When the pandemic lockdown began, illustrator Loren Long’s work life didn’t change much. “I work at home, so keeping away from people wasn’t hard,” he recalls as we stand at the edge of the parking lot behind the Schoolhouse Restaurant in Camp Denison. One big change did happen, though: Long and his wife Tracy adopted Charlie, a 50-pound hound mix.
Charlie is a great dog—Loren refers to him as his “studio dog,” as Charlie will lay around Long’s home space all day—but he also needs to get his exercise. And since he’s a barker, Loren, Tracy, and Charlie often make the drive from their Madeira neighborhood to the Little Miami Bike Trail, where Loren and Charlie established a daily routine of running a mile or so down the trail and then walking briskly back.
That’s where Long first saw an abandoned yellow school bus in a goat paddock. Four years later, the vehicle is the star of Long’s new picture book, The Yellow Bus (Macmillan Publishers).
At first, the bus struck Loren as simply odd. It was an object that was at once mundane and iconic and yet in the wrong spot. Why was the bus parked in a goat paddock? It seemed sad. Long and Charlie ran past the bus every day, and every day Long would think about it. Over time, though, his impression of the scene changed. “There was something about that bus that seemed almost happy to me,” he says as we stand on the trail, gazing through the thick summer foliage at the back of the old yellow wagon. “Why would the bus be happy in such a state?”
The pandemic was the perfect time for long, contemplative thoughts, and Long found himself meditating on the broken-down bus. What set of circumstances had brought it here? What happened between the days of driving children “from one important place to another,” as he put it in his book, and the days of sitting dormant in a sinking field in rural Ohio?
And yet, as he watched goats climb inside the bus in the rain or on top of the bus in the sunshine, he felt uniquely inspired. He finally got to the bottom of what made the bus so unexpectedly happy: It was the goats. They were filling the bus with joy.
In his new book, Loren explores the life of a fictionalized bus in several stages, each one a “level below” the one that preceded it. Beginning with motoring children and transitioning to driving the elderly, eventually getting to the goats and beyond, Loren’s yellow bus is joyful over the long haul and, as he puts it in our interview, “a variety of low points and very real valleys.” Yet the bus at the end of the book (which I won’t spoil for you here) is arguably more joyful and fulfilled than she is at the beginning.
“It was a crazy process,” Long says of assembling the story. “I wanted to take the bus on all of these twists and turns, but really the process of creating the book took me on all of these twists and turns.”
A huge fan of bucolic landscapes like Virginia Lee Burton’s world in The Little House, Long wanted to create a detailed setting showing the bus in a variety of locations. But he couldn’t quite visualize the town, so he decided to build a small model in his studio. What was supposed to be a 10-day process turned into a two-month project, full of long, invigorating days. “I was having the most fun I’ve had in years,” he says.
In the end, the model nearly took over his studio with the landscape of the entire town—from the top of the hill, where the bus starts her journey, to the far south paddock of the lower farm, where she encounters her goats and final resting place. In addition to building the model, which he’d never done for any of the more than two dozen books he’s illustrated previously, Loren also experimented with a new medium: charcoal. The book appears entirely almost entirely in black and white, except for the bus and the bus riders, who are in color.
The book’s visuals are stunning, and the message behind the story—about the passage of time, the value service and hard work, and the joy that can be found in almost any circumstance—resonates more deeply than most picture books on the shelves.
Photograph by Chris von Holle
As we circle back to the goat paddock, Long shares that the owner of the Schoolhouse Restaurant and her brother, who owns a small country store and oversees the goat paddock, are now aware of the book’s publication. They were understandably surprised when Long introduced himself and asked if he could bring a team from his publishing house to see the real bus. (The publisher later produced a short book trailer, which can be viewed here.) But they also shared something with Long that surprised him: The goats he’d been seeing every day as he jogged by with Charlie were there because they’d been rescued; that paddock, now outfitted with a small lean-to and other equipment, is a haven for goats in the Cincinnati area that otherwise have nowhere to go.
In the end, the story of a yellow bus making a home for the people she carries is truer than Long imagined. As it turns out, finding spaces for refuge—whether from inclement conditions inside a bus tucked in away a field or from the aimless, meandering days of the pandemic through deeply creative work—matters to everyone.
Loren Long’s yellow bus is also making an appearance this summer on a new ArtWorks mural. Read more about the public art project here. Read the New York Times’ interview with Long here.
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