On a Farther Shore (37 page)

Carson’s mood remained bleak. It was looking as if the “Lost Woods” project was not going to happen, as the landowners of the Southport Island property wanted an exorbitant price.
Carson told Dorothy it had been a year since she had actually believed she’d ever write again. But now she at least had a magazine assignment, a piece called “Our Ever-Changing Shore” that she’d been asked to write for
Holiday
. Carson’s plan was to write it from personal recollections of some of her favorite places—the high dunes near Provincetown on Cape Cod, Plum Island in Massachusetts, St. Simons Island in Georgia.
Her biggest challenge, she told Marie Rodell in a contemplative letter, would be trying to explain the pristine beauty of the shore when development was devouring untouched sections of it seemingly everywhere:

Early in 1956, Carson got into a running feud with the Musical Masterpiece Society, which offered monthly recordings to members much as the Book-of-the-Month Club sent out a book selection each month. Carson subscribed—but then decided the recordings were inferior and canceled her membership. When another shipment arrived the month after she’d quit, Carson paid for it anyway. She then started getting notices that her account was delinquent. Furious, she wrote the company a scalding letter, reviewing the facts that showed her blameless and her account not in arrears. Leveraging her notoriety, Carson went on acidly:

The amount Carson supposedly failed to pay was $3.80.

Carson didn’t like change, which sometimes challenged even her belief in science. Exhilarated by the technologies that had allowed men such as William Beebe and Jacques Cousteau to probe the depths of
the ocean and that were enabling biologists to begin exploring the inner workings of the human cell, Carson was at the same time dismayed by the onslaught of chemical poisons that had contributed to what would soon be called the “green revolution” in agriculture—a period of explosive growth in crop production made possible by improved seed stocks, new plant hybrids, and the massive application of chemical fertilizers and pesticides. Much of this was happening in underdeveloped countries where food scarcity was a long-standing problem. But the use of pesticides on such a massive scale was progress that came at too great a cost, Carson thought.

There were also questions that Carson seemed to prefer not be asked, problems that should not be solved, places that ought to remain unvisited. When the Soviet Union launched
Sputnik
in October 1957—which was followed into orbit a month later by a second Russian satellite—Carson was appalled.
She thought everyone now faced a “strange future” and confided to Dorothy that it made her feel ill. This was only partly a concern about the inevitable uses of rocketry in warfare. Fascinated by the sea, so much of which is dark and cold, Carson was terrified at the thought of humanity extending its reach into the infinitely darker and colder and more mysterious realm that was outer space. Human beings had an affinity for the sea—the cradle of life—and it was only natural that they would venture there. But to visit space would be to part company with the earth and become disconnected from the biological and geological cycles from which all life and all human intelligence had arisen. Where then after that? It was all, Carson thought, “deeply disturbing.”

Earlier that year Carson had turned fifty. No longer young, not yet old, she seemed not to belong entirely to the time in which she was living. She paid little attention to a changing culture that was leaving behind such relics as Richard Jefferies and H. M. Tomlinson, or to the new tastes of a younger generation that no longer knew or cared about the classical music she loved. Carson enjoyed listening to concerts and classical recordings, but never mentioned coming across
any other kind of music, even though it would have been hard not to. In July 1954, while the crew of the
Lucky Dragon
was confined to Tokyo University Hospital, a young Memphis truck driver named Elvis Presley recorded a song called “That’s All Right,” and popular music hadn’t been the same since.

If Carson was aware of the extent to which nuclear fears had penetrated middle-brow entertainment she didn’t seem to consider it important—though she would have enjoyed at least one of Hollywood’s less-cheesy endeavors, a 1957 film called
The Incredible Shrinking Man
. Based on a clever and disturbing novella titled
The Shrinking Man
by Richard Matheson, it’s the story of a man named Scott Carey who begins to grow smaller after his boat drifts though a strange mist during an otherwise placid day at sea. At first Carey notices he’s losing weight. Then one day he finds he’s looking directly into his wife’s eyes—even though he’d always been four inches taller. Carey continues to shrink. His distraught wife begins to see him as a child. Their sex life gets weird and then stops. He’s harassed and beaten by a group of young boys. Eventually he ends up living a desperate existence in his basement, where he is terrorized by a spider and by his own cat. And he keeps getting smaller.

Matheson, unspooling the story in a series of flashbacks while Carey tries to stay alive as he approaches microscopic proportions, reveals what’s happening midway though, when the doctors who have been studying Carey’s condition tell him they’ve found a “toxin” in his body. And they have an idea what may have produced it:

Strictly speaking, a “toxin” is a biologically produced poison—snake venom, for example. But technicalities aside, Matheson’s story—which was told all the way through in that same rattling machine-gun style—neatly combined the twin fears of the modern age. Toxicologists actually have a name for the thing Matheson imagined, the synergistic combination of two poisons that results in a single more powerful one. It’s called “potentiation.” The symbolism would not have been lost on Carson.

The threat of radioactive fallout was more realistically explored in Nevil Shute’s bleak, postapocalyptic 1957 novel,
On the Beach
. Set in the not-too-distant future of 1963, the book tells the story of humanity’s last days on earth in the aftermath of a “short, bewildering” war in which nuclear exchanges involving a handful of small countries
equipped with primitive atomic bombs spin out of control into an all-out thermonuclear conflagration among the superpowers. Military officials in the United States, Russia, and China—their civilian leadership all killed in the initial bombings—exhaust their nuclear arsenals. Now everyone in the Northern Hemisphere is dead, either blown to bits or fatally sickened by a vast cloud of radiation that is moving inexorably southward, steadily blotting out what remains of civilization. In Australia, where most of the action takes place, the survivors know they have only months to live.

What makes Shute’s nightmarish story even more disturbing is the pluckiness of the survivors, who carry on with their lives almost—but not quite—as if nothing terrible has happened. It’s a shocking contrast to the barbarism and chaos that would seem more likely under such circumstances. Although they are low on fuel and essential supplies, people continue on in their jobs as best they can. They attend their swank private clubs for port and cigars, go out dancing, take fishing vacations, hold neighborhood cocktail parties, and make plans for their children as if they had a future. The attempt at normalcy in the face of doom is heartbreaking—and a potent indictment of the policies and technologies that would make such a thing imaginable.

Carson thought most of what was on television was terrible, though she sometimes found musical events that suited her or science programs that she deemed superior to TV’s usual fare,
which she described as “puppets vs. cosmic rays.”
One time she stumbled upon an interview with the architect Frank Lloyd Wright in which Wright explained that he had had to choose whether to conduct himself with “honest arrogance” or “hypocritical humility.” Wright said he’d picked honest arrogance. Carson thought this was not surprising but shocking all the same. “It somehow crystallized my belief,” she wrote to Dorothy, “that a large share of what’s wrong with the world is mankind’s towering arrogance—in a universe that surely ought to impose humility, and reverence.”

Carson thought a fine example of human arrogance was playing
out in the news from several parts of the country that year. The USDA’s spraying campaign against the gypsy moth was under way in the Northeast, while in nine southern states an “all-out” effort to eradicate fire ants had begun.
The nonnative pest—they were often called “imported fire ants”—arrived in Alabama sometime before 1920, spreading across the southeast in the decades afterward. While they caused little direct damage to crops or forestlands, fire ants built large mounds that interfered with farm machinery, and their painful stings were a nuisance to agricultural workers and to children who encountered them while playing outside. There was so little evidence that fire ants caused economic losses to crops or to livestock that it was debated whether they were anything more than a minor nuisance. But under provisions of the Federal Plant Pest Act of 1957, the U.S. government was providing matching funds to assist state agencies and private groups in a plan to treat more than twenty-two million acres with heptachlor or dieldrin by the end of the decade in an attempt to rid the region of fire ants forever.

By 1958, reports from the field indicated sharp wildlife declines in areas being treated for fire ants. On a single ten-acre tract in Alabama, nine species of birds, plus an assortment of small mammals, fish, and frogs, turned up dead or dying one week after an application of heptachlor. The same story was repeated across the south. In Louisiana every single red-winged blackbird and meadowlark vanished from an area treated with heptachlor, and several species of birds and mammals found dead in the area had residues of heptachlor in their bodies. Earthworms, a food source for many species of ground-feeding birds, also contained heptachlor—five months after the treatment. If birds weren’t poisoned by eating contaminated worms they alternatively faced starvation, as only about 20 percent of the earthworms survived exposure to the chemical. On a ranch in Texas, heptachlor killed more than 90 percent of the birds found along the edges of dirt roads. On other parts of the property it killed more birds, plus mammals, snakes and lizards, frogs, and fish. In Florida, cats, dogs, and chickens
reportedly succumbed. Ranchers in Georgia claimed more than one hundred head of cattle had been killed. Officials in a town in Alabama said they had to haul fifty dead dogs to the city dump.

A report from the Alabama Division of Game and Fish, taking note of the seemingly catastrophic collateral damage to wildlife, said the hasty decision to use insecticides believed to be many times more potent than DDT was ill advised and had overwhelmed wildlife agencies. Meanwhile, new research on the toxicity of heptachlor with respect to
human
health was under way, and the findings were sufficiently alarming that in the fall of 1959 the FDA
banned the use of heptachlor on food crops. In 1954,
Congress had authorized the FDA to begin setting tolerances for pesticide residues in food. The guidelines essentially required that any pesticide found in food had to be either proven completely safe or present in amounts small enough to be deemed safe.

It had been discovered that heptachlor oxidized after it was applied, forming a compound called heptachlor epoxide that coated the foliage of plants. This had gone unnoticed because standard assays for heptachlor alone did not detect heptachlor epoxide. Better detection methods now showed that heptachlor epoxide residues ended up not only in food crops but also in meat and milk from livestock that consumed forage treated with heptachlor. Preliminary testing indicated that such residual contamination magnified the risks of using the insecticide, as heptachlor epoxide had an acute toxicity greater than heptachlor alone. In January 1958, the
New York Times
published an editorial opposing the fire ant eradication program and blasting the government for being reckless: