Part scientist and part salesman, Ricketts was also a proto-bohemian. He believed there was another dimension of knowledge that resided outside of everyday experience—a place where the truth behind everything could be perceived as whole and perfect—and he liked to talk about “breaking through” to that place in small ways, always hoping for more. Free in his thoughts, free in his behavior, Ricketts hated the idea of social restraint in all its forms. He sometimes wore a beard and regarded his marriage vows more as suggestions than rules whenever it suited him to do so.
The lab on Cannery Row became a hangout for an assortment of pretty girls, writers, artists, and other colorful types who loved Ricketts and appreciated his willingness to keep the place well stocked with phonograph records and cold beer. One member of this informal association was a young writer named John Steinbeck, who had a success in 1935 with a book of stories called Tortilla Flat that was soon followed by three memorable novels about the downtrodden and the dispossessed: In Dubious Battle, Of Mice and Men, and finally The Grapes of Wrath, which would come out in 1939, the same year as Between Pacific Tides. In 1945, Steinbeck published a raucous novel called Cannery Row, about a ragtag Depression-era group of friends whose lives in a crummy waterfront community center on their spiritual leader and benefactor—a marine biologist named Doc, whom Steinbeck based on Ed Ricketts.
In May 1948, at the end of a long day in the lab, Ricketts got in his car and went to buy a steak for dinner. He failed to stop as he approached the tracks of the Southern Pacific Railway and was hit by the Del Monte Express coming from San Francisco. Ricketts died three days later from injuries sustained in the crash, shocking everyone on Cannery Row, some of whom probably suspected he was not mortal. Ricketts was fifty-one when he died, but people who knew him said he looked ten years younger.
Steinbeck had studied biology and was captivated by Ricketts and by Ricketts’s love of the intertidal seashore. For several years they contemplated the idea of coauthoring a guidebook to Pacific coastal marine life. In the spring of 1940, Ricketts and Steinbeck came up with a slightly different plan. They chartered a seventy-six-foot fishing vessel, the Western Flyer, and with its captain and crew of four, embarked on a four-thousand-mile collecting trip into the Sea of Cortez—more commonly known as the Gulf of California—which lies between the Baja peninsula and Mexico proper. Moving from one anchorage to the next, they went ashore at each stop to observe and collect and catalog marine organisms. They also pondered what such life forms might teach us about ourselves in order to—as Ricketts would put it—break though to a more far-reaching view of life:
We have looked into the tide pools and seen the little animals feeding and reproducing and killing for food. We name them and describe them and, out of long watching, arrive at some conclusion about their habits so that we say, “This species typically does thus and so,” but we do not objectively observe our own species as a species, although we know the individuals fairly well. When it seems that men may be kinder to men, that wars may not come again, we completely ignore the record of our own species. If we used the same smug observation on ourselves that we do on hermit crabs we would be forced to say, with the information at hand, “It is one diagnostic trait of Homo sapiens that groups of individuals are periodically infected with a feverish nervousness which causes the individual to turn on and destroy, not only his own kind, but the works of his own kind.”
Given the unusual collaboration between Ricketts and Steinbeck, it was not surprising that the book that resulted from this forty-day odyssey was big and wonderful and strange. Sea of Cortez was almost six hundred pages long and divided into two parts—a narrative of the trip and a descriptive inventory of the species collected. Ricketts handled the scientific section; both men worked on the narrative, which was based on journals kept by the captain of the Western Flyer and by Ricketts, as well as Steinbeck’s own idiosyncratic impressions. The narrative tracked their journey as they visited different kinds of coastal environments—rocky headlands, tidal flats, beaches, coral reefs, and muddy, stinking thickets of mangrove. There’s a salty, ironic flavor to the travelogue portion of the narrative, which is interrupted at one point for a lengthy and nearly impenetrable excursion into Ricketts’s metaphysics of “non-teleological thinking.” This was his idea—now a generally accepted principle—that biology does not operate as preferential striving toward some ultimate objective. If, for example, one regards evolution as a teleological process, then one sees the product and purpose of evolution as a better or “higher” organism. But the reality is that evolution only results in organisms better suited to prevailing conditions. Simply put, nature does not have a plan—it just happens.
Sea of Cortez was published on December 5, 1941, two days before the attack at Pearl Harbor, and it suffered the same fate as Carson’s Under the Sea-Wind, collecting a handful of nice reviews before being swallowed up and lost in the turbulence of war. Carson presumably read Sea of Cortez—she read everything about the ocean and sea life—and she might have felt an affinity for the narrative portion of the book, as it was more like her own writing than was the unadorned, factual text of Ricketts’s Between Pacific Tides.
What drew her strongly to Between Pacific Tides was not the narrative—there was hardly any—but its approach. Ricketts organized the book around the different kinds of shoreline encountered on the Pacific coast. These were further subdivided according to the marine life that was present within discrete zones that were differentially governed by the tides and surf. So a “rocky shore” on the open coastline, for example, could be divided into four zones, segmenting it from a few feet above the high-tide line, where organisms could be classified as “marine life” only by virtue of intermittent wetting from the spray coming up from the surf, down through the high-tide and mid-tide reaches, all the way to the levels of the lowest tides. This was useful, as any reasonably alert person could find his or her way to these places-within-places and identify what was living there from Ricketts’s plainspoken descriptions. In some cases, Ricketts supplemented the straightforward catalog of species with more entertaining information:
Many years ago, when the Pismo clam was as common on exposed beaches in southern California as are sand dollars on bay and estuary beaches, teams of horses drew plows through the sand, turning up the clams by the wagon load. Now adults of the species are almost unobtainable in the intertidal zone. Experienced diggers with rakes or forks work at low tide, wading out waist deep or even shoulder deep, where the surf frequently breaks over them. It is hazardous work, for the diggers must feel their way along bars that are separated from the shore by deeper channels, and now and then the surf claims a victim.
For most species, Ricketts provided a careful description and sometimes a longer natural history, explaining peculiarities such as hermaphroditism in oysters or the curious habits of nemertean worms, which when disturbed break into pieces that undergo a subsequent regeneration and become complete worms again. The only thing missing in Between Pacific Tides was the voice of someone standing above this elemental environment and feeling within it the slow pulse of geologic time and the mighty force of evolution that lies inside and beyond the surging waters—a voice that belonged more naturally to Rachel Carson than to Ed Ricketts. And it came to her again as she turned her attention to the ocean’s border. The Edge of the Sea would be the only book Carson wrote in the first person singular.
Carson explored many places along the Atlantic seaboard, from Maine to Key West, as she researched The Edge of the Sea. At every place she stopped, she took time to record the look of the shore and the sea, how the wind felt and what the surf sounded like, and how the sky and sand appeared. These descriptions were accompanied by detailed lists of plants and animals observed, many of which would later be drawn by Bob Hines. Carson was a master assembler, putting down bits of observation and narrative in related blocks of notes that were later joined together—though she again often used the same notebooks to keep track of expenses an
d other matters. Mixed in with notes on a section of rocky coast were plans and specifications for the cottage she would soon build at West Southport.
Carson revisited familiar places, some more than once, including Beaufort and Woods Hole. But she also made new discoveries, her favorite being St. Simons Island, Georgia, where the gradual slope of the sea bottom caused a vast tidal flat to emerge at low tide, creating a beach that periodically extended far into the ocean, as if the sea had not merely retreated but had rather moved itself nearer the horizon. Carson confided to her notebook the intense pleasure she took in exploring this expanse of sand, where she estimated as much as a half mile of shallow sea floor was exposed at low tide, and where you could walk out a long way over the firm sand and barely get your feet wet. At the outermost edge, where the sand mixed with clay, there were the same standing ridges that Carson had seen at Beaufort many years before, like shadows of the waves that would soon creep back toward land and inundate the ground on which she stood.
And yet nothing compared to Carson’s own shoreline in Maine and its otherworldly menagerie of marine treasures and oddities. Carson wrote to an old college friend that her good fortune there was boundless:
The tides following the recent full moon have fallen to really spectacular lows and have proved to me that I’m living on a very exciting shore. I don’t see how I could have picked a much better place for collecting purposes. I must try some color photographs, for I’ve never seen such a range of color in starfish—and they are simply lying about all over the place, in water and out of it, as inlanders would probably expect them to be, but as they practically never are in real life. The beautiful little red one, Henricia, is very common, and the northern star, Asterias vulgaris, comes in every conceivable color. We found a ten-inch one yesterday. Just below low water, the bottom is just paved with that beautiful calcareous alga in a rich rose color, and there are literally hundreds of green urchins lying about over it. And I’ve never seen so many anemones—big ones—and clusters of the soft coral, Alcyonium—and funny, fat little sea cucumbers down under layers of horse mussels, which themselves are hidden under a thick mat of Irish moss and brittle stars. Last night I went down after dark to return a big starfish I’d borrowed on the previous low tide, and it was quite eerie, with the big crabs, that hide during the day, slithering around over the rocks; and the anemones hanging down from the roof of their cave, seen by flashlight, looked like something Charles Addams dreamed up.
The Edge of the Sea was Carson’s most personal book—the only one derived extensively from her own fieldwork—and her voice made it come alive. She still haunted the library, still read journals and technical papers, still consulted with experts. But in an important way she finally freed herself to enter a story, to take her readers in hand as together they explored the seashore. Utterly at home in the intertidal world—like Ricketts, she segregated it into different types, such as rocky shores and sandy beaches—Carson made The Edge of the Sea less a description of that realm and more of a lively guided tour. Writing of the sand dollars that lie just under the sand at St. Simons Island, Carson noted the subtle pattern on their backs, like a five-petaled flower that repeated the “meaning and the symbolism of the number five,” which she called the “sign” of the echinoderms, a family that includes the five-legged starfish. Beneath the sand was a strange kingdom of burrowers, of which she was constantly aware:
Walking back across the flats of that Georgia beach, I was always aware that I was treading on the thin rooftops of an underground city. Of the inhabitants themselves little or nothing was visible. There were the chimneys and stacks and ventilating pipes of underground dwellings, and various passages and runways leading down into darkness. There were little heaps of refuse that had been brought up to the surface as though in an attempt at some sort of civic sanitation. But the inhabitants remained hidden, dwelling silently in their dark, incomprehensible world.
Carson called the edge of the sea an “elusive and indefinable boundary,” one that changes daily with the tides and thus has a “dual nature … belonging now to the land, now to the sea.” And the shore is also altered over the course of many eons, as the climate shifts and the level of the ocean by turns rises and then subsides. As always, Carson regarded the sea with the greatest affinity, but also with awe, for it is the source of all life and the wellspring of history, a place where each day of the world bears allegiance to all the ages of the world, and to which we are inexorably drawn. In a draft of The Edge of the Sea, Carson composed an epilogue. Eventually she turned it into a short, haunting chapter called “The Enduring Sea” that comes at the conclusion of the book. In it, Carson describes a foggy night at Southport Island. As she listens from the window of her study, she is surrounded by the “sea sounds” of a rising tide. She thinks how this same tide is “pressing also against other shores” she has known and loved:
Then in my thoughts these shores, so different in their nature and in the inhabitants they support, are made one by the unifying touch of the sea. For the differences I sense in this particular instant of time that is mine are but the differences of a moment, determined by our place in the stream of time and in the long rhythms of the sea. Once this rocky coast beneath me was a plain of sand; then the sea rose and found a new shore line. And again in some shadowy future the surf will have ground these rocks to sand and will have returned the coast to its earlier state. And so in my mind’s eye these coastal forms merge and blend in a shifting, kaleidoscopic pattern in which there is no finality, no ultimate and fixed reality—earth becoming fluid as the sea itself.
In May 1955, Carson complained to Paul Brooks about the biographical profile of her that Houghton Mifflin had drafted for the jacket of The Edge of the Sea. She thought it came off as an unseemly attempt to “build up” the book’s author, when, in fact, she was already well established. Carson had a point—The Sea Around Us had sold more than a million copies and had been translated into eighteen languages. Carson disingenuously said the mere thought of writing her own bio was too unpleasant to even think about. But she managed, eventually submitting an exhaustive biography that gave a detailed accounting of every award and distinction she’d won for The Sea Around Us. Brooks said it was great but that he’d have to shorten it a little.
About a month later Carson was at West Southport, busily corresponding with an editor at the New Yorker named Sanderson Vanderbilt on the excerpts of The Edge of the Sea that were being readied to appear in the magazine in two installments. Just before the Fourth of July, she told Vanderbilt she needed a ten-day break in order to prepare and deliver an important speech. In truth, Carson was indulging her habit of doing things for the least likely of people.
Although she was often overwhelmed with fan mail and requests for information, Carson routinely took time to compose long, thoughtful letters in response to inquiries from students or teachers. She thought nothing of saying no to speaking engagements—the more important and high profile they were the less likely she was to accept. But she had a soft place in her heart for struggling organizations. The speech she mentioned to Vanderbilt was to be given at a fund-raiser for the fledgling Lincoln County Cultural and Historical Association in Maine. Carson spoke at the Wiscasset High School auditorium—not far from Boothbay Harbor—and accompanied her talk with color slides Stan Freeman had taken near her cottage and out at Ocean Point the previous summer.
Carson was unhappy when she learned that Houghton Mifflin had set November 9, 1955, as the publication date for The Edge of the Sea. Ignoring the fact that she had delivered the often-delayed manuscript years after it was due, she complained that Houghton Mifflin was now jeopardizing the book’s prospects with its “late publication” schedule. Carson took her case over the heads of Paul Brooks and Lovell Thompson, writing instead to Houghton Mifflin president Henry Laughlin to urge an earlier release for the book. She said a big reason The Sea Around Us had done so well was that it came out almost immediately after its serialization in the
New Yorker. With The Edge of the Sea set to appear in the New Yorker in late August, Carson thought whatever momentum it got from the magazine would evaporate by mid-November. She also claimed that many people had told her they finished their Christmas shopping by November 1 and were already disappointed that they wouldn’t be able to give The Edge of the Sea as a holiday gift.
Laughlin was out of the country, then abruptly back home to see his terminally ill mother through her final hours. In his stead, Lovell Thompson—who must have found Carson’s insistence on an earlier publication pretty rich—patiently explained that every book has its own life and that what had been important to the success of The Sea Around Us would be much less so with The Edge of the Sea. Thompson assured Carson that she was now a famous bestselling author whose name alone would carry The Edge of the Sea and that booksellers and readers would eagerly snap it up whenever it came out. Besides, he said, reproducing Bob Hines’s drawings made the book’s production schedule challenging and hard to modify. But he said they’d think it over.
A week later he wrote to Carson again, saying he thought they could issue the book on either October 31 or November 1. When Henry Laughlin got back to the office a few days after this message, he at once wrote to Carson, telling her deferentially that The Edge of the Sea was to be Houghton Mifflin’s “big book of the season” and that they would do everything possible to ensure its success. Laughlin said they would try for publication in the third or fourth week of October.
“The Rim of Sand” appeared in the August 20, 1955, issue of the New Yorker. It was followed in the next issue by “The Rocky Shores.” Alerted to another book coming from Rachel Carson, an eager readership awaited The Edge of the Sea when it was published on October 26. Few were disappointed.
On a Farther Shore Page 22
