26 October 2024 SOMETHING ABOUT THE SKY by Rachel Carson and Nikki McClure, ill., Candlewick Studio, March 2024, 56p., ISBN: 978-1-5362-2870-0

“Rising, the warm air cools; at a certain point it can no longer contain its water invisibly, and the white misty substance of a cloud is born.”

“The fog comes

on little cat feet.

It sits looking

over harbor and city

on silent haunches

and then moves on.”

– Carl Sandburg (1916)

“Rows and floes of angel hair

And ice cream castles in the air

And feather canyons everywhere

I’ve looked at clouds that way”

– Joni Mitchell (1966)

“Clouds are as old as the earth itself–as much a part of our world as land or sea.

They are the writing of the wind on the sky.

They are the cosmic symbols of a process without which life itself could not exist on earth.

Our world has two oceans–an ocean of water and an ocean of air. In the sea, the greatest depths lie about seven miles down. Life exists everywhere. Corals–sponges–waving sea whips inhabit the bottom. Fish glide through the sea, carrying lightly the weight of all the overlying water. Waves move across it. Great currents flow through it like rivers.

We, too, live on the floor of an ocean–the vast atmospheric sea that surrounds our planet. From airless space down to where it touches earth, its depth is some six hundred miles, but only in the lowermost layer, some six or seven miles deep, is the atmosphere dense enough to support life. Here, close to the earth in the zone of living things, clouds are born and die.

Like the sea, the atmospheric ocean is a place of movement and turbulence, stirred by the movements of giant waves, torn by the swift passage of winds that are like ocean currents.

These movements of the air are made visible by the patterns of the clouds.”

I love to gaze out the window, westward, watching the clouds building up and spilling over the top of Twin Peaks. After reading Rachel Carson’s 1956 poetic essay on how clouds are a keystone to life on this planet–the reason humanity could come to exist–you may well never look at clouds the same way again.

“Like whitecaps on the crests of ocean waves, these clouds mark the crests of giant atmospheric waves–waves surging through space in an undulating pattern.

The bands of cloud mark the upsurges of condensation; the wave troughs of blue sky, the warmer air valleys of evaporation. Clouds give clues to the unseen structure of the ocean of air.”

Six years before the publication of SILENT SPRING, Carson’s seminal 1962 book that kickstarted the modern environmental movement, Carson developed this essay for a children’s educational television program. The script’s abridged version, presented here with Nikki McClure’s cut-paper illustrations, is not some cozy tale for four-year-olds. Given the conceptual science presented, and given its relationship to today’s significant climate issues; I would argue that second-, third- and fourth-graders would make a more appropriate readership and audience. 

I would further propose that Nikki McClure’s washi paper/sumi-inked, cut-paper illustrations–predominantly featuring blues, whites, grays and blacks–are a pitch-perfect match for the sophisticated text and for the intended picture-books-for-older-readers audience. This is unquestionably McClure’s best-realized work to date, and I would be ecstatic to see it recognized by the current Caldecott committee.

SOMETHING ABOUT THE SKY is something else! Don’t miss it.

Richie Partington, MLIS

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