On a Farther Shore

by William Souder

  Carson, with a recommendation from Miss Skinker, had reapplied to Johns Hopkins and earned a full scholarship. In June, she graduated magna cum laude from PCW. That summer, again with help from Skinker, Carson also earned a scholarship to study at the MBL during the month of August. She went first to Baltimore, where it was unusually hot, and spent a day exploring the Johns Hopkins campus. Then she caught a bus for Luray, Virginia, at the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains, a half day away. Miss Skinker had invited Carson to join her on vacation at Skyland, a rustic turn-of-the-century resort perched atop a four-thousand-foot peak with commanding views of the Shenandoah Valley.

  Cars could not ascend the difficult road to the summit, so Carson went up on horseback. It took about an hour, during which she was delighted by the forest and the birds, including a turkey that scuttled away as she approached. The best part, she said later, was reaching the resort and finding Miss Skinker coming up the path to meet her. The two women spent their days riding horses and playing tennis. Carson thought Skinker, who claimed to be a poor player but wasn’t, helped her game some. They passed their evenings sitting by a fire in their cabin and talking.

  The oppressive heat had not abated back in Washington, D.C., where Carson went next to catch a train from Union Station to New York City. She spent a day sightseeing, riding a tour bus around Manhattan, lunching at a German restaurant, and taking the subway up to Columbia to climb the steps of the library. It was raining late in the day when she boarded a boat for New Bedford, Massachusetts. The boat passed the Statue of Liberty, just visible in the storm, and turned east, following along the coastline of Long Island. Carson—looking for the first time at the sea and breathing salt air—said it was pleasant out on the deck later that evening, even more so after the boat passed Montauk and they were out of sight of land. Before dawn the next day Carson changed boats at New Bedford. Carson said the sixteen-mile trip across Buzzards Bay as the sun came up had been “glorious,” although the sea was running and it was rough.

  Carson found Woods Hole and the MBL complex completely wonderful, better than she’d expected in every way. The apartment she shared with another researcher from PCW had hot and cold running water and was located just across the street from Crane lab, where her table was. She was especially taken with the library, which beckoned to her and seemed to have “everything.” And she discovered that no matter where you went, you were never far from the water. She loved this. The sea was all around her.

  Carson wrote to a friend that Woods Hole was a “delightful place to biologize” and said she could see herself returning every summer. Researchers worked hard but also took time to enjoy the ocean and the beach. Carson said she was trying to learn to swim the crawl. She’d also had an adventure after a beach party on one of the islands in the bay when the boat she was on became lost in the fog on the return and had nearly been swept out into the open ocean. Carson particularly liked exploring rocky sections of shoreline when the tide was low and examining the marine life that teemed in the tidal pools. Sea anemones and urchins fascinated her, and she became acutely aware of the power of the ocean currents, as these sometimes brought in unexpected treasures such as Sargasso weed or jellyfishes from warmer regions far away. Delicately fair-skinned, Carson said these hours on the shore and under the sun had at last convinced her she would never get a tan, though she believed that she had acquired a “weathered” look and a fresh set of freckles. The U.S. Bureau of Fisheries had a sizable contingent of researchers at Woods Hole, and Carson got to know them. One day they took her aboard their research ship for a day of collecting.

  Carson also enjoyed collecting trips aboard the MBL’s “little dredging boat” on which they would steam up and down the waters of Buzzards Bay and sometimes the Vineyard Sound, seining the bottom to inspect the plants and animals of the sea floor. It was often a wild ride as the boat lurched against the weight of the net in rolling seas. But Carson loved discovering what came up from under the water: Mixed in with rocks and shells was a profusion of species—crustaceans and seaweeds, invertebrates and small fish—an embassy of living things she had never seen before, from a place she was just beginning to imagine.

  She allowed her thoughts to “go down through the water,” so that what was unseen below gradually came clear to her and she could at last “see the whole life of those creatures as they lived them in that strange sea world.” The great variety of life in the sea impressed upon Carson that every living thing belonged to a larger diverse community of life that was sustained by interdependence and perpetuated across the vastness of time. Of all the lessons she’d learned well, this was the one she learned best.

  But Carson’s two months of study at the MBL were not entirely happy. For the first time in her life she struggled. In the lab, Carson couldn’t decide what to work on. Even though she was surrounded by the marine environment that she felt destined to study and write about, Carson initially investigated the terminal nerve in reptiles. The terminal nerve, which belongs to the subset of the central nervous system known collectively as the cranial nerves, is associated with the sense of smell. At the time olfaction hadn’t been thoroughly described in reptiles and so Carson felt she might break new ground by studying it in lizards and snakes, and possibly crocodiles. She also remained interested in turtles, which had intrigued her at PCW. But this left her once again working on embalmed inland specimens, slicing and staining tissue sections for microscopic examination—the very same laboratory subjects and techniques Carson felt she had been inadequately trained in after Miss Skinker’s departure from PCW. She was still heartsick over the way things had ended at PCW, which she described as a “near tragedy.” She wrote to a friend that she’d spent much of her time at Woods Hole trying to overcome the feeling that her last year at PCW had left her unready for real biological research work.

  “We thought we realized what it was doing to us,” Carson said of the classes at PCW with Anna Whiting, “but we didn’t. We couldn’t, there. I tell you frankly, I was a near-wreck the first week I was here. Didn’t know what I wanted to do, and had no ambition to do it! But I’m slowly recovering, and beginning to come to life mentally once more.”

  Woods Hole was an intimidating place, the working retreat of many of the country’s leading scientists. Still woozy after four cloistered years at PCW, Carson had moved on to one of the main stages of American biology. And she had done so just as biology was becoming a more experimental science. Until the turn of the century, biology had been mostly about natural history, an “organismal” discipline that was mainly concerned with comparative anatomy, morphology, taxonomy, behavior, and, more recently, evolution.

  In describing and differentiating species, biology was in many ways not that different from what it had been for Aristotle—a science that served mainly to enumerate and catalog the living world. Then, in the early part of the twentieth century, a number of researchers rediscovered the work of Gregor Mendel, the Austrian monk whose study of dominant and recessive hereditary traits in pea plants had led to his formulation of the laws of inheritance. Published in 1866, Mendel’s laws languished for three decades before becoming the basis of the new study of genetics. Biologists began putting less emphasis on characterizing “wild type” organisms found in the field, and more on exploring functional biology through experiments with captive colonies of species that bred rapidly and were easy to maintain: rats, salamanders, and, most significantly, a tiny prolific insect called Drosophila melanogaster—the fruit fly. Carson’s interest in dissecting wild specimens to see how they were made was, if not yet quaint, at least musty—the back end of science rather than the cutting edge.

  The MBL had always been generous in its acceptance of female students and researchers, though they were usually noticeably outnumbered by men. Of the twenty-three students in an embryology class in 1897, six were women—one of whom was Gertrude Stein. Ann Haven Morgan, arguably the country’s foremost freshwater ecologist when Carson was still at PCW, had taught at
the MBL in the summers before the publication in 1930 of her classic Field Book of Ponds and Streams. Morgan’s little blue book with the red-edged pages—it was the same size and shape as a modern-day Audubon field guide—demonstrated a curiosity about nature and a competence in depicting it that suggested there ought to be no limits on what women could do in the field. But Carson had never shared lab space with men, who arrived at the MBL better trained, and she marveled at how adept they were. She found that she had trouble distinguishing important features of the tissues she painstakingly sectioned from her specimens. It wouldn’t be until months later, back in Baltimore at Johns Hopkins, that Carson would begin to make tentative progress on her slides from Woods Hole. Meanwhile, long hours at the microscope hurt her eyes.

  Carson’s story was a familiar one in biology, where even brilliant students sometimes falter when it comes to actually doing hands-on science. Some are clumsy; others are careless or indifferent to the precision required in carrying out a well-controlled experiment. Or they lack the insight needed to formulate hypotheses that can be experimentally tested—the essence of the modern scientific method. Carson’s admission that she would be content working in the library contained a whiff of self-recognition. It was, in fact, an allusion to what would become for her both a refuge and a lifelong wellspring of inspiration.

  As she hit one dead end after another Carson could not make up her mind whether the problem was her or her subject. At Johns Hopkins she briefly narrowed her focus to snakes, and at one point got curious about the pit organ sensory system in vipers. Sometimes her specimens were delivered alive, and one day she took a friend to the lab to see a crate full of rattlesnakes. As the two women peered in through the mesh top of the container, several thick-bodied specimens disengaged themselves from the tangled mass on the floor of the cage and, tongues flicking, slowly raised their heads.

  The next several years saw a winding-down of one phase of Carson’s life and a halting transition into the next. At Johns Hopkins, Carson again assumed her favorite role, that of the hardworking student. Her days were long, beginning just after seven with breakfast at the university cafeteria and often continuing into the evening. Carson estimated that class time and lab research occupied almost fifty hours every week, with the balance of her waking moments left to studying. Organic chemistry was her most demanding class, while botany, a subject that didn’t interest her, nonetheless provided the welcome diversion of an occasional field trip. Carson eventually earned a hard-won B in chemistry and surprised herself with an exemplary performance in physiology. She told a friend that she liked living in Baltimore, which had a pleasant climate and seemed to be slightly better off economically than Pittsburgh. The atmosphere at Johns Hopkins was decidedly southern, and Carson loved listening to the accents of her classmates.

  As absorbing as her studies were, Carson was not insulated from the hard times besetting the country. In her second year at Hopkins she became a half-time student and found work as a lab assistant in the medical school, where she helped maintain colonies of rats and fruit flies. Carson hoped to earn enough to make payments on what she still owed to PCW—and to help support her family, most of whom came to live with her early in 1930. They rented a large three-story house outside of Baltimore in the remote, mostly rural area of Stemmers Run. The house had no central heat but did have indoor plumbing and a big fireplace. A handsome grove of oaks sprawled over the property, and a two-mile hike through the woods brought you to Chesapeake Bay. The house also featured—incongruously—a tennis court, a step up from the homestead back in Springdale. But life at Stemmers Run could hardly have been comfortable. Carson’s father was in poor health, weak and quiet and spent. Carson’s sister, Marian, divorced again, lived there, too, accompanied by her two energetic young daughters. Mrs. Carson, forever at Rachel’s side, seemed content to encourage her daughter’s studies and happily type her papers. It was apparent to everyone who saw them together how close Carson and her mother were.

  Not surprisingly, with Carson the only wage earner in the household, PCW didn’t get the money still owed on her undergraduate studies. In 1932, after many missed payments, Carson settled with the school by signing over the title to the pair of her father’s lots she’d offered as collateral back in 1929. Much later, a neighbor at Stemmers Run would recall stopping in at the Carsons’ early one evening and finding the family seated at the table with only a bowl of apples for dinner.

  In the lab, Carson’s problems multiplied. She gave up on snakes and at one point tried to study embryonic development in squirrels. But she couldn’t get the animals to breed. She complained to a friend, “I don’t have time to think any more.” Between working part-time and going to school part-time, she wasn’t making any progress at all. She began to worry that she was running out of time for an ambitious study. Eventually Carson’s adviser suggested that she work on the pronephros in catfish—a project interesting to Carson mainly because it could be done quickly. The pronephros is an embryonic precursor of the kidney, and at the time it was unknown whether it was retained as a functional excretory organ in the adult fish. Carson concluded that it wasn’t, and in June 1932, a full year behind schedule, she submitted a mostly descriptive one-hundred-page master’s thesis featuring drawings and photographs of histological sections. It wasn’t breakthrough science—but it was done.

  When Carson later received letters of recommendation from her professors at Johns Hopkins, they all expressed confidence in her teaching abilities but were tepid about the prospect that she would do meaningful scientific research. Whether they’d have thought differently had Carson had the resources to finish her degree on time, or that it was simply the case that she lacked a talent for research, Carson would never know. As the months and then years unspooled at Johns Hopkins, Carson’s fascination with biology remained intact, but her commitment to it as a career waned.

  Through graduate school, Carson had steadily increased her efforts to earn money. She started teaching biology in the summers at Johns Hopkins and worked as a lab assistant and zoology instructor at the University of Maryland in College Park, which was a long ride from Stemmers Run by bus or train that Carson made several times each week. In the fall of 1932, Carson began work at Johns Hopkins toward her PhD. She would not complete this degree, but she did fall in love with an animal she studied for the first time: the American eel.

  Carson had an enormous aquarium in her lab that was filled with eels, and contemplating their dark undulations as they glided from one end of the tank to the other made her think. Eels are migratory and have a complex life history that Carson found beguiling. Born in the open ocean, larval eels drift on currents toward the continental shelf, where they metamorphose into elvers, finger-sized and serpentine and so transparent they appear to be made of glass. The elvers move up through estuaries and eventually into freshwater streams and ponds, where they undergo a maturation that takes many years. As adults they return to the ocean for the long journey back to their breeding areas in and around the Sargasso Sea in the middle Atlantic. Carson could not stop thinking about the story of the eel.

  Migrations like that of the eel are one of nature’s most literal examples of the continuity of life. In the same lab where she studied her eels, Carson also kept some amoebas that caused her to think about this in a different context. As almost every student of biology comes to realize, amoebas—and indeed, all single-celled animals that reproduce by simply dividing in two—have a kind of eternal life. Although they can be killed, amoebas do not senesce and die, but rather divide and live on. So every amoeba is arguably not an individual with a singular identity, but is rather part of the first amoeba—and thus an organism whose life originated in the mists of time and that might exist for as long as there are amoebas. Carson thought another way to picture it was to imagine that within such species there must be “infinitesimally small molecular aggregates” that had been “alive” for millions of years and would be perpetuated indefinitely. Carson told all
this to a friend, admitting that it was “a curious train of thought.”

  Robert Carson collapsed and died one morning in the backyard at Stemmers Run in July 1935. He was seventy-one. Rachel, whose brother lived on his own in Baltimore, was now truly the head of the household at the age of twenty-eight. She had left the doctoral program at Johns Hopkins a year and a half earlier and continued with her several part-time academic jobs. At the urging of Mary Scott Skinker, who had completed her PhD and gone to work for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Carson in early 1935 had taken and passed civil service examinations in parasitology, wildlife biology, and aquatic biology. In October she was hired as a field aide by the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries in their Baltimore office. Her job entailed “assembling information for public distribution on the natural history and conservation of the fishes of the Atlantic Coast.” These duties consisted mainly of writing short scripts for a radio program called Romance Under the Waters, which the bureau produced in partnership with the CBS Radio Network. The job was, as Carson later reported, “intermittent.” When she worked, Carson earned $6.50 a day. On a personnel form that asked her to list the number and ages of any dependents living with her, Carson stubbornly answered that she had “1 totally; 3 partially” and left it at that.

  The Bureau of Fisheries had come into existence partly by accident. In the mid-1800s, commercial fishermen in New England noticed a decline in fish numbers in coastal waters. In response, Congress in 1871 created the U.S. Commission of Fish and Fisheries—but did not limit its charter to the problems in the New England fishery. With no deadline to report on or resolve the issue, the commission became by default a permanent federal agency—the first one whose mission was the conservation of wildlife.