like a field under wind.” Of Mount McKinley: “The mountain is a sky of rock, seemingly all above you.” He describes a river with “so many standing waves, so much white water, it appeared to be filled with running sheep.” He says, “People throng the post office like seagulls around a piling, like trout at the mouth of a brook.” Great floes coming on from upriver “roll, heave, compile; sound and surface like whales.” He describes riverborne ice: “big masses pounding into one another with the sound like faraway thunder, or, often, like faraway surf.” I love this one: “He picked up and tossed idly in his hand a piece of dry wolf feces with so many moose hairs in it that it looked like a big caterpillar.” And this: “On a cold, clear aurorean night with the moon and Sirius flooding the ground, the sound of the sled on the dry snow is like the rumbling cars of a long freight, well after the engine has passed.” And this amazing image:
A butchered grizzly: Burgundy is the color of the grizzly’s flesh. With the coat gone, its body is an awesome show of muscular anatomy. The torso hangs like an Eisenhower jacket, short in the middle, long in the arms, muscles braided and bulging. The claws and cuffs are still there. A great deal of fat is on the back. The legs, still joined, suggest a middle linebacker, although the thought is flattering to football. The bear was two years old.
Like an Eisenhower jacket? That’s an arresting, quasi-surreal point of reference. I guess we all remember who Eisenhower was. But did we know he wore jackets “short in the middle, long in the arms”? Who but McPhee could imagine the torso of a butchered grizzly resembling an Eisenhower jacket? No one. It’s an extraordinary simile conjured by an extraordinary writer.
Speaking of extraordinary, consider these gorgeous figures of speech from Frazier’s Great Plains:
Away to the skies of sparrow hawks sitting on telephone wires, thinking of mice and flaring their tail feathers suddenly, like a card trick!
The Great Plains are like a sheet Americans screened their dreams on for a while and then largely forgot about.
Beyond the road were foothills, clear-cut of timber in patches, like heads shaved for surgery, and beyond the hills were mountains.
This one is crazy-good:
The first snowstorm blew in from the north, and crows crossed the sky before it like thrown black socks.
And this:
A moth glanced off the edge of the windshield, and in the sunset the dust its wings left sparkled like mascara.
This one makes me smile every time I read it:
Carp sometimes rise up and suck insects off the surface with the same noise the last of the bathwater makes going down the drain.
And this:
Along a straightaway, a coyote raced the truck, his tongue flapping beside him like a tie.
And this:
Maybe you’ll hear a good bluegrass song, like “Blue-Eyed Darlin’,” by Bill Monroe and the Bluegrass Boys, that comes at you like a truckload of turkey gobblers.
Here’s an ingenious one:
Up ahead, in North Dakota, storm clouds came all the way down to the ground like an overhead garage door.
I love this:
Canvas tipis as white as water-cooler cups stood among the trees.
And this:
From the wooden floor came a dust that smelled like small towns.
How about this beauty:
Then the road twists to follow a river valley, and cottonwood leaves pass above, and someone has been cutting hay, and the air is like the inside of a spice cabinet.
Hoagland, McPhee, and Frazier are masters of figuration. Another aspect of their art is their keen eye for detail. That will be the subject of my next post in this series.
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