A little boy's grandfather wakes him up early, early one morning when it's still dark outside. They creak down the stairs and climb into a truck. They drive past houses and farms before stopping in a field.
"Pop nestles me under his shoulder and we wait," the little boy narrates. "Then, suddenly, we hear them… Soft, then loud. One, then many."
It's the annual migration of snow geese.
"It's just about… one of those quiet moments in nature that end up being really important to someone," says author Angela Burke Kunkel of her new picture book, Snow Geese Season.
Kunkel lives in Vermont, near the Dead Creek Wildlife Management Area, one of the places where — every fall — the geese will cover the ground in a snowy white blanket as they make their way south. According to Vermont Fish & Wildlife, "the geese are best viewed flying around and feeding during the first hours after sunrise and the last hours before sunset," usually from early October into mid-November.
When illustrator E.B. Goodale read the manuscript for Snow Geese Season, she says she knew she had to visit the geese in person. "Something that I was so struck by was the very specific color palette that exists in Vermont at that time of year before the sun comes up," Goodale says. "These very deep, dusky blues like on the mountains, and then all the straw light yellows and oranges in the grass. And I was just like, in awe of this color palette."
Goodale illustrated the picture book traditionally — "I created these watercolor washes to kind of lay under everything to just kind of amplify the colors," she explains. Then she made monoprints, using a plate and her finger or a brush and oil-based inks to create texture and scene. "The last stage for me is always… adding in some line work with oil paint on top to add in all the little fine details," Goodale says.
Snow Geese Season is a relatively quiet story — two characters and a lot of standing around waiting for the snow geese to arrive. Goodale says one of the challenges was coming up with ways to make the pages dynamic and different from each other. So, on one spread the characters are looking at the field through binoculars. In another, the reader sees the snow geese fly over the field as if from above the scene. "This is the kind of thing I love," says Goodale. "Things that are quiet and moody where you can just, like, ease into the atmosphere and like get a sense of the emotions that are happening just through the place."
Kunkel says it was a lot of fun to see all of the familiar details in the illustrations — "the house that the boy and Pop exit at the beginning of the story is a house in the town where I live… and even all the details of what the two characters are wearing." When Goodale was planning her visit to Vermont, Kunkel warned her that there might be hunters in the wildlife area and to wear neon safety gear. "I went out with my son," Goodale remembers, "and we had on these bright orange hats. And I was watching him stand in this field with these deep, deep blue colors all around and darkness all around in that neon hat. And I was like, this is it. This is awesome."
Kunkel says she's grateful that Goodale made two trips to Vermont for this story because it's that kind of attention to detail that makes Snow Geese Season feel so special and relatable. "When my parents were separated, I spent a lot of time with my grandparents but also my uncle who lived with them," Kunkel remembers. "There was a moment where he just took me for a walk in the woods. He was really the only adult who wasn't asking me how things were going, how I was doing, what's going on. And he just gave me kind of that space and that breathing room in nature."
It was only after she finished writing Snow Geese Season that she connected that moment to this story, she says. "And I was like, Oh, like I had that same important moment as a kid."
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