The customers were folded over their coffee cups like ferns.
The bed was lumpy, the walls dirty yellow, the curtains like the underskirts of a slattern.
Over the green higher hills to the south, the evening fog rolled like herds of sheep coming to cote in the golden city.
The highways eight lanes wide cut like glaciers through the uneasy land.
The minister, a man of iron with tool-steel eyes and a delivery like a pneumatic drill, opened up with prayer and reassured us that we were a pretty sorry lot.
The pointers came to the wire mesh of the kennel, wriggling like happy snakes and sneezing with enthusiasm, and even the sickly one came out of his house and fleered at us.
The muscles of his cheeks stood out from clenched jaws, a man afraid who by his will held his fears in check as a great rider directs a panicked horse.
Night did not stop us, and when my eyes ached and burned from peering too long and my shoulders were side hills of pain, I pulled into a turnout and crawled like a mole into my bed, only to see the highway writhe along behind my closed lids.
My boat cried and whined against the piles, and plunged like a frightened calf.
It is my guess that we can cut and divide our inherited guilt like a birthday cake….
It is an island that nestles like a suckling against the breast of Maine, but there are many of those.
It did not seem to me to have the thrust of land that supports itself and its owner. Rather it was like a beautiful woman who requires the support and help of many faceless ones just to keep going.
It isn’t only color but a glowing, as though the leaves gobbled the light of the autumn sun and then released it slowly.
It seemed to me that a Long Island poodle who had made his devoirs to Sequoia sempervirens or Sequoia gigantea might be set apart from other dogs – might even be like that Galahad who saw the Grail.
Mount Toro, on the brother range to the west, was a rounded benign mountain, and to the north Monterey Bay shone like a blue platter.
Like a weakening swimmer I edged to the right into a pleasant street only to be stopped by a policeman, who informed me that trucks and such vermin were not permitted there.
The silence was like a rushing sound.
The taxi driver, a sallow, yellowish man, shriveled like a chickpea with the cold, said, “I wouldn’t take you more than a couple of blocks near.”
We watched the wind rip at earth and sea like a surging pack of terriers.
We have inherited many attitudes from our recent ancestors who wrestled this continent as Jacob wrestled the angel, and the pioneers won.
Trucks as long as freighters went roaring by, delivering a wind like the blow of a fist.
Well, he got me out of town by a route which, if I could have remembered it, let alone followed it, would have made the path into the Labyrinth at Knossos seem like a thoroughway.
Well, there I was, a hundred yards offshore with Donna baying over me like a pack of white-whiskered hounds.
When he went away I felt a sweetness like music, if music could pleasure the skin with a little chill.
What a man he was, granite as any quarried about Portland, a perfect model for some future equestrian statue.
To put it plainly, this Isle is like Avalon; it must disappear when you are not there.
This vacant eye, listless hand, this damask cheek dusted like a doughnut with plastic powder, had to have a memory or a dream.
The trees plunged and bent like grasses, and the whipped water raised a cream of foam.
The top is shaved off and a television relay station lunges at the sky and feeds a nervous picture to thousands of tiny houses clustered like aphids beside the roads.
There was a face before me, a lean and shriveled face like an apple too long in the barrel, a lonely face and sick with loneliness.
They walked intently like people going to a fire after it has been burning for some time.
This solitary stone peak overlooks the whole of my childhood and youth, the great Salinas Valley stretching south for nearly a hundred miles, the town of Salinas where I was born now spreading like crab grass toward the foothills.
This journey had been like a full dinner of many courses, set before a starving man.
In this a journey is like marriage. The certain way to be wrong is to think you control it.
In the spring, Charley, when the valley is carpeted with blue lupines like a flowering sea, there’s the small of heaven up here, the smell of heaven.
First there was a very high iron bridge, as high-arched as a rainbow, and after a bit of low stone bridge built in the shape of an S-curve, and I was on Deer Isle.
First the traffic struck me like a tidal wave and carried me along, a bit of shiny flotsam bounded in front by a gasoline truck half a block long.
Charley’s combed columns of legs were noble things, his cap of silver blue fur was rakish, and he carried the pompon of his tail like the baton of a bandmaster.
For three of four minutes I had a name, and the duties and joys and frustrations a man carries with him like a comet’s tail. It was like dodging back and forth from one dimension to another, a silent explosion of breaking through a sound barrier, a curious experience, like a quick dip into a known but alien water.
For when Charley is groomed and clipped and washed he is as pleased with himself as is a man with a good tailor or a woman newly patinaed by a beauty parlor, all of whom can believe they are like that clear through.
Go to the Ufizzi in Florence, the Louvre in Paris, and you are so crushed with the numbers, once the might of greatness, that you go away distressed, with a feeling like constipation.
From Salinas to Los Banos, through Fresno and Bakersfield, then over the pass and into the Mojave Desert, a burned and burning desert even this late in the year, its hills like piles of black cinders in the distance, and the rutted floor sucked dry by the hungry sun.
Charley moved about smiling and sniffing ecstatically like an American woman in a French perfume shop.
Charley, having explored the area, sat at my feet, his fringed ears blowing like laundry on a line.
And I am sure that, as all pendulums reverse their swing, so eventually will the swollen cities rupture like dehiscent wombs and disperse their children back to the countryside.
American cities are like badger holes, ringed with trash – all of them – surrounded by piles of wrecked and rusting automobiles, and almost smothered with rubbish.
A lovely sloop stood away from us, her genoa set like a curving scarf, and all the coastal craft trudged up the Sound or wallowed heavily toward New York.
And it was building pressure like a boil.
And the Aurora Borealis was out. I’ve seen it only a few times in my life. It hung and moved with majesty in folds like an infinite traveler upstage in an infinite theater.
Charley, always a dog for water, panted asthmatically, jarring his whole body with the effort, and a good eight inches of his tongue hung out flat as a leaf and dripping.
Birds move in the dim light or flash like sparks through the stripes of sun, but they make little sound.
He inspected me and wagged his tail as a professor wags a pencil – once to the left, once to the right, and return to center.
He plays the instrument of language as Casals plays a cello.
I know now she was a mouse-haired, freckle-nosed, scabby-kneed little girl with a voice like a bat and the loving kindness of a gila monster, but then she lighted up the landscape and me.
I had passed my limit of taking in or, like a man who goes on stuffing in food after he is filled, I felt helpless to assimilate what was fed in through my eyes.
I had forgotten how rich and beautiful is the countryside – the deep topsoil, the wealth of great trees, the lake country of Michigan handsome as a well-made woman, and dressed and jeweled.
I lay panting like a wounded duck, quietly cursing as I inched the jack forward under an axle that I had to find by feel, since it was under water.
I set it down only so that newcomers to bumdom, like teen-agers in new-hatched sin, will not think they invented it.
… I was not prepared for the Bad Lands. They deserve this name. They are like the work of an evil child.
I spoke earlier of the emergence of the trailer home, the mobile unit, and of certain advantages to their owners. I had thought there were many of them in the East and the Middle West, but California spawns them like herrings.
I found myself plunging over the roads of Washington, as dedicated to the sea as any migrating lemming.
How many people have seen or heard or felt something which so outraged their sense of what should be that the whole thing was brushed quickly away like dirt under a rung?
Her springs were deeply depressed but seemingly safe, and on hard-pitching roads I slowed and eased her through, and because of her ready goodness I treated her like the honest bookkeeper, the faithful wife: I ignored her.
He stared at the river, and the breeze stirred his hair like white smoke.
Her voice was the bellow of a bull, a deep and powerful shout with flat edges like a circus barker’s voice.
His body was tensed as a strong leaf spring drawn to the breaking strain; his face was grave and gray, and his eyes were on the ground immediately ahead of him.
His pale eyes were frosted with sun glare and his lips scaly as snakeskin.
His face was coffee-colored and cross-hatched with a million tiny wrinkles, and his lower lids showed red rims like a bloodhound’s eyes.
A bear dog would know his chances, but I’ve seen a Pomeranian go up like a puff of smoke. You known, a well-favored bear can bat a dog like a tennis ball.

Featured Simile

“No rush,” I tell him, noticing how Katie’s neck looks impossibly thin from this height, like the stem of a sunflower.
-- Rule of Four, The - Caldwell, Ian and Thomason, Dustin - 2004