By Jacqueline Briggs Martin
The true story of a farm boy in Vermont who decided to photograph snowflakes, which nobody had managed, and then did it for fifty years.
Willie Bentley grows up in Jericho, Vermont, where it snows a hundred and twenty inches a year, and while everybody else is shovelling it he is lying on his stomach catching flakes on a board and drawing them before they go. Drawing is too slow. His mother gives him her old microscope. That's better, and still too slow, because a snowflake lasts about as long as your breath. So he asks for a camera with a microscope on the front, and it costs more money than his family has, and after two years his parents buy it anyway. Then he fails. For a whole winter he gets nothing. His father thinks it was a waste. The second winter, one flake comes out, and he has done something no one on earth has done. He spends the next fifty years doing it again: five thousand snowflakes, no two the same, in a shed, in the cold, mostly ignored, until at sixty-six he publishes the book of them. That December he walks six miles home through a blizzard, and he gets pneumonia, and he dies.
It's the rare true story where the thing the person wants is small enough for a child to hold. He doesn't want to change the world. He wants a picture of a snowflake. Everything a class is supposed to learn about how science actually goes is in here without a single lecture: the first winter produces nothing, the neighbors think he's odd, the work is repetitive and cold, and the payoff is a photograph of something that melts. Fifty years for five thousand pictures. A child who reads this comes away understanding patience as a method rather than a virtue.