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The Snow Geese: A Story of Home, by William Fiennes
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Every spring, millions of geese embark on an arduous three-thousand-mile migration from their winter quarters in the southern United States to their breeding grounds in the Canadian Arctic. One year William Fiennes decided to go with them. Intrigued by what he’d read about the birds’ amazing annual journey, Fiennes was also desperate to emerge from a period of illness and from the belief that, at age twenty-six, his life had ground to a halt.
The story of his voyage turns out to be about a great deal more than geese. A blend of memoir, natural history, and travel writing, The Snow Geese is also about homecoming: the birds on their long homeward journey north, the romance of homecomings, the urge to leave home and the even stronger need to return. The arc of Fiennes’s extraordinary adventure is the backbone of a narrative rich in meditations on philosophy and natural science, and deeply perceptive in its descriptions of both physical and emotional travel.
Already being compared with Bruce Chatwin and Barry Lopez, William Fiennes is a gifted writer with a voice that is thoughtful, wry, and keenly observant. His book thrums with ideas, with stories and anecdotes, with humankind as well as with birds. The joy of being alive, of being on the move, and—above all—of returning home are poignantly captured in this intelligent, exuberant book, a debut of great delicacy and distinction.
- Sales Rank: #2000470 in Books
- Published on: 2002-02-12
- Released on: 2002-02-12
- Format: Deckle Edge
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: .95" h x 5.94" w x 8.62" l,
- Binding: Hardcover
- 288 pages
- Attractive blue harcove with jacket showing the author in a field with binoculars.
Amazon.com Review
In The Snow Geese, a model of artful, elegant prose, William Fiennes, a young convalescent, follows migrating snow geese on their annual 3,000 mile journey to the Arctic Circle. Fiennes's own journey, a wide loop he hopes will return him to his pre-illness life, is no less arduous.
Fiennes travels to south Texas, and leapfrogs the birds--by car, bus, train, snowmobile, and foot--en route to their nesting grounds on Baffin Island. His journey's log is freckled with pungent lessons on avian orientation, the Northern Lights, and the sport of curling as well as portraits of birdwatchers, former hobos, backyard inventors, and Inuit hunters. Most moving are his meditations on restlessness--the primal, contradictory human impulses to leave and return and leave and return.
Its prose crystalline and illuminating, its double-helix narrative intricate, The Snow Geese is a rare and painfully lovely work. --H. O'Billovitch
From Library Journal
Far from first cousins Ralph and Joseph, Fiennes tracks the Canada Snow geese for 3000 rugged miles to their Arctic breeding ground.
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Booklist
Along with documenting the action of a cross-continental journey to follow the spring migration of snow geese, Fiennes ruminates at length about the longing for place. A young English writer laid up by surgery, Fiennes needed a recuperative project. Re-reading a 1940s book titled The Snow Goose, which he first read during childhood, he decided to join the geese's wanderlust, departing from their winter grounds in Texas and traveling to their summer place on Baffin Island. In an open-spirited manner, Fiennes absorbs the life stories of transient companions on the Greyhound from Austin to Minneapolis, then to Winnipeg and the overnight train to Hudson Bay, culminating in a plane hop to the Inuit settlements on Baffin Island. Along the way, Fiennes finds himself outpacing the birds, whose northward trek is slowed by a cool spring. Forced to wait, Fiennes readily finds friendly folk glad to put him up. During his stay, he thinks about homesickness as experienced by him and, metaphorically, by the flocks he is following. A pleasant, calming travelogue with a tinge of ennui. Gilbert Taylor
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Most helpful customer reviews
7 of 10 people found the following review helpful.
Birds as healers...
By Amazon Customer
...figuratively of course. The first healing in more real than metaphysical though as we begin with the author convalescing from a debilitating illness. This seemed to be quite a blow to Fiennes because he appears to have been an otherwise healthy young man in his 20's and the illness was a long-term one (we never learn what). He was forced to return to his parents home to recuperate. While confined in-doors he became longingly aware of the freedom of the birds flying around outside. He re-read the story of THE SNOW GOOSE and was inspired by that tale of a lost bird finding it's way back to its correct migratory route.
Now healed his horizons expanded. No longer was his vision limited to just getting better, he was ready to spread his wings. "I imagined a quest, a flight: a journey with snow geese to the Arctic". He quickly changes imagination into action and the rest of THE SNOW GEESE is a retelling of his adventures on his quest: following flocks of Lesser Snow Geese on their 3000 mile northward migration from wintering grounds in South Texas to their nesting area in the Canadian Arctic.
Along the way through various stops in different states we see our land and ourselves through the objective eye of a visitor. Fiennes is English. It's an interesting perspective. Equally as interesting are some of the characters that Fiennes meets. Some of these people are scientists, travellers, and birders. Not surprisingly then these are three of the groups that will probably most enjoy reading this book.
12 of 17 people found the following review helpful.
Finding Home
By A reader
Snow geese, or "wavies," as they are known due to their wave-like up and down movements during flight, are reputed to be the most abundant goose in the world (an estimated six million breed in the Arctic each year) and come in two varieties. "'White-phase' snow geese have white plumage and black wing tips; 'blue-phase' geese have feathers of various browns, greys and silvers mixed in with the whites, giving an overall impression of slaty, metallic blue. Blues and whites pair and breed together; they roost and migrate in mixed flocks. Both have orange-pink bills, narrower than the black bills of Canada geese, with tough, serrated edges for tearing the roots of marshland plants. A conspicuous lozenge-shaped black patch along each side of the bill gives them a grinning or leering expression."
So William Fiennes defines his quarry, not to hunt, but to observe, as he follows them on their 3,000-mile spring migration from the Gulf of Mexico to Baffin Island where their breeding grounds are located. Just as certainly as the geese desire to return to familiarity, so does the author. Having just recovered from a lengthy illness before starting on his trek, he writes, "my frustrations were mollified but not resolved by the kindness of those close to me, because no one, however loving, could give me the one thing I wanted above all else: my former self."
Nipped by the same bird-watching bug as his father, Fiennes found himself curious about "the mysterious signals that told a bird it was time to move, time to fly," and asking, "Why did birds undertake such journeys? How did they know when to go or where?"
But mostly it would seem he just wanted to be part of the adventure, for early on he provides this textbook answer to his own questions: "A snow goose, like all migratory birds, inherits a calendar, an endogenous program for fattening, departure, breeding, and molt. This schedule is essentially fixed, but it can be fine-tuned by environmental conditions." Interspersed throughout the book - between his tracking of the geese by car, bus, train or plane, and conversations with those he meets in transit - are snippets of information about how these migrating habits came to be known.
The obvious question would seem to be if they can winter comfortably in Texas or Mexico, why would the geese want to make such a jaunt in the first place? The answer: "In the high Arctic latitudes, snow geese find large areas of suitable nesting habitat, relatively few predators, an abundance of food during the short, intense summers, and twenty-four hours of daylight in which to feed."
Put that in your travel brochure and you'll find the place swarming with geese every year around the end of May!
The birds typically leave the south in late-February or early-March to embark on their 3-month odyssey north. Last year, Fiennes, who is from Britain and had never seen a snow goose, carefully scheduled his time so he could accompany them.
He describes their first meeting in Texas: "Drifts of specks appeared above the horizon ring. Each speck became a goose. Flocks were converging on the pond from every compass point..." until finally, "whole flocks circled over the roost, thousands of geese swirling round and round, as if the pond were the mouth of a drain and these geese the whirlpool turning above it."
Lesson #1 in bird watching: it can be a messy avocation. The next time the geese return to their roost, Fiennes says, "I took shelter inside the car, wise to the turd squalls."
He spots other species in his travels, describing them just as beautifully as he does the geese. For example, he shares, "when I saw eight tall, slender birds with the long necks, legs, and bills of herons, and shaggy tail bustles, and the dainty gait of ballerinas, I knew instantly that they were sandhill cranes, the oldest species of bird in existence...which, it was once believed, helped smaller birds migrate by carrying them on their backs. These sandhill cranes would themselves soon be leaving for Arctic Canada...."
The trip doesn't entirely go the way he thought it would ("On maps the flight of snow geese...was a flawless, unbroken arc, the curve of time from one season to another. But the reality was different...a stop-start, stage-by-stage edging towards the north, with geese flying from one resting area to the next, proceeding only as far as the weather would allow"), but there are little victories along the way. Soon after Fiennes arrives in Aberdeen, South Dakota the local newspaper reports 340,000 snow geese have arrived at the Sand Lake National Wildlife Refuge within the last 24-48 hours. "I couldn't believe it," Fiennes exudes, "I'd reached South Dakota on the same day as the geese."
The sojourn could also be fraught with peril, more so for the geese than for Fiennes, as he relates, "Once, near Elgin, Manitoba, snow geese were seen flying northeast during an electrical storm. The flock, 300 yards wide and three-quarters of a mile long, was flying at about 180 feet. Witnesses described a flash of lightning, a thunderclap, an entire portion of the flock falling to the ground, struck dead."
Finally reaching Baffin Island, Fiennes found himself in a different world: "It was ten o'clock, evening, but the light still held to the idea of day, with no sign that night was imminent or ever expected," and "The silence was something you could hear...a steady white drone." His guide confides, "Sometimes I'm out there. I'm out on the land, and it's like the void. It's like a sentence or two before Genesis."
This is a good book to be reading with spring approaching - or when you want it to approach - for following the migration of the geese is akin to tracing the permeation of warmer weather as it spreads across the continent. With winter still clinging to parts of the landscape, we need to hear phrases like: "The afternoon was beautiful: unambiguously spring."
3 of 4 people found the following review helpful.
Ideal for migration buffs, & health professionals !
By sulis
I read excellent reviews of THE SNOW GEESE while in transit from Europe to the USA and bought the work at Gatwick airport. It's an unusually informative & absorbing book, more than one man's healing journey via the migratory patterns of snow geese, more than a collection of fascinating encounters with experts from Eagle's Lake to Baffin Island. As a health professional, I was also struck by Fiennes' research on medical definitions of "heimweh" or "homesickness" and "nostalgia", and shall share these insights with my students worldwide.
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