On a Farther Shore (24 page)

Anemones, small, tentacled predators that come in a wild and colorful assortment of species, were one of Carson’s favorite marine animals. She heaved away at mats of seaweed and collected bits of muck and algae in the small specimen bottles she carried with her, filling them as she went. She also had a bucket for larger captives. Dorothy never realized that sponges lived in the waters around Southport Island, and she especially enjoyed finding some. There was a good swell running that day, and a few waves crashed heavily enough on the rocks to soak everyone. Afterward, they warmed up with tea by the fireplace and then visited Carson’s study, where they looked through the microscope at what Dorothy called a “new world” that was “wonderful, beautiful, and unbelievable.” Dorothy could not get over seeing the pincerlike spines of a starfish under magnification, though she said it was only “one of a hundred eye-openers” that day. Dorothy also studied Carson more closely.

The author of
The Sea Around Us
wasn’t what she’d expected.
Carson had become so famous that after a photograph of her with her cat appeared in a newspaper the cat started getting fan mail. So it was surprising to Dorothy that Carson seemed “tiny” and often wore a wistful expression. It was hard to believe that so much knowledge resided in such an unimposing person. Dorothy sensed something sad in Carson, who seemed overwhelmed by her sudden prominence. Still, she was humble and kind, and always ended a day like this one by taking all of the specimens she’d collected back down to the water to release them.

Carson was similarly impressed with her visitors.
Stan had given Carson a picture he’d taken of some seagulls and she thought it looked nice on her end table.
The Freemans had also commiserated with Carson over the recent death of a beloved cat, which Carson said had been heartbreaking and all but impossible to get over. Carson was only sorry they wouldn’t have more time to get better acquainted that summer, as the Freemans had to return to West Bridgewater.
She sent Dorothy a farewell note, beginning it once again with “Dear Mrs. Freeman” and closing with a suggestion that they drop such formalities and call each other by their first names. She reminded Dorothy how happy she was that Dorothy had written to her the year before and said she was glad to have started “this very pleasant friendship.”

From the start, Dorothy worried that Carson would misread her intentions and think she was being friendly on account of Carson being a famous writer. Dorothy—who would soon enough prove a capable correspondent herself—respected the demands of the writing process and worried that in making friends with Carson she might interfere with her work. Carson had no such reservations. She wanted to get to know the Freemans, Dorothy in particular. The seasons at West Southport were regrettably short—the municipal water system utilized aboveground pipes and had to be shut down in the fall and did not reopen until spring. There was no possibility of staying on or even visiting through winter. Carson said she was sorry they hadn’t spent more time together over the summer, but agreed with Dorothy that this meant they could look forward to the following season in
Maine. Evidently, Dorothy wrote several letters to Carson while Carson was still at West Southport—but urged Carson not to take time from her writing to respond.

Even so, in late September—perhaps experiencing the “wistfulness” Dorothy perceived in her—
Carson sent off a long letter telling Dorothy everything that had been happening on Sheepscot Bay. Instinctively, Carson seemed to sense that Dorothy was eager to keep track of what she was doing. She enclosed a snapshot she’d taken down at the water’s edge during a spell of unusually high surf—the kind that almost never broke with such violence so far up in the bay. And she gave Dorothy a close accounting of various species of marine life she’d recently examined, including, she said merrily, an “exquisitely beautiful worm” that she had discovered living among a colony of diverse creatures hidden under the pink crust of corallines that covered the rocks in many places. Carson told Dorothy not to laugh—it was the “most beautiful worm in the world.”

Carson said the tides since Dorothy left had been magnificent and that for a while she felt she should divide her explorations among various locales. One of her favorite places nearby was Ocean Point, a sprawling, boulder-strewn headland east of Boothbay Harbor. In the end, though, Carson said she felt she owed it to herself to get better acquainted with her own shoreline and so had stayed close to home. Now it was going to be difficult to say farewell. She also wanted Dorothy to know that her writing was an often trying enterprise, no matter who was around to keep her company.

Carson said she was happy to know that Dorothy and Stan had reread
Under the Sea-Wind
and
The Sea Around Us
and had liked them just as much after having met the author. She told Dorothy she had to make herself bring her letter to an end or else it would start to feel like another book. Tentatively, almost as a person might lightly touch the hand of another in whom they were interested, Carson closed by saying “My best to all the Freemans, and to you my affectionate regard.”

A week later, Carson wrote again. This time she urged Dorothy to keep writing and forget her concerns that in doing so she would
cause Carson to neglect her work. She was behind on the book for reasons that had nothing to do with Dorothy, she said. A big one was that she’d decided to completely rewrite a long section. Almost as an afterthought, Carson mentioned that she was going to be in Boston at the end of December for a scientific meeting and wondered if Dorothy might come into the city and meet her for lunch. This time Carson signed off “Affectionately yours, Rachel.”

Carson went off to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, for more research on the seashore book, and she hunkered down long enough during a gale to write a couple of long, chatty letters to Dorothy. Carson was accompanied by her mother and the two nieces, Virginia and Marjorie. Also along was Marjorie’s twenty-month-old son—Carson’s grandnephew—Roger. Carson told Dorothy she was delighted by Roger’s enthusiasm for the beach. She took him out after dark to hunt by flashlight for ghost crabs and laughed when he picked up a strange shell and called it a “winkie,” as he did the periwinkles he’d collected at Southport Island. Carson reiterated how wonderful Dorothy’s letters were and how every one was filled with things they absolutely had to talk about at length the next summer.

As for their proposed meeting in Boston at the end of the year—Carson wanted to make a definite plan. She admitted to being nervous about the conference she was attending, a meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science at which she was going to deliver a formal paper on the effects of climate change on sea life along the coast. A capable but reluctant public speaker, Carson was more anxious than usual about making a presentation before such an august group of scientists—a prospect she told Dorothy that was “unnerving.” Carson wanted to make sure that she and Dorothy would meet the day after the AAAS talk, as she would then be at ease and better able to give Dorothy her full attention.

Carson told Dorothy she was glad Dorothy liked a book she had recommended—
Conversation with the Earth
by the German geologist
Hans Cloos. Meanwhile, the storm in South Carolina had caused a number of interesting reef creatures normally found offshore to fetch up onto the beach. Carson told Dorothy how much fun she’d had examining brightly colored sponges, sea squirts, crabs, starfish, urchins, and even a “fair-sized octopus” that reminded her annoyingly of Irwin Allen’s documentary based on
The Sea Around Us
, in which an octopus had been made out as a “monster of the deep.”

Carson continued to make passing references to the seashore book, which was still not going well—though she was always careful to explain that this was her fault and in no way Dorothy’s. She confessed the progress she’d made over the summer had been disappointing. Although Paul Brooks at Houghton Mifflin was being patient, Carson almost wished he wasn’t so understanding, as she felt the end of the project was still so far off that it made her feel “desperate.” Miserable, Carson told Dorothy that life was too short to spend so much time on one book. She wondered if getting started on a new chapter might be easier if she typed the words “Dear Dorothy” on the first page.

Silver Spring, Maryland, had been Carson’s home since 1938, except for the time she spent in Chicago during the war, and for a couple of years immediately after that when Carson and her mother lived in nearby Takoma Park, Maryland. Back in Silver Spring in the fall of 1953, Carson was beginning to think of herself as having several homes—the one in Maryland, of course, but now also the summer place at West Southport and, figuratively at least, in a charming cottage of the mind and heart that had come to life on the pages of the letters that had begun to flow between her and Dorothy.

Dorothy liked small, pastel-colored stationery—sometimes it had a flower or some other decorative design in the upper left corner—and she wrote her letters in a neat, up-and-down longhand that marched precisely across the page, leaving small margins at either end of every perfectly level line. Sometimes she made drafts in pencil before committing them to ink. Carson, who occasionally typed her letters, tended to write them on whatever was at hand. Sometimes
that was pretty stationery like Dorothy’s, but it could also be a note card or plain typing paper.

In mid-November, Dorothy proposed that, rather than just meet for lunch after Carson’s speech in Boston, Carson should come down to West Bridgewater where she could spend a whole afternoon and evening with Dorothy and Stan before catching a late train back to Maryland. Carson said this would be fine, though she could not disguise her disappointment at the prospect of not having time alone with Dorothy in Boston.
She told Dorothy she liked to imagine arriving in Boston and coming off the train “into your arms” even though she knew that wasn’t possible. Carson said that between the crush of preparations for her speech and the impending Christmas holidays she was “going mad.”

For Carson, one of Dorothy’s most endearing traits was her love of literature. Carson was eager to share the work of her favorite writers with Dorothy, and one of the first she brought up was Richard Jefferies.
Carson admitted that Jefferies was an “uneven” writer and said that because he was also prolific it would be easy to go astray by picking up the “wrong” volume of his work. She said she had always loved the essay collection
Jefferies’ England
and suggested Dorothy try to find it at the library. If it wasn’t there, Dorothy could borrow her copy.

Carson wanted Dorothy to like Jefferies because she considered him her “literary grandfather,” and she outlined for Dorothy his place on the family tree of her work. “
I am sure that my own style and thought were deeply influenced, in certain critical years, by Henry Williamson, whose
Tarka the Otter
and
Salar the Salmon
are, I’m convinced, nature writing of the highest order. And Williamson has said that he owes the same sort of debt to Jefferies.”

Cryptically, Carson added that Dorothy could expect another letter soon, as there was something Carson just had to tell her.

By their own estimate, Carson and Dorothy had been in each other’s company for a little over six hours that first summer at Southport Island. Now, after exchanging letters for a few months, the two
women felt themselves in the grip of a mutual attraction that was thrilling and utterly surprising.
In early December, Carson wrote to iron out the details of the Boston trip and to tell Dorothy how wonderful her latest letter had been. Carson had mentioned that she sometimes wrote to Dorothy long after midnight, and this had made Dorothy again feel she was imposing. Carson told her not to worry, as she was a “nocturnal creature” by nature. Dorothy had also wondered in her letter how different their lives might be had they not met as they did the preceding summer. Carson airily dismissed this question—it only reminded her that they
did
meet. She said she felt sure they would have done so one way or another, no matter what. And then she told Dorothy something that she had never told anybody else:

Carson’s AAAS talk, at the grand old Mechanics Hall in Boston, went well. Having received a couple of honorary degrees after
The Sea Around Us
,
Carson was listed on the program as “Dr. Rachel L. Carson.” To meet her audience on its own terms, Carson made a presentation that was more technical, more grounded in emerging science than in her popular writing. She discussed changes in the biotic populations of the seashore environment that were caused by a warm shift in the climate and perhaps subtler alterations in oceanic plant communities and the chemical composition of seawater. And she alluded to a novel concept that would gain traction in the coming years—the idea that life on earth is a continuing biological experiment in which we are both observers and participants: