Suddenly, at one of the most dramatic moments in the book before its climax—the music overpowered me so that I had to stop reading. Floods of tears just streamed from my eyes. The music had been subdued and at times a rich human voice had become part of it. At the time it reached me it was carrying an exquisite melody in the high strings with dark shadings in the lower strings. It seemed to complement the book completely. Then I began to think of Stan asleep in the other room and suddenly underneath the lovely melody was a pattern of discord in the brasses, incongruous and intruding—almost a warning to me it seemed. And then I knew that I’ve got to tell Stan how wonderful has been my life with him, how good he has been to me, how rich our life together has been. He’s made me so happy—given me so much. I feel I have in no way repaid him for his years of devotion.
One time, as Carson and Dorothy lounged on the rocks above the tide pools, Carson had gotten into a confessional mood that she later regretted, but Dorothy assured her that such confidences were precious to her. When they were apart, Carson and Dorothy often wrote to tell each other of things they’d seen or done that would have been more meaningful had they been together. Nature and music could make either of them cry, and it was hard to tell whether such experiences were more intense when shared or when they arrived in a letter. Dorothy told Carson she missed her more when a flight of geese passed overhead or there was intense phosphorescence on Sheepscot Bay. Dorothy said Carson had reawakened her love of the natural world—Stan’s, too—but that above all it had been finding someone who understood her so perfectly that had transformed her life when nothing of the kind had been expected.
“Darling,” she wrote to Carson, “you and I on our Island are looking at a light so bright—invisible to others—a glorious, miraculous light that has brought to me and I hope and believe to you, untold happiness.”
Carson had finally written a letter introducing herself to Henry Beston, admitting to him that she’d meant to do so some twenty years earlier, after she’d found his cottage from The Outermost House on that trip from Woods Hole to the outer Cape. Beston had long since settled at a country place he called Chimney Farm in Nobleboro, Maine—close enough to visit. Carson told Beston he’d been recommended to her as someone who would know where she could go to hear veeries, their song being in her estimation “one of the most deeply moving of bird voices.” She was also eager to thank Beston for having written a penetrating review of Under the Sea-Wind after its reissue by Oxford. Beston invited her to come over, and she went with Dorothy, and again later that summer with her mother—whom Beston and his wife, Elizabeth, found delightful.
At the end of the season, Carson sent Dorothy a first edition of The Sea Around Us, telling her there were not many such in existence and that it would sadden her if Dorothy did not have one. She said they both understood the book’s significance in each of their lives, and she also told Dorothy about the lines from Tennyson’s “Locksley Hall” that had convinced her that her destiny was entwined with the sea:
And so, as you know, it has been. When I finally became its biographer, the sea brought me recognition and what the world calls success.
It brought me to Southport.
It brought me to you.
So now the sea means something to me that it never meant before. And even the title of the book has a new and personal significance—the sea around Us.
Carson and Dorothy were both passionate about the Christmas holidays, and for them it would always be a time for recounting things they’d done together in the last year and for looking ahead to what was to come. But in the weeks leading up to the holiday season in 1954, their letters became more expectant than usual—they were going to escape together to New York just after New Year’s, and the logistics of this meeting mixed confusingly with worries that it might appear to be an assignation. Carson had recently discovered Eliot’s “The Dry Salvages,” and had been struck by the several lines in it that seemed full of meaning for them, especially the phrase “time not our time.” She wondered if Dorothy was counting the days until their arrival in New York as she was.
They debated over which hotel was best. Carson thought either the St. Moritz or the Barbizon-Plaza would be fine. She said she really didn’t care, as long as wherever they went was “out of range.” They also debated whether Carson should register under her “usual” name. Carson decided that using an alias would make her feel silly. Besides, she told Dorothy, “the hotel management doesn’t matter.” A more important consideration, in Carson’s mind at least, was the possibility that, given their train schedules, they would arrive at the hotel at the same time. Could they, Carson wondered, hide their emotions and restrain themselves long enough to get up to their room? Or would they give themselves away right there in the lobby? Dorothy thought they could affect a nonchalant air. She told Carson that when they were alone at last she wanted to spend an hour just being close to her without speaking a word. Carson said she liked Dorothy’s suggestion for that first hour—and afterward they would see what happened.
Carson and Dorothy spent two nights at the Barbizon-Plaza. Apparently there had been some discussion about the advisability of Carson’s spending a second night there, as Dorothy later thanked Carson for staying over with her for what would otherwise have been a “desolate” night alone. Dorothy told Carson their room had been filled with a “rosy glow” that vanished the moment Carson departed, leaving just an empty room. She said how nice it would be for them to be able to remember the hours they’d had together. “Thus far I have no regrets,” Dorothy added. “How wonderful also.”
A day later Dorothy again wrote to Carson to say how happy their time together had been. She said it was “queer to see the moon above the skyscrapers” but that seeing it with Carson was all that mattered: “Darling, again let me tell you how sweet every moment of our being together was for me. Another lovely memory to be added to so many others. Of course, I believe the setting for our type of happiness is at its best in the natural world but if we can’t always have that we can create our own ‘quiet bower’ in a man-made environment, can’t we? It wasn’t too bad, was it dear?”
Carson and Dorothy were together in New York for about forty-four hours—long enough, somehow, for Dorothy to feel the need to say at the end that she had no regrets about any of it thus far. Carson, meanwhile, was uncharacteristically circumspect in the days following their meeting—saying little more than it had made her happy and that she could now return to The Edge of the Sea with renewed energy. She said they’d had a “lovely interlude.”
Dorothy’s caution—did she fear that regret would come with time?—was as unusual as Carson’s reticence. Had they been intimate in a way they were now reluctant to acknowledge? Sex seems not to have been part of their relationship, or at least not an essential feature of it. Their surviving correspondence describes a transcendent, romantic friendship that existed in a realm above ordinary physical love and desire. Nowhere in their many hundreds of letters to each other are there the declarations of mutual attraction so common among sexually intimate couples. Their longing for each other was intense, an “overpowering emotional experience” that swept them up like an inrushing tide. They remarked often on the impossibility of anyone else understanding their feelings for each other. Rarely together in the same place for long—a few days here and there, sometimes a week or longer at West Southport—their relationship existed mainly on paper and in their own hearts and minds.
Their differences were complementary. Carson was famous and ambitious and had never given a thought to living any life other than a writer’s life. She knew a lot about the world, but nothing of love. Dorothy was private and shared a rich, loving marriage with Stan. Together they had a son, and now a daughter-in-law and a grandchild named Martha whose company was a delight. Dorothy could cook and take care of things; Carson, despite years at the head of a sprawling family, was indifferent to domestic matters.
What they shared was an intensity of feeling for
nature and books and music—a love for the beautiful things in life that are associated with the highest category of Platonic love. Platonic Eros is a hierarchy, with carnal desires at the bottom rung of what the classicist Allan Bloom called Plato’s “ladder of love.” At the top is “beauty itself,” and it was on this highest rung that Carson and Dorothy began their affair of the heart. From the beginning, they related to each other mainly through their shared appreciation of “beautiful things” that were larger and more perfect than themselves.
A few weeks after their rendezvous in New York, Dorothy wrote to tell Carson that the night before, feeling anxious and having had too much coffee, she’d lain awake for a long time. At last her thoughts settled on their time together in Maine the previous spring, their “Maytime”:
Oh, darling, live over those days together sometime. Such happiness as those days brought to me. I remember the morning I got up before you did, to stand at the window for a long while looking down on your own special world. Darling, the tears came that morning—the whole situation was so lovely—so far lovelier than anything my wildest imagination could conjure up. Do you remember?
Alone with this memory in the small hours of the morning, Dorothy said she’d gone to get the letters Carson had sent the previous winter confessing the fullness of her love. Dorothy wondered how many hours Carson had spent writing them—they were so perfect and so finely composed—and she thought how the world would have valued that time had Carson instead devoted those same hours to writing things meant for everyone. Dorothy was amazed at how much they had discovered about each other over the past year and at the way there always seemed to be still another level of deeper understanding that could be achieved.
Although they never doubted one another, their letters sometimes betrayed the inherent fragility of what was a mostly long-distance relationship. They frequently worried that their words might be misconstrued. In letter after letter, one or the other of them finds herself apologizing for some slip of the pen—only to hear back at once that there was no misunderstanding for which to be sorry. For a while, Dorothy had asked herself how long this incomparable thing could last. But no more:
Darling, I’m sure now that with me it will last as long as I shall live—the year has not dulled my love and devotion to you by one little neutron—in fact my love is as infinite as that beautiful morning star which is my first ritual of each day—to look out at it and speak to you, to reach you in your subconscious for I always hope you are asleep. This morning I thought what a lovely experience it would be if we could watch that star rise together.
Despite the uncanny synchronicity between Carson and Dorothy—the conviction that their thoughts and feelings about life were identical—their relationship surely meant different things to each of them. For Carson, Dorothy was the one great love of her life. To Dorothy, Carson was the person who’d opened a world for them to share, one in which the birds would always sing, the rhythm of the sea would never cease, and the words for everything would endure. When Carson finished The Edge of the Sea, she decided to dedicate it to “Dorothy and Stanley Freeman—who have gone down with me into the low-tide world and have felt its beauty and its mystery.” Overwhelmed, Dorothy and Stan asked her to consider this carefully. Carson answered that her only concern was whether The Edge of the Sea was a good enough book for the purpose. “I thought of waiting for another,” Carson said, “but who knows what else will be written, or how that will turn out.”
EIGHT
The Enduring Sea
Carson was determined to make The Edge of the Sea different from the guidebooks that commonly grouped organisms together by taxonomy—whether that was finches with finches or crabs with crabs. Instead, she planned to organize her marine subjects according to the communities they shared and the habitats in which they could be found. This ecological approach not only reflected emerging scientific principles—much as she explained them in her lecture to the AAAS in Boston—but would also make it easier for readers who actually wanted to go down to the ocean and know what kinds of plants and animals they were seeing.
Practical utility remained an essential part of the idea in spite of Carson’s conviction that it could be made as readable as The Sea Around Us. As Carson drafted and revised early versions of the manuscript, its evolution to the longer and less discursive book it would become moved closer to what she had in mind. A few other books had taken similar approaches, notably Douglas Wilson’s Life of the Shore and Shallow Sea.
Published in 1935, Life of the Shore and Shallow Sea was really a book about the near-shore marine environments, and how they are influenced by tides, waves, light, temperature, and the like. The inhabitants of these regions, rather than simply being cataloged, were considered according to specific characteristics or life stages. So the chapter “Locomotory Movements,” for example, looked at animals that swim, others that drift or walk or burrow their way into the sand, and some—like the cuttlefish or the octopus—that travel by means of water-jet propulsion. Wilson’s cast of characters necessarily grew big and varied, from urchins to marine mammals such as seals and whales. Offering an observation that was well ahead of its time, Wilson also speculated on the daily movement of plankton and small marine animals from deep water to near the surface after dark that would soon take center stage in the debate over the “phantom bottom.”
But Life of the Shore and Shallow Sea, although nicely illustrated with photographs, was a challenge for amateur beachcombers to use. Plus, Wilson was British and so were his shoreline and its denizens. A better model, Carson thought, was a handsome book—already regarded as a classic—called Between Pacific Tides by Edward F. Ricketts and Jack Calvin. In the spring of 1951, as Carson was again marshaling a group of expert correspondents to help her with information and fact checking, she had written to Dr. T. A. Stephenson at University College in Aberystwyth, Wales. Stephenson had recently published a paper on the Florida Keys that Carson admired, and she wondered when he might do something similar on northern Florida and the Carolina coast. Carson was interested in this research, she said, as it related directly to her current project:
I am at work on a popular guide to the seashore life of the Atlantic coast, in which I am departing from the traditional method of organization and am grouping the animals and plants as they are found on the shore. The basic idea is somewhat like that used in Ricketts and Calvin’s Between Pacific Tides (although mine will be a less ambitious book) but we do not now have an Atlantic coast guide based on an ecological treatment.
Had she written to Stephenson a few months later—this was just before The Sea Around Us came out—Carson might have been less deferential toward Between Pacific Tides. As it was, she had already told Brooks in a less guarded moment that if the guide to the Atlantic coast turned out well they could proceed to do one on the Pacific shore. Whether Carson would have taken herself to the other side of the continent to work for months on coastlines she did not know is doubtful; she never did. But she had a few things in common with Ed Ricketts, who was the primary author of Between Pacific Tides. Ricketts was a kindred spirit in his passion for low tides and surf-pounded shores, and like Carson he knew what it was like to publish something at the wrong time. Beyond that, they could not have been more different.
Ricketts was originally from Chicago. He was ten years older than Carson and not so well educated, having departed abruptly from Illinois Normal State University after a messy encounter with a married woman. He traveled some, held various jobs, did a stint in the army, and ended up at the University of Chicago where—with another interruption following another dicey sexual escapade—he fell under the influence of a professor named W. C. Allee.
Allee didn’t invent ecology, but he was on his way to becoming a towering figure in its emergence as a way of understanding the natural world. Like other scientific disciplines, ecology developed slowly and unevenly from early origins, particularly in Greek philosophy. It began to have recognizable principles in the nine
teenth century and finally started to flourish in the twentieth. By the 1930s ecology was a robust science, and it owed a lot to the work of Allee, whose studies focused on animals not as individual organisms, but as groups. Allee had worked on marine ecology at Woods Hole early in the century, and in 1931 his book Animal Aggregations would establish itself as one of the foundations of ecological science.
In this same period, the studies of plants and animals were becoming more integrated, and researchers began talking about “biomes,” large-scale segments of the total environment that could be understood only by learning how the life forms occupying them interacted and how such interactions were subject to environmental influences. The ocean is a biome, and within it are multiple zones that have unique characteristics—among them the intertidal zone over which the sea regularly advances and retreats, and where the life forms are adapted to the dramatic change in conditions that takes place several times each day.
Ricketts had gotten married and moved to the Monterey area in California, near the Hopkins Marine Station, which was the West Coast version of the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole. Monterey Bay, sheltered from the high Pacific surf in places and deep in the middle—the Monterey Canyon, as it’s called, is more than eleven thousand feet deep—is home to an abundance of marine life. Ricketts loved exploring the tidal pools and mudflats around the area. He opened a biological supply company called Pacific Biological Laboratories, shipping specimens around the country and managing to eke out a living despite the Depression. The catalog started out with a few items—sponges, jellyfishes, corals, and such—but as the business expanded it came to include many other marine organisms, as well as rats, cats, and snakes. Ricketts operated out of a dilapidated house on a section of the waterfront called Cannery Row, across the street from one of the area’s most popular brothels.
On a Farther Shore Page 21
