On a Farther Shore

by William Souder

  At no place on its length is Shackleford Banks more than a handful of feet above the high-tide line, but it changes the character of the sea just the same. On the outside the open ocean lashes at the beach, and contrary winds and fierce currents turn the waves into a confused and mighty froth. Along the inner shore the sound is calm. Carson, who likely stayed with her family in the nearby oceanfront community of Atlantic Beach, said the mistake most people make when they visit the shore is hanging close to the fishing piers and resorts—and thus to one another. Her preference, she said, was for the solitude found far away from such places. And nowhere had she felt this pull more powerfully than at Shackleford Banks, where half an hour’s walk along the ocean side takes you out of sight of anything but the water before you, the sky above, and the long blinding rim of sand reaching off in either direction.

  This “lovely stretch of wild ocean beach,” as Carson thought of it, was to join Town Marsh in the opening of a book that, while as yet unwritten, had evolved from the ideas she’d initially discussed with Quincy Howe. Carson now thought she could give a “fairly complete picture of sea life” by dividing her story into three parts: one set at the shoreline, another on the open sea, and the third in the murk of the abyss. Each of these settings would feature one animal protagonist in a complex interplay with the ecosystem and its other inhabitants. Carson had a title in mind, too: Under the Sea-Wind. It was a phrase that had come to her from the same source that had inspired Henry Williamson—Richard Jefferies.

  Like Williamson, Carson revered Jefferies. She was moved by the words “the wind, wandering over the sea” in his long prose poem The Pageant of Summer. This piece was for her a kind of sacred text, one that inspired a lifelong sense of wonder—a phrase she used often—for the natural world. Carson had a special affection for one passage near the end of the poem: “The exceeding beauty of the earth, in her splendour of life, yields a new thought with every petal. The hours when the mind is absorbed by beauty are the only hours when we really live.… This is real life, and all else is illusion, or mere endurance.”

  Surveying the sea or the sound from the dunes at Shackleford Banks or walking on the strand at the edge of the surf, Carson breathed in the sea wind and felt time slowing and everything but what was before her eyes melting away. She made notes and wrote out fragments of narrative, carrying with her each day a small spiral-bound notebook into which she poured her thoughts and observations. A careful and fastidious writer, Carson was much less orderly in her note taking and would flip open her notebook and begin writing on the first blank space she found, her thoughts becoming a random tangle of snippets that were interspersed with odd lists of expenses and items to pack.

  Carson was attentive to colors and sounds, and to the endlessly shifting tones of light and shade under the temperate sun of the Carolina coastline. Looking down into a shallow pool where the tide had flooded the beach, Carson thought the lined ridges in the sand beneath the water looked as if the “shadows of surface ripples had dug deep and become permanent.” She was struck by the way the tops of the sea oats in the dunes, bending before the wind to touch the earth, carved arcs in the sand as they swayed in the breeze. And always, her gaze was drawn to the sea: “The crests of the waves, just before they toppled, caught the gold of the setting sun then dissolved in a mist of silver. The sand in the path of each receding wave was amethyst, topaz, and blue black. A lone sanderling hunted the surf line, with busy probings of his bill. Two ghost crabs scurried about in the wet sand.”

  It is clear from her notes that Carson at this point thought Under the Sea-Wind would be a book for young readers. She wrote that it was important to make youngsters curious about the sea. More practically, she wondered in her notes what age of children would most appeal to publishers and how she might eventually describe the reading level the book required. Carson made lists of “things to include” and of potential “characters” in the story. Among these were squid, starfish, scallops, crabs, clams, and a big jellyfish. She thought she might make “a squid who lives in a wreck” the “villain” of the narrative. But she also wrote out long, technical discussions on subjects such as fish migration, and tried to imagine the phenological changes in the assemblage of birds that would occur on the shore in different seasons.

  In the end, Carson ignored the question of who would read the book and simply wrote it the way she wanted to, in the voice that came most naturally to her. She drafted her manuscript in longhand on the backs of stationery bearing the letterhead “National Recovery Administration, Washington, D.C.” By the spring of 1940 she’d finished five chapters, the first one-third of the book, and sent it off to Quincy Howe at Simon and Schuster where, as he told Carson a few weeks later, everyone loved it.

  Shortly before the book’s official publication on November 1, 1941, Carson sent a copy of Under the Sea-Wind to her editor at the Baltimore Sun, who wrote her a note saying how much he liked it except for the opening chapters that composed Book I, “Edge of the Sea.” Carson would later admit that many readers felt the same way, though for her these five chapters about life along the threshold of the ocean—based so much on her own observations at Beaufort and at Woods Hole—had an inner meaning closest to the nature-as-spirit world of Richard Jefferies and with an outer structure most like Salar the Salmon. In fact, Carson began her book exactly as Williamson had his, near an island close to shore where fishermen do their work and where the tides and currents make a meeting place for many species of wildlife, including the transitory visitors who stop there to hunt or breed or only rest on their way to far-off destinations. Carson’s island was based on Town Marsh, and in a thank-you to the Bureau of Fisheries staff at Pivers Island, the creatures she described there included a pair of diamondback terrapins.

  Following Williamson’s convention—and breaking her own vow not to anthropomorphize—Carson gave names to some of her animal characters, using a mix of scientific nomenclature and whimsical invention. A pair of sanderlings named Blackfoot and Silverbar are the featured players in this opening section. The sanderling is a species of sandpiper familiar to beachgoers for its entertaining habit of running over the sand so close to the surf line that it seems to be chasing the waves, though Carson had a different reason for putting them center stage. Sanderlings are long-range migrators, breeding among the rocks and tundra of the high Arctic and overwintering on tidal flats as far south as Patagonia. Carson was fascinated by migration, and by the game of chance that takes place in the mass movement of animals that breed in great numbers in one place and then succumb in waves to predators and to hostile environments as they travel the earth on their instinctive journeys.

  Books II and III of Under the Sea-Wind, which tell the stories respectively of a mackerel and an eel, were in mood and setting more like “Undersea,” watery and dark and densely packed with information about the diversity and tenuousness of life in the ocean. Unlike what prevails in the frozen northern landscape, where the sanderlings build cozy nests and guard their small clutches of hatchlings, here the fish cast their unprotected offspring into the vast ocean by the thousands to begin life against odds so long that it would be accurate to say that for each species, death is a way of life. Riding currents and swimming ahead of a ceaseless onslaught of hungry enemies, the fish and all their cousins of the sea—the spiny and the tentacled and the clawed—are a self-sustaining multitude in which every individual is both predator and prey, and whose numbers are winnowed every day.

  Carson would later say that it was only in the writing of the book that she became aware that its true central character was the sea itself. As with “Undersea,” she was at her best in describing that portion of the planet that is water:

  Between the Chesapeake Capes and the elbow of Cape Cod the place where the continent ends and the true sea begins lies from fifty to one hundred miles from the tide lines. It is not the distance from shore, but the depth, that marks the transition to the true sea; for wherever the gently sloping sea bottom fe
els the weight of a hundred fathoms of water above it, suddenly it begins to fall away in escarpments and steep palisades, descending abruptly from twilight into darkness.

  Carson had high ambitions for Under the Sea-Wind, and as the reviews came out it appeared she had achieved something special. She was delighted when the book was named a selection of the Scientific Book Club, a recognition that it was as serious and as informed as it was entertaining. In a glowing review, the New York Times called Under the Sea-Wind a “beautiful and unusual book.” The reviewer for the Times, Peter Monro Jack, explained that Carson was both a writer and government marine biologist. He thought the book’s great strengths were its varied settings and the many creatures whose stories were told, especially the eel that breeds and dies in the open ocean but spends most of its life in inland freshwaters—an epic life history, Carson knew, that is the reverse of the salmon’s.

  A slightly more critical but still favorable review came from an important source—William Beebe. Writing in the Saturday Review of Literature, Beebe said that Carson had succeeded in making “the sea and its life a vivid reality.” He “enjoyed every word” in the book, but complained that too many of them were technical and that the story was often overburdened with facts. Still, he added almost apologetically, the accuracy of Carson’s science was never in doubt; the man who’d visited the depths of the ocean said he could not find a single error in Under the Sea-Wind. Beebe loved the “sureness and ease” with which Carson described life in the open sea, apparently unaware that the greater portion of her experience was with the shallows and the shoreline. A few years later, Beebe would include two chapters from Under the Sea-Wind in an anthology of writing by naturalists.

  Despite the terrific notices, Under the Sea-Wind sold slowly at first—then hardly at all. Toward the end of January, Under the Sea-Wind had sold fewer than 1,300 copies, and weekly totals had dropped to only a handful. Carson was gratified when she learned the book would be translated into a Braille edition, but she was disappointed at learning there was no interest in publishing the book in England. In fact, Simon and Schuster’s London agent relayed the complaint of one English publisher that the book was “poetical” and “broody” and full of fish names that would be unfamiliar to British readers. For those reasons and owing to “present conditions” in wartime London, Under the Sea-Wind would have no chance of success there.

  Carson would later blame the failure of Under the Sea-Wind on the U.S. entry into World War II, which she believed obliterated readers’ interest in books like hers. If she detected any irony in the poor wartime sales of a book that had been inspired by a Nazi sympathizer, she apparently kept such thoughts to herself. She always believed in the felicity of the literary lineage—Jefferies to Williamson to Carson—that was behind Under the Sea-Wind.

  Two days after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Carson had gotten a letter from her PCW friend and mentor, Mary Scott Skinker. Skinker had followed developments on the publication of Under the Sea-Wind all through the fall and was immensely happy at her former star pupil’s success. But now she conceded a preoccupation with a darker reality. “The world tonight is depressing,” Skinker wrote, “and thoughts of friends in danger serve but to increase a sense of despair over the inevitable period of years we must face before we know anything resembling peace or security.”

  Whether Under the Sea-Wind was a casualty of war is impossible to know, but as Carson later put it, “the rush to the book store that is the author’s dream never materialized.” For a while, Carson held out hope that word of mouth would keep the book selling at a slow but steady pace. She kept close track of reviews, offered suggestions for serializing chapters of the book in magazines, and compiled lists of groups such as the Audubon Society and the American Fisheries Society that might be marketed to in direct-mailing campaigns. But a mailing to six hundred members of the latter resulted in only four orders. Carson also discussed with Simon and Schuster which category of the Pulitzer competition Under the Sea-Wind might be eligible for. Around the beginning of March 1942, Carson appeared on a Washington, D.C., radio program about books and diligently provided its host—a woman uncannily named Mrs. Eales—with a ten-page memo detailing the origins and concepts behind Under the Sea-Wind. Shortly afterward, Carson was told by Simon and Schuster that their sales department now blamed the book’s anemic performance at least in part on its title, which on reflection seemed too abstract and literary. The publisher wondered whether she might consider changing it to something more like Life Along the Atlantic Seaboard for future editions—not that any were imminent.

  For the better part of the next seven years Under the Sea-Wind languished. Sales never reached 1,700 copies. Carson complained to Simon and Schuster about what she saw as their halfhearted attempt to generate interest in the book—and what she believed was the publisher’s failure to attend to a long list of details that she worried over endlessly. Royalty statements. Reprint opportunities. The status of remaindered copies. At one point she argued with Simon and Schuster over whether Under the Sea-Wind was or was not still in print.

  In the spring of 1948, she asked to be released from her contract with Simon and Schuster and requested that the publisher forgo its option on her next book. She wrote them a letter saying how disappointed she was that Simon and Schuster didn’t have “wider interests and contacts in the field of nature writing” that could have maintained a “steady, continuing sale” of her book. She added that she felt this assessment was completely realistic. “Please understand,” Carson wrote, “that I have never believed that Under the Sea-Wind would, under any circumstances, have been a run-away best seller; nor do I ever expect to want to write that kind of book.”

  Carson did not explain what she meant by “that kind of book.” She later said that for a while she had doubted she’d ever write another book, period. She was wrong on both counts.

  FIVE

  This Beautiful and Sublime World

  Harold Ickes, Franklin Roosevelt’s strong-willed secretary of the interior, wanted to take over the Biological Survey and the Forest Service from the Department of Agriculture—along with Fisheries from Commerce and the Civilian Conservation Corps, which was being run by the army—and move them into his department. Ickes was a powerful New Deal figure. During Roosevelt’s second term he was discussed as a potential future candidate for president. But there was resistance to his plans from the departments that would have to give up these agencies.

  Ickes saw his chance in the fall of 1936, when the president informed him of an impending reorganization plan for most units of the federal government. He told Roosevelt what he wanted—and added that he’d like to rename his agency the Department of Conservation. Roosevelt liked the idea, but in the end opposition in Congress and from the USDA convinced the president to leave the name unchanged. Ickes got his new agencies all the same and soon combined Fisheries and the Biological Survey in what amounted to a “conservation department” that lacked only the name.

  It was a time when the abuse of the nation’s resources had become evident across large areas of the heart of the country, where the great, flat American prairie was devastated. In the early 1930s the onset of a prolonged period of drought and intense heat scorched the over-tilled, exhausted landscape, turning its once rich, loamy topsoil to a powder that was borne aloft on the wind in roiling dust storms that could block out the sun. Some were so powerful that they drifted all the way to the East Coast, dropping dust and black rain on New York and Washington, D.C. One of the worst swept through the central United States, from Colorado through Kansas, and from South Dakota down to Oklahoma, on April 14, 1935—Black Sunday—carrying away three hundred thousand tons of topsoil, more dirt than had been dug out to build the Panama Canal. Five days later the storm reached Washington, D.C., where it darkened the early afternoon sky and interrupted a Senate hearing on soil erosion. Before the month ended Congress had passed the Soil Conservation Act, and twenty thousand Civilian Conservation Co
rps workers were moved from the Forest Service into the new Soil Conservation Service, where they would go to work establishing conservation districts and replanting sod.

  President Roosevelt, enamored of the idea of planting trees in a part of the country that hadn’t had many in the first place, pushed forward a plan to plant trees from the Canadian border to Texas. It was thought that trees would not only help to retain soil but would also increase rainfall. Some 220 million trees were planted, but most either died or were cut down by farmers when normal rainfall returned to the prairie years later and crops again covered the land from horizon to horizon.

  Roosevelt’s tree-planting scheme rested on the dubious premise that nature could be regulated on a large scale, and in this respect, it at least had a history—one that Harold Ickes was mindful of as he tried to consolidate conservation efforts within the Department of the Interior. The merger of the Bureau of Fisheries with the Bureau of Biological Survey in 1940 brought together two federal agencies with similar origins, but whose missions and methods had diverged. Both had been created by Congress for the purpose of maximizing economic resources through the monitoring and “control” of nature. Fisheries, the older of the two agencies, took a passing interest in aquatic pests such as starfish, which could destroy oyster beds, but was more actively engaged in rearing fish stocks in its network of hatcheries and in doing basic research as it did on the high seas from the Albatross and other vessels.