In Dangerous River, Patterson writes, “After an hour or two’s travel a dirty, yellowish-looking ball climbed up out of the trees on the right bank and hung suspended in the sky, glowing feebly like a badly cleaned lantern.” He says of the wind, “The raving wind was whipping the tall spruce around like fishing rods.” Of wind and snow: “In the small hours of December 2, the wind rose to a gale and swung into the northwest, and from there it blew all day long, a searing blast of cold out of a cloudless sky, drifting the snow down the river with a hissing, scratching sound like that of driven sand.” He compares the canoeing prowess of his friend Albert Faille to that of a “fine swordsman”:
The Nahanni has probably never seen a finer canoeman, and to watch Faille search out the weak spot in a riffle and plant his canoe’s nose exactly there, and neither to the right nor to the left by even a hand’s breadth, is like watching a fine swordsman seeking for an opening, feeling out his adversary.
And in one of his most lyrical lines, Patterson writes, “The seed heads of the long, dry grass shone like silver against the low October sun: the meadows were wind rippled and from them came a new sound – a sound that is never heard in the dark forests of the North – the song of the west wind in the wild standing hay.”
Raban’s Old Glory brims with figuration:
The afternoon was rank and sweaty, and the Mississippi here drifted in a listless sweep between two bridges, a mile north of the end of commercial navigation. It looked as tame as a fishpond in a civic park.
Rising fish left circles on the water here, and the current squeezed them into narrow ovals, before they faded into the scratched wax polish of the top of the river.
The tow went by, dragging the river in creases behind it like a trailed skirt.
Big tows lounged on the current, thrashing the water around their tails, their engines farting loudly as they turned. They maneuvered lugubriously around each other, honking and grumbling, heaving their ridiculous bulk about like hippopotami at a water hole.
Once, when I seesawed ineptly over a breaker, the propeller was lifted clear of the water and the engine made a vile sound like the squeal of a stuck pig.
In front of the boat, the water had the gleaming consistency of molasse; behind, it lay smashed and buckled by my wake.
Just beside my boat, a fish jumped. It was a big carp, and as it turned in the air and walloped back, it looked as if someone had chucked a block of gold bullion into the lake.
Still and brown, gleaming faintly in the thin, diffuse light, the lake had the vacant gaze of an enormous animal’s eye.
As I reeled them in from under the boat, they changed from one metal color to another, coming up, struggling, through the peaty water: first an indeterminate flash of dull pewter, then a powerful glow of polished brass, finally a brilliant threshing of pure silver as they came wallowing to the net.
The water felt as hard and fibrous as muscle tissue, and the whole structure of the boat throbbed as it hit each successive wave.
The river stayed wide – four thousand yards from bank to bank – but the islands thickened until they lay as dense as the pieces of a disturbed jigsaw puzzle.
All I needed to watch was the scratched-glass surface ahead of the bow and the sun as it began to settle in the sky behind me.
Wharves, cranes and smokestacks were going by in a blur of black type.
At least I could see a reason for these eddies and learn to predict them before they swallowed me, but I couldn’t explain the boils. They came sprouting up from the river bottom, often in mid-channel, miles from any tongue of sand or rock. Their mushroom tops gleamed nastily, like patent leather.
The junction of the Mississippi and the Ohio was a confluence of thick machine oil and rosewater.
It was like riding a long slide on a children’s playground. The boat streamed with the current.
By nine, the sky had gone blue, the wave points glittered, and I could feel the wind on my cheeks, coming in long warm gusts like the breath of a panting dog.
I edged out of the Yazoo into the mainstream, where the glistering water was tooled with arabesques like an inlay of polished silver on oak.
Tim Butcher’s Blood River contains at least a dozen evocative figures of speech. He says of his guide Benoit Bangana, “He was wearing a bright-yellow plastic raincoat, with heavy gloves, kneepads, goggles and black shiny wellington boots. He looked like a ninja North Sea trawlerman.” A wreck of an old boat has “panels eaten away by rust to reveal bulkheads like ribs in a whale carcass.” The coarse hull of a pirogue feels like “a rough-hewn braille, charting the history of a river nation both blessed and cursed by this great natural phenomenon.” The limbs of his sleeping river guides are “all folded together for warmth like the blades on a Swiss Army knife.” Their wooden paddles are “shape of spades from a deck of cards.” Rainforest trees have trunks “pleated into great sinews that plunged into the earth, as massive and solid as flying buttresses on a Gothic cathedral.” And this wonderful sentence: “As I ran back to the bikes, the ants were so thick on my trousers I brushed them off like soot.” To evoke the Congo, Butcher borrows an image from Joseph Conrad: “And there was the river. Conrad’s uncoiling serpent grew fatter and fatter each day that we descended.”
Figuration is one tool these three great writers use to describe their travels. Another is detail. That will be the subject of my next post in this series.
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