On a Farther Shore

by William Souder

  Reviewing The Edge of the Sea in the New York Times, Charles Poore caught the joyous mood that would prevail in most of the notices. The “main news,” Poore wrote, was that Carson had “done it again.” He said her new book was as “wise and wonderful” as The Sea Around Us and that she had a remarkable knack for making the reader care about “all sorts of spiny and slime-wreathed creatures that you’ve hitherto regarded with hearty loathing when you wanted to go in swimming and the tide was low.” Poore was struck by how Carson avoided being overly technical and by the way the breadth and variety of her enthusiasms became contagious in her prose:

  Apparently Miss Carson can do no wrong. Even when she gets off that bit about how a thousand years are but a moment in the life of nature that the cosmic wallahs favor, we find ourselves nodding fatuously and saying to ourselves, “How true,” for all the world as if Miss Carson were to exercise a patent on the notion. Matter of fact, though, as she shows, life whizzes by rather briskly for many members of her cast. And if they are under-privileged in comparison with modern man in the sense that they can’t wallow in fretfulness over hydrogen bombs and such, they do take, like little men, the ceaseless surge and thunder of the sea.

  Earl Banner, writing in the Boston Globe, said the book was even better than The Sea Around Us. Exercising a Bostonian’s innate distaste for all things Manhattan, Banner assured his readers they needn’t worry that the earlier magazine serialization would diminish the impact of the book. “Since so many New Yorkers end up in the trash barrel … this should have no important affect [sic] upon book sales,” he wrote. Freely mixing its metaphors in a brief, unsigned notice, Time magazine likened the natural world portrayed in The Edge of the Sea to an “underwater ballet,” explaining that “Author Carson has shown her remarkable talent for catching the life breath of science on the still glass of poetry.”

  There were a few dissenters. Writing for the New Republic, Jacquetta Hawkes said it felt to her as if Carson had “exhausted the heart of her subject” in The Sea Around Us and was now working around its margins in a way that was “a little sad.” And Farley Mowat wrote in the Toronto Telegram that Carson had tried to repeat the lyric qualities she’d achieved in The Sea Around Us, but that she had overdone it this time and succumbed to a “mazy sentimentality.” This, Mowat, said, was something that often happened to writers—himself among them—who tried to “deal with a factual subject in too markedly a literary manner.”

  Perhaps the most perceptive review came a few months after publication, in a British journal called Books and Bookmen, in which John Langdon claimed that people who obsessed over the beauty of Carson’s prose risked losing sight of what her books were about. Good writing, Langdon said, “is not a mere matter of style.” If it were, he concluded, then “we should be as blind in reading books as when we scan the seashore, seeing alike the leaping adjective and the tumbling wave.” Langdon likened writing to painting, in which the point is not the cleverness of the brushstroke but how recognizable is the reality it shows. He said he was not surprised that so skilled a naturalist as Carson would find a way of explaining what she knew:

  It is not an accident of history that Gilbert White and Charles Darwin described flora and fauna with genius, nor that the great mariners and voyagers in distant lands can re-create their experience as part of our own. They wrote as they saw and their honest, questing eye, their care for detail is raised to the power of art by a deep felt love of nature, a respect for all things that live and move and have their being.

  Four weeks after its release, The Edge of the Sea joined the New York Times bestseller list at number eight. Solidly atop the list at number one was Anne Morrow Lindbergh’s acclaimed memoir Gift from the Sea, the story of a famous woman’s attempt to find meaning in her life during a beachcombing sojourn on Captiva Island in Florida. In mid-December, with The Edge of the Sea at number four and Gift from the Sea still at number one, the two First Ladies of the sea were joined on the bestseller list by Walter Lord, whose account of the sinking of the RMS Titanic in A Night to Remember came in at number twelve, reminding everyone that the sea could be treacherous as well as beautiful.

  Carson, exhausted and anxious—though as always protective of her interests—closely monitored the reception of The Edge of the Sea. She told Dorothy Freeman that the thrill of unexpected success that had come with The Sea Around Us could never happen to her again, but that this was all right as it had been replaced by Dorothy’s devotion. Dorothy’s support was a “rare flower” Carson would treasure, no matter what. Because The Edge of the Sea was so firmly anchored in scenes from the Atlantic seaboard, Carson doubted that it would sell well enough in other parts of the country to equal her earlier effort. She would have to make do, she said, with being satisfied if the book could at least be judged on its own merits, though she was braced against the probability that it wouldn’t be.

  “I know that, even if this book achieves acceptance, acclaim, and sales that by any reasonable standards amount to ‘success’—still by comparison with The Sea it will fail,” she said. When The Edge of the Sea did make it onto the bestseller lists—not just in New York but also in Chicago—Carson said she was content and would be even if it never went to the top. “I’ll be happy that it is Mrs. Lindbergh’s book and not something sensational or trashy that holds that position.” Carson told Dorothy that she had never met Anne Lindbergh but that she would like to, preferably “on a beach.”

  As it became clear that she had another success, Carson insisted that the flood of good reviews for The Edge of the Sea was a shock and frankly hard to believe. She told Dorothy she was too aware of the “many flaws” in the book to read the critics without serious reservations. The best thing, she said, would be to think of the reviews as something she could maybe live up to in the future. Not surprisingly, Dorothy felt differently and suggested that when they could be together again they could read the reviews out loud and relish them line by line.

  Carson had recently been approached by the Ford Foundation to write a script for the CBS-TV cultural series Omnibus—an idea that intrigued her even though she had doubts about the medium. She told Marie Rodell that she was “indifferent” to television, but realized that it now reached a large audience and so could not be ignored. Plus, Carson thought the program’s subject—clouds—would present an interesting challenge. But as she got further into discussions with the people from Omnibus—whom she described to Dorothy as “difficult”—Carson had second thoughts. Over the course of several months, Carson tried to understand exactly what was wanted of her, while Marie Rodell attempted to finalize the contract with Omnibus. Carson felt herself in the unpleasant position of being tentatively committed to something that she might not want to go on with. Dorothy, hoping to calm Carson’s worries—and aware that Carson paid little attention to television—told her she liked the Omnibus series and thought the program generally well done. Dubious, Carson wrote back to say that if that were true, then it must be by way of “some miracle I can’t explain.”

  But Carson went to work on the script in her usual way—creating files about clouds, making lists of things to include, jotting down ideas and drafting fragments of script on random pieces of paper and in her ever-present spiral notebooks. She decided that television people were simply different and that the Omnibus staff was working in a way that was completely normal—“for them.” The subject, though, seemed uncannily familiar.

  Carson saw the atmosphere as an “ocean of air,” with humanity standing on the bottom and watching the clouds floating above us. “In relation to the air-ocean,” she wrote, “we are exactly like deep-sea fishes, with all the weight of tons of air pressing down upon our bodies.” Carson and Omnibus eventually came to terms, and the program aired on a Sunday afternoon in early March 1956. Afterward, one of Carson’s neighbors in Silver Spring stopped over to say that he’d have known she’d written it even if her name hadn’t appeared in the credits at the end. In a letter to one of the produc
tion assistants at Omnibus, Carson fibbed that her initial foray into television writing had been “fun.”

  Another phase of Carson’s life was coming to an end. Ever since the publication of The Sea Around Us, Carson had been besieged with requests from magazines wanting to write profiles of her. She always said no, frustrating Marie Rodell no end. In August 1955, Rodell discussed an idea with J. Robert Moskin, the articles editor at Woman’s Home Companion, that she thought might overcome Carson’s reluctance to embrace the role of public figure. Moskin said that rather than interview Carson, he wanted her to write an article for the magazine telling parents how they could instill an appreciation of nature in their children. The tentative title was “Teach Your Child to Wonder,” and Rodell and Moskin calculated that it would appeal to Carson because of her special relationship with her grandnephew, Marjorie’s now four-year-old son Roger. It did.

  “Help Your Child to Wonder,” as the piece was finally called, ran in the July 1956 issue of Woman’s Home Companion, under a tempting subheadline announcing it as “her first magazine article since the publication of her bestselling books The Sea Around Us and The Edge of the Sea.” In writing about her experiences with Roger by the ocean’s edge or up among the spruces on the hillside behind the cottage in Maine, Carson revealed something of herself and her own feelings about nature, just as Rodell had hoped she might. The whole point, Carson argued, is not to try to “teach” a child about the natural world, but rather to simply share with him or her the act of looking at and listening to the world around us all.

  Carson believed that adults lose a natural curiosity about nature that they have as children, but that it takes only a willingness to visit a beach or a forest to rediscover a human fascination with the environment and to transmit it to even the youngest of children. How could a child not be enchanted by the sight of a ghost crab scurrying away over a nighttime beach before the searching cone of light from a flashlight—or by the discovery of a tiny evergreen taking root in the forest if he or she is told it must be a Christmas tree for squirrels? All that is required to make this happen is for adults to pay attention to nature as if it were something never seen before that might never be seen again. To make the point, Carson detoured into a personal reflection, freely disclosing her innermost feelings and mentioning—though not by name—Dorothy:

  I remember a summer night when such a thought came to me strongly. It was a clear night without a moon. With a friend, I went out on a flat headland that is almost a tiny island, being all but surrounded by the waters of the bay. There the horizons are remote and distant rims on the edge of space. We lay and looked up at the sky and the millions of stars that blazed in the darkness. The night was so still that we could hear the buoy on the ledges out beyond the mouth of the bay. Once or twice a word spoken by someone on the far shore was carried across on the clear air. A few lights burned in cottages. Otherwise there was no reminder of other human life; my companion and I were alone with the stars. I have never seen them more beautiful: the misty river of the Milky Way flowing across the sky, the patterns of the constellations standing out bright and clear, a blazing planet low on the horizon. Once or twice a meteor burned its way into the earth’s atmosphere.

  It occurred to me that if this were a sight that could only be seen once in a century or even once in a human generation, this little headland would be thronged with spectators.

  When Dorothy read a draft of the piece it made her cry. Carson said she thought the article revealed a different side of her that would to some extent satisfy the public’s curiosity about Rachel Carson. That year at Christmas, Carson bought herself an expensive Fisher phonograph that featured an AM/FM radio. The music from it played like a stirring soundtrack behind plans for a future that had long seemed impossible but that now whirled in Carson’s imagination like a raging fever. For years, Carson and Dorothy had wanted to acquire a section of land behind Carson’s cottage at West Southport and convert it into a nature sanctuary they planned to call the Lost Woods, a name taken from an essay by H. M. Tomlinson. The question was always one of money. But now Oxford University Press had agreed to generous royalty terms on a junior edition of The Sea Around Us, which was to be issued by Golden Press. There was enough money in this project to take care of Marjorie, who was in poor health with arthritis and diabetes, and Roger for the foreseeable future. Meanwhile, Simon and Schuster wanted to renew its association with Carson on an anthology called “The World of Nature.” If it did as well as Carson believed it could—the book was to be part of a series that was already selling strongly—the royalties could be as much as $150,000, an astonishing sum and more than enough to proceed with the Lost Woods.

  Dorothy, who for a long time had worried about the financial burden Carson bore in caring for her family, was overcome with joy. To think that it had begun long ago, in their “Maytime,” and might finally become a reality was almost too much to believe—even though it seemed that Carson had met one obligation only to take on another. “And now this Dream—I know its accomplishment will have its satisfaction for you, but beyond that, the joys and rewards are going to be shared by so many others that even in this you are losing yourself,” Dorothy wrote. “Do you wonder I worship you?”

  A month later, after a hospitalization from which she never fully recovered, Marjorie died. Shocked by her niece’s sudden passing and painfully aware of the fact that she would soon turn fifty, Carson began making arrangements to adopt Roger.

  NINE

  Earth on Fire

  On the morning of January 22, 1954, a ninety-three-foot wood-hulled tuna boat named the Lucky Dragon departed Yaizu harbor on the southeastern coast of Honshu Island, Japan. At the helm was Hisakichi Tsutsui, a replacement for the ship’s regular captain, who was ill. Tsutsui, although licensed as a fishing boat captain, was one of the youngest members of the twenty-three-man crew. Most of the men regarded the fishing master Yoshio Misaki as their leader. The Lucky Dragon was heavy and slow, powered by a 250-horsepower engine that was assisted, when the wind was right, by sails carried on two short masts.

  It was cold, and two days out they struck bad weather that lasted four days. After the storm subsided, Misaki gathered the crew together and told them they were not going south to the calm fishing grounds near the Solomon Islands—as everyone had been told—but were instead making for Midway Island, which was far to the east and known for treacherous seas that grew steep on their long fetch across the open Pacific Ocean. Nobody wanted to go that way, but in the end they agreed with Misaki that the fishing was likely to be better in that direction. The men weren’t paid a straight wage, but instead shared in the proceeds from the catch, so the more fish they brought home the more they would earn.

  The Lucky Dragon was a “long line” tuna boat that put out a single line, as much as fifty miles long, to which hundreds of shorter, baited lines were attached at intervals. At two forty-five in the morning of February 7, 1954, the ship was south of Midway Island when Misaki ordered the crew to start fishing. The line stayed out for four hours as the Lucky Dragon drifted lazily nearby. It took another thirteen hours to haul the line back in. The catch was poor—only fifteen fish. The radio carried reports of better fishing beyond Midway, closer to Hawaii. But the Lucky Dragon was already near the limit of its range. For a few days the crew struggled with broken fishing lines, bad weather, and a balky engine that needed constant attention. Misaki wanted to go north, which would shorten the return voyage to Japan and likely produce more fish. The crew agreed that the fishing might be better in that direction, but the seas would be much more dangerous. Instead, they implored Misaki to head southwest. Reluctantly, he agreed.

  For the next several weeks, the Lucky Dragon made its way toward the Marshall Islands, first going south and then west. The fishing remained poor. By the end of February, they had brought in only 156 fish and some of the crew now regretted not listening to Misaki. A couple of hours before dawn on March 1, 1954, the long line was put over once again.
The Lucky Dragon cut its engine and drifted silently on a calm sea beneath the stars and a few wandering clouds.

  A crewman named Shinzo Suzuki woke up when the engine stopped and, unable to go back to sleep, went out onto the fantail of the ship. The morning air was warm and heavy. Scanning the dark horizon, Suzuki spotted the blinking light from a float on the long line. He was looking to the west when all at once a blinding wall of light burst into the sky and lit up the surface of the ocean. In seconds it went from searing white to yellow before changing again into a mix of yellow and orange and red, a monster light that Suzuki could not stop looking at even as he began yelling to the crew that the sun had suddenly risen in the west. Sleepy and confused, the crew came on deck and stared gaping at the terrifying light, which grew dimmer but continued to spread and rise into the sky. Minutes went by. Then the Lucky Dragon, all ninety-nine tons of her, shivered and lurched as if the great weight of the thousands of feet of ocean beneath her keel had reached up and tapped the hull. In the same instant a roar like the end of the world passed over the ship, followed by two deep, concussive shock waves. Terrified, the crew flattened themselves on the deck. Nobody knew what was happening.

  Misaki considered ordering the Lucky Dragon ahead at full speed in a direction away from the light. But he couldn’t bring himself to abandon the long line that was still in the water, even though he knew it hadn’t been out long enough for any kind of catch. While the crew began hauling in the line, the radio operator, a man named Kuboyama, made a hasty calculation. Guessing that the loud sound wave had hit the ship about seven minutes after they’d first seen the light in the sky, Kuboyama estimated that the Lucky Dragon was roughly eighty-seven miles from whatever had happened. As he looked at their position on a chart with Misaki, Kuboyama saw that there was nothing in that direction but a vast stretch of ocean and a few small piles of sand called Bikini atoll, which was eighty-five miles away.