[ECO]Holling Clancy Holling: Why His Picture Books Matter Now More than Ever

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Reading Time: 8 minutes

Holling Clancy Holling: Why his picture books matter now more than ever

Holling Clancy Holling was born one hundred and twenty-four years ago.  It has been over three-quarters of a century since his most famous picture book—Paddle-to-the-Sea, a Caldecott Honor book—hit the market.  That feels like a long time to me.  Yet Holling’s picture books remain strikingly innovative and original.  Back then, there wasn’t anything quite like his unique blend of fact and fiction, presented in a hybrid format of story, detailed marginals, and full-page watercolors.  And there hasn’t been anything quite like it since.  

Motivating all of Holling’s greatest picture books—

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(Caldecott Honor book), Tree in the Trail, Seabird (Newberry Honor Book), Minn of the Mississippi  (Newberry Honor Book), and Pagoo—is a striking blend of scientific and artistic impulses mirroring what Holling himself felt as a young boy playing and working in the woods and fields of southern mid-Michigan. 

These outdoor experiences instilled a deep scientific curiosity in young Holling and a ******* to know how the world works, which in turn produced in him an artistic impulse to express his newfound knowledge through story and image.  It’s precisely this connection between his youthful outdoor experiences and his mature literary work that convinces me Holling Clancy Holling’s mid-twentieth century picture books are even more relevant, timely, and important today than ever.  

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Courtesy of the Holling Clancy Holling Papers (Collection 1012).

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, Charles E. Young Research Library, University of California, Los Angeles.

The reason I believe this to be true has as much to do with the particular kind of world children find themselves living in today as it does with the particular kinds of books Holling wrote and illustrated.  Today, kids are much less likely to have access to regular, unstructured outdoor play than they were even ten or twenty years ago.  In response to this disturbing trend, children’s advocates talk about “nature-deficit disorder,” linking the growing gap between children and nature with a wide range of childhood problems, including obesity, ADD, anxiety, and depression. 

While some people question the scientific credibility of the nature-deficit disorder movement, two things seem undeniable to me: 1) today’s kids spend much less time roaming woods, fields, backyards, and parks than their parents or grandparents, and 2) that’s not good for kids.

It’s not very good for nature, either.  Combine kids’ shrinking access to outdoor play with the growing threat and ***** of a major environmental crisis, and you begin to see the problem.  Think of it this way:  Children are growing up in a time when it is more important than ever for them to care about their environments and to understand how those environments work.  Unfortunately, it’s also a time when many kids appear to be more alienated from their environments than ever before.  

Books can, of course, teach children about and, ideally, draw them toward the natural world.  And there’s no shortage of environmental

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on the market nowadays.  On the shelves and online, you’ll find biographies of environmental celebrities and single-issue books about pollution, climate change, and recycling.  But that abundance belies a certain limitation in scope and perhaps even effectiveness—if by an effective environmental children’s book, we mean one likely to cultivate and inspire the kind of curiosity and imagination that motivates children to engage in meaningful, healthy, and productive ways with the natural world.  

Holling Clancy Holling’s picture books are so important and relevant today precisely because of the way they do just that—offering young readers a unique style of visual storytelling animated by a wondrous spirit of scientific discovery and artistic creation.  Academics would describe this aspect of Holling’s style and spirit as “interdisciplinary.”  But Holling, I bet, would simply call it as acting like a ****.  

As a young boy, Holling grew up working and playing, learning and making, in the woods and fields of mid-Michigan.  This relationship with nature cultivated in him a scientist’s hunger to know how things work and an artist’s ******* to show and tell his knowledge and experiences to others.  As an ****** writer and artist, Holling infused his classic series of picture books with this same scientific and artistic style and spirit.  That matters so much to us now because it’s the kind of relationship Holling had with his environment, animating every page of his picture books, that our world so dearly needs.  

It works like this.  Holling’s picture books tell two stories simultaneously.  First, each relates the engaging adventures of its protagonist—a turtle in Minn of the Mississippi, a hermit crab in Pagoo, or a miniature canoe in Paddle-to-the-Sea.  At the same time, each also tells the story of Holling’s own personal learning experience as a child, characterized by his two mutually enriching boyhood desires:  to know how things work and to represent visually and narratively the working of things.

Take, for example, Holling’s most popular and influential book, Paddle-to-the-Sea.  On the surface, Paddle-to-the-Sea is an uncommon but identifiable travel narrative.  It relates the journey of the eponymous Paddle-to-the-Sea, a carved wooden “Indian figure” kneeling in a birch bark canoe, all the way from the northern creeks in Nipigon country above Lake Superior, through the Great Lakes and eventually on to the St. Lawrence River and the Grand Banks beyond. On his journey, Paddle experiences a series of adventures, encountering a wide variety of landscapes, waterscapes, animals, and human cultures.  

Ultimately, though, Paddle-to-the-Sea is a story about watersheds—particularly the way in which watersheds shape landscapes and the lives of the human and non-human animals who live there.  The story begins when a young Native ********* boy carves a canoe and paddler from a block of wood.  He inscribes the message “Please Put Me Back In Water—I Am Paddle To The Sea” into the boat’s underside before placing it on a snowy hill overlooking a river near his home north of Lake Superior.  “I have heard in school,” he says, “that when this snow in our Nipigon country melts, the water flows to that river.” 

The boy then informs his new creation, Paddle-to-the-Sea, what he knows of the Great Lakes watershed:  “The river flows to the Great Lakes, the biggest lakes in the world.  They are set like bowls on a gentle slope.  The water from our river flows into the top one, drops into the next, and on to the others.  Then it makes a river again, a river that flows to the Big Salt Water.”  

But for the boy, just as for Holling himself, school learning isn’t enough.  He wants to learn he can see and feel and taste and touch—what nowadays we’d call experiential learning.  So he makes Paddle-to-the-Sea and strategically places him on a snowy slope. And he waits.  And he watches.  The days pass, the seasons turn, the snow melts, and eventually, Paddle slides down the hill and into the river, beginning a journey that will end some four years and many hundreds of miles later.

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Courtesy of the Holling Clancy Holling Papers (Collection 1012).

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, Charles E. Young Research Library, University of California, Los Angeles.

These opening moments of Paddle’s journey, related in a typical Holling two-page single-chapter spread, beautifully illustrate the way Holling’s tripartite style of text, marginals, and watercolors embody his unique method of teaching and storytelling, even as they dramatically and artistically embody Holling’s own motivating youthful impulses to understand how things work and to dramatize that understanding in word and image. 

The narrative text, set spatially to the left of center, anchors the action.  It’s here we textually “see” and “hear” the boy’s watershed lesson to Paddle.  Just above the text block, along the top of the left-hand page, one of two marginals visually establishes character and setting in a realistic, pulled-back landscape drawing of a snowy mountain peak, ice-shagged conifers, and the small, distant form of the boy kneeling beside Paddle.  

Rotating counter-clockwise on the page sits the second marginal.  Unlike the realism of the top marginal, however, this one graphically employs an almost cartoonishly exaggerated image that literalizes the boy’s bowl metaphor in order to clarify a complex geological process.  The perspective, pulled back even further, shows mountain peaks in the distance.  The boy and Paddle are now too small even to be seen.  In the foreground, massive bowls sit notched in descending fashion down a hillside, water pouring each to each.  It’s a uniquely effective representation of the physical reality of the Great Lakes watershed, the water moving and pooling downslope from the headwaters of Nipigon country through the Great Lakes and beyond.  

Continuing the counter-clockwise movement pulls the eye to the water ****** on the right-hand side of the spread.  This full-page image sweepingly combines the who and what of the chapter—boy, Paddle, and watershed—in an artistic display drawing on the textual and visual information of the boy’s lesson.  Once again the viewpoint makes a dramatic, final leap backwards and upwards, now looking down on the Great Lakes watershed from a bird’s-eye perspective. 

The geological reality of the watershed—from mountain run-off to the Great Lakes to the St. Lawrence River—gets mapped onto the political boundaries dividing state from state, providence from providence, and country from country.  And in the center of it all, grown enormous, floats Paddle-to-the-Sea, riding the water of Lake Huron seaward.

Paddle-to-the-Sea, like all of Holling’s picture books, is more than just a great illustrated story.  It’s also an allegory of sorts about how he believes children instinctively learn—by a glorious blend of scientific and artistic impulses to know and imagine, to wonder and create.  The boy wants to know how watersheds really work.  So he employs his imagination honed by factual knowledge and creates a model boat—nothing less than a playful scientific experiment—to test out his book learning in the actual world.  It is precisely this blend of scientific curiosity and artistic imagination that characterized Holling’s own childhood and that, as an ******, he dramatized in Paddle-to-the-Sea and his other picture books.

The writer M. Clyde Armstrong saw this connection between Holling’s childhood education and ****** literary production as clearly as anyone.  In one of only a few extended critical treatments of Holling’s work, Armstrong relates Holling’s own words about the joys and limitations he felt as a young reader, linking them to his aspirations as a writer of books for children.  “I felt great respect for things to be learned in books,” Holling says, “but I was increasingly upset because I could not find enough books to answer all my questions.”  So Holling took his education upon himself and to the woods. 

As Armstrong puts it, “all the time he had to spare from his multiple farm chores he spent in the woodlots looking and thinking and hunting out the answers to things.”  Armstrong points out that Holling’s inability to find the answers to his questions inspired him to write books that he believed children desperately wanted to read, books that offered the kind of information about the world he himself was seeking as a child but couldn’t find, books that presented information in a way that matched his own wild curiosity and imagination.  

But what Armstrong couldn’t (understandably) see when she interviewed Holling for her article back in 1955 was the way our world today would be so different than his then—with our ubiquitous screens, rising temperatures, and the way nature feels increasingly distant, alien, and a bit scary.  This not-so-ideal relationship with the natural world takes on a particular significance when viewed alongside the very real—though nonetheless still publicly fraught—threat of our changing climate.  For most adults in the U.S.A. and Canada, the reality of rapidly warming global temperatures is cause for political jousting or an all-too-often abstract concern.  But for the kids, it’s the unavoidable reality of their future.  

This, to me, is exactly why the style and spirit of Holling’s work—emblematized in Paddle-to-the-Sea by the boy’s ******* to understand and imagine his relationship with nature—is so deeply important to us today.  It seems to me that the boy in Paddle-to-the-Sea stands in not only for Holling himself as a **** but also for all children who seek to know how the world is and who imagine new ways it could be. 

His books teach children that the world is a thing—a wonderous, wild thing—that can be known and that their curiosity and imagination are the tools they need to understand and enjoy it. As I read Paddle-to-the-Sea today, just a few months from my fifty-fifth birthday, I feel a complicated mixture of emotions I rarely experience when I read the work of contemporary environmental writers. 

I feel confident and hopeful.  The confidence comes from the way Holling reminds me that the future of our planet is in the hands of children born with precisely the scientific and artistic instincts, intuitions, and sensibilities they need to face and solve our environmental problems.  The hope comes from a deep memory that stirs when I read Holling, the memory of that self-same boy still inside me who, like Holling in the Michigan woods, the boy in Paddle-to-the-Sea, and countless other children, desires to know and understand how the natural world works and who endeavours to imagine and create new ways to be a part of it.

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