Reading time: Less than 1 minute
I like to share interesting pieces of figurative language I encounter in my reading. I write today about some metaphors and similes from Dana Goodyear…
I live in Vancouver, Canada which is geographically considered to fall within a coastal rain forest. Trouble is, we haven’t had any rain to speak of for at least two months. And weather-announcers are starting to use the D-word — drought.
Thus, I read with particular interest a New Yorker piece, by Dana Goodyear, about California’s water problems. Subtitled, “What will California sacrifice to survive the drought?,” the piece explored the implications of the dying Salton Sea, a human-made lake that is gradually drying up. Sadly, the retreat of this water is likely to lead to toxic dust and serious health problems for both animals and humans.
I’d seen Goodyear’s work before on the pages of the New Yorker, but until I read this piece, I hadn’t realized she was a published poet. It shows in her writing. Take a look at these metaphors and similes.
- There is a place in the California dessert where a pipe pokes out from a berm made of broken concrete and delivers freshwater to a dying sea. I stood there recently, on a beach of crumbled barnacles, and watched it gush. The sea was the dull blue of a cataract, surrounded by small volcanoes, bubbling mud pots, and ragged, blank mountains used for bombing practice by the Navy and the Marines
- Like a jungle, it seethes: yellow-green Sudan grass; rough, inky sugar beets; alfalfa as bright as a banker’s shade; mixed lettuces that grade from light green to violet. “You could not paint a picture that is a better color,” Kay Pricola, the executive director of the Imperial Valley Vegetable Growers Association, says.
My husband and I visited the Salton Sea two years ago and were struck by its eerie beauty. All the more eerie now that I know the health risks associated with its demise.