Reading time: About 2 minutes
I like to share interesting pieces of figurative language I encounter in my reading. I write today about similes from John Vaillant….
John Vaillant is a writer and journalist who was born and raised in Massachusetts and has lived in Vancouver since 1998. His work has appeared in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, National Geographic, and Outside.
His first and breakthrough book, The Golden Spruce, told the story of the felling of a Golden Spruce — considered sacred by the First Nations Haida people — on Haida Gwaii by forest engineer Grant Hadwin. The book was a runaway bestseller and won several awards.
Vaillant is known for his deep interest in environmental issues and he pursued a new line of inquiry in his most recent book, Fire Weather.
Published in 2023, the book follows the events and aftermath of the 2016 Fort McMurray wildfire, which caused billions of dollars’ worth of damage and forced the evacuation of more than 80,000 people. Fire Weather describes the history between humans and fire and describes how it now threatens us through climate change.
Vaillant is not only a careful and thoughtful researcher, he’s also a fine figurative writer with often-amusing analogies. Here are my favourite examples from his most recent book:
- This fire, farther off than the others, had started out doing what most human-caused wildfires do in their first hours of life: working its way tentatively from the point of ignition through grass, forest duff, and dead leaves — a fires’ equivalent to baby food.
- All afternoon, cell phones and dashcams captured citizen cursing, praying, and weeping as they tried to escape a suddenly annihilating world where fists of heat pounded on the windows, the sky rained fire, and the air came alive in roaring flame. The D11 weighs more than a hundred tons, and its blade is twenty-two feet wide; it can plow down a forest like mowing a lawn.
- Shifts are typically ten to twelve hours long, and, in winter, the sun is up for only seven hours a day; even at noon, it sulks on the horizon offering no sensible heat.
- It takes two tons of bituminous sand to make a single barrel of bitumen, and, at room temperature, bitumen pours about as well as Nutella.
- Compared to the instant gratification of [oil] gushers like Dingman (or Titusvillle), bitumen was a hard sell — lima beans to oil’s ice cream.
