On a Farther Shore

by William Souder

By Christmas 1962 Silent Spring had climbed to number one on the New York Times bestseller list, fallen back, then returned to the top spot. Houghton Mifflin prepared a ten-page, 5,500-word booklet rebutting Carson’s critics, and continued sending out regular press releases updating the book industry on sales and endorsements from important persons. That same month, Carson got a letter from a girl named Elsie Baier, a high school senior in North Kingstown, Rhode Island. Baier said she’d been assigned to defend the “thesis” of Silent Spring in an upcoming debate at school. The enterprising teenager told Carson she was worried that her opponent was likely to have a pile of material from the critics of Silent Spring. Baier asked if Carson could send her examples of support for the book from “reputable authorities.”

  Carson, who routinely said no to prominent people and institutions asking for her time or help, gave careful thought to Baier’s naive request before writing her back at length and enclosing materials Baier could use in making her argument. Carson’s advice to Baier provided a rare insight into how she perceived much of the criticism directed at Silent Spring:

  One thing that fascinates me is this: Has “the thesis of Rachel Carson” been defined with precision as a preliminary to the debate? If it has not, you will probably find that you and your opponent are talking about entirely different things. I say this because a great many people who are talking about the book have not read it; they are arguing, not about what I have said, but about what the pesticide industry wants people to believe I said. Therefore, if you find your opponent saying my “thesis” is to abandon controls and “let nature take over,” I hope you will bring him back to reality by quoting from my concluding chapter.

  Carson probably found her correspondence with Baier a pleasant diversion from the noise that had enveloped Silent Spring—and from her continuing health problems. In late October 1962, Carson had gone to Cleveland for the dual purpose of attending a reception in her honor at the Museum of Natural History and a checkup at the Cleveland Clinic. Carson’s cancer was thought to be under control for the time being—more X-rays a few weeks later seemed to confirm this—but Carson told Dorothy Freeman she’d had a terrible premonition. She said she could write letters as though a “menacing shadow” did not exist, but that just before she’d left for Cleveland she had a moment when she felt time stop and it had occurred to her that “there might even be no tomorrow.”

  In December, Carson made her most thorough public response to the attacks on Silent Spring. It was in a speech to the Women’s National Press Club, and in it Carson’s frustration with critics who had twisted or ignored her meaning—as well as her amusement at those who attacked the book without having read it—came out at last. After being introduced as “Silver Spring’s Joan of Arc,” Carson told the audience that the industry response to Silent Spring—what she called the “unquiet autumn” following its publication—was something she and Houghton Mifflin had anticipated all along, and that it had employed “all the well-known devices” for weakening a cause, which included claims the book said things it did not.

  Carson quoted an editorial from Vermont’s Bennington Banner that said, “The anguished reaction to Silent Spring has been to refute statements that were never made.” Another line of attack had been the effort to discredit the person behind the book. Carson, bemused, said she had been branded a bird lover, a cat lover, a fish lover, and—heavens—a “high priestess of nature.” To her detractors, Carson belonged to “a mystical cult having to do with the laws of the universe which my critics consider themselves immune to.”

  She offered a number of examples that demonstrated continuing problems with pesticides, and she specifically challenged Time magazine’s claim that accidental poisonings from pesticides were rare. California—one of the few states with accurate records, Carson said—was reporting as many as one thousand accidental poisonings a year. Carson also warned that the chemicals industry protected its interests among academic researchers and government regulators in ways that were often invisible to the public. She said pesticide makers routinely underwrote the cost of studies that reported favorably on pesticide safety. Not even the prestigious National Academy of Sciences, which had recently reviewed the pesticide issue, was immune—the NAS committee behind its latest report, Carson said, included no fewer than nineteen chemical companies representing the interests of the pesticides industry.

  Carson’s voice that day was firm and clear. But only days later she was flattened with crippling back pain. Her doctors assured her this was the result of “normal” joint deterioration from her arthritis. Dorothy sent her some exercises designed to relieve back problems. Carson told Dorothy she was looking forward to having a couple of weeks off. She said she’d just enjoyed a performance of the annual Christmas pageant at Roger’s school in which he at last had the role of King after playing smaller parts in previous years. As the year came to a close, Carson told Dorothy she wouldn’t have appreciated the impact Silent Spring was having or been able to endure her deepening health problems without Dorothy’s constant support.

  Then, on New Year’s Day 1963, Carson wrote to Dorothy with a grim update that canceled many of the hopes they had maintained about her condition. Carson admitted to “holding out” on Dorothy “a little” before remembering that they had promised each other not to conceal anything.

  Carson said that about a week before Christmas she’d complained to her doctor again about back pain—wondering if there wasn’t something more that could be done for it. When the doctor reexamined her X-rays he unexpectedly suggested they begin a course of radiation treatment on her spine right away. Checking with Barney Crile in Cleveland, Carson was told this was a wise course, as when cancer invades the vertebrae the patient may experience pain before anything shows up on X-rays. The sooner radiation treatments began, the better the chance they would stop the spread of cancer if that’s what it was. The good news was that this time the treatments were with a smaller, less frightening machine that made the sessions more bearable, Carson said. The radiation had again caused severe nausea, but now it was over and the hard part was behind her. Carson was told to expect it would take several weeks before her pain subsided, but she told Dorothy there seemed to be little change.

  Carson tried to reassure Dorothy that there was no definite diagnosis that cancer was the cause of her back problem and that perhaps there was not a malignancy after all. But she preferred to assume it was exactly that. And if it was, the good news was that it had been caught early. “So there’s much reason for optimism,” Carson said.

  But her back was not Carson’s only problem now. In the same letter she told Dorothy that one day while she’d been out Christmas shopping for Roger she started to feel funny. Suddenly everything went black, and when she came to she found that she had collapsed and toppled over a record display. Once her head cleared, Carson realized she was close to her regular clinic and went over to have her fainting spell evaluated. Everything seemed okay, she said, except for a racing heart. Now her doctors wanted her to see a heart specialist, as she had also recently complained of chest pains. Her symptoms pointed to angina on top of cancer. Carson tried to laugh it off for Dorothy’s benefit. “Well, I may do something about it one of these days, but if it is angina it is certainly a mild case and I’m not running up hills or anything like that.” But four weeks later she did see a cardiologist—who said it was unmistakably angina, “a classical case.”

  The changes this meant for Carson were significant. A hospital bed was sent to her home in Silver Spring and she was ordered to stay in the house. There was to be no stair climbing. Carson told Dorothy she was henceforth forbidden to do anything that someone else could do for her. The reason for these dramatic restrictions, Carson said, was that it turned out she had a well-understood but rare form of angina that most often struck while she was sleeping and not as the result of any exertion. At the same time, Carson’s doctor said exercise probably wouldn’t help her condition, either. She told Dorothy she now
expected her life to be “pretty tame.”

  In early February 1963, Carson told Dorothy her new routine was to go back to bed as soon as Roger was off to school each day—and that she often stayed there without bothering to get dressed, although this tended only to increase her weariness. Dorothy wrote back, wondering how Carson managed to take it all. Carson reminded her that it was Dorothy who made things easier, though she also hinted at more difficult times ahead. “Because of you there has been far more joy in the happy things,” Carson wrote, “and the hard spots have been more bearable. And so it will be in time to come, I know.”

  Inevitably, Carson began to think about her legacy, as it now seemed undeniable that her time was growing short. Like any writer, she hoped that her work would outlive her. She told Dorothy that the past decade—the time when they had known each other—had been crowded with sorrow and illness, but also with “everything I shall be remembered for.”

  Less than two weeks later, Carson had more bad news. Two new tumors had appeared, one by her collarbone and another higher up on her neck. She tried to reassure Dorothy that radiation usually knocked out these kinds of tumors—but she allowed that this latest setback was not likely to be her last. She said she could not pretend to be “lighthearted” about any of this and mainly tried not to think about it. This wasn’t easy, as the discovery of new cancer had been accompanied by an increase in her chest pains. She said her confinement to bed was “strange.” She was afraid to do so much as pull up the blinds or even pick up the cat. Carson said she had told almost nobody how ill she was and, as a result, wasn’t getting the kind of attention she would have received in the hospital. Being home this way, not knowing how to decrease her physical activity any further, was dreadfully lonely.

  Only days after this, Carson wrote to Dorothy again, telling her that the “arthritis” she’d been complaining about in her left shoulder for two months now looked like more cancer in the latest round of X-rays. The new radiation treatments were extended to include this area. Her doctor warned her that any similar pain she felt in other joints in the future needed to be looked at promptly.

  Carson tried to stay upbeat: “The main thing I want to say, dear, is that we are not going to get bogged down in unhappiness about all this,” she wrote. “We are going to be happy, and go on enjoying all the lovely things that give life meaning—sunrise and sunset, moonlight on the bay, music and good books, the song of thrushes and the wild cries of geese passing over.”

  Houghton Mifflin and Carson had worked out arrangements for her appearance on CBS Reports. Carson got plenty of advice from the publicity people at Houghton Mifflin about how she should present herself on television. Don’t allow yourself to be shot at an angle “from the knees down,” she was told, and wear little or no makeup, especially lipstick, as it tended to look black on black-and-white film. The publisher’s main concern, though, was that Carson avoid looking “too stern.” Even though the subject was a serious one, she should smile a little now and then, as it would “relax” her face and keep her from appearing as grim as her message. Of course, it was the message that was most important to Houghton Mifflin, but the publisher also wanted their much-loved author to reveal a little of her naturally gentle nature. Her scientist self would come through on its own.

  But months after interviewing Carson, CBS rescheduled the program several times and everyone got nervous again, wondering if CBS, which was also talking to Carson’s critics, might be allowing the program to tip in the direction of the pesticides industry. In November 1962 the publicity department at Houghton Mifflin warned Carson she should brace herself for harsh treatment on the show. The program’s producer, a man named Jay McMullen, had a reputation for being slow and methodical—and Houghton Mifflin thought that could mean their “friends in the chemical business” might in the end make a strong defense of pesticides.

  Privately, Carson had reason to think CBS reporter Eric Sevareid was favorably disposed to the case she’d made against pesticides in Silent Spring, as she believed he shared her views on the sometimes careless nature of human progress. Carson had clipped and saved a newspaper account of a CBS Radio news broadcast Sevareid had done in 1958 about proposals for sending rockets—and someday men—to the moon. Sevareid believed that “winning” the moon would mean losing that magical relationship humanity had always had with it—though he understood that many people younger than himself would not share his feelings. “There must come a time in every generation,” Sevareid said on the broadcast, “when those who are older secretly get off the train of progress, willing to walk back to where they came from, if they can find the way.”

  While an ailing Carson waited for CBS Reports to air—it was finally scheduled for the evening of April 3, 1963—she was showered with accolades, winning awards from the Garden Club of America, the American Geographical Society, and the National Audubon Society. The Geographical Society’s prize, called the Cullum Medal, had never before been presented to a woman. Carson was also elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. But she confided to Paul Brooks that of all the honors she’d been given, the one that had been the most touching was being elected the first member of a newly formed chapter of Phi Beta Kappa at her alma mater, the Pennsylvania College for Women—which was now called Chatham College.

  In early March 1963, Carson and Dorothy began to feel their time together was running out. Carson said her days were now unremittingly difficult. Any movement at all caused her pain—in her back and ribs mainly—and she was beset with constant nausea that made working all but impossible. Torn between wanting Dorothy to know everything and wanting to protect her from the worst news, Carson confided that she’d held on to a letter she’d written about a month before after a night of such intense chest pains that she’d thought she might not live until morning. The thought of Dorothy, bereft and having had no chance to say goodbye, caused her to write down “what is in my heart” so that Dorothy might have something of her if the end came without warning.

  In the weeks since, Carson thought her angina improved enough that she was not likely to die suddenly after all. Now she wanted to make sure they were completely honest with each other: “All that is most wonderful in our relationship has been based on that spontaneous outpouring of thoughts and feelings. We both know that my time is limited, and why shouldn’t we face it together, freely and openly?”

  Carson said it was ironic that other people had to accept the many honors being bestowed on her, and that all her opportunities to travel to interesting places had to be turned down. Idly she thought about getting away to Myrtle Beach—Roger would love it—though it would mean flying down and renting a car, as the drive from Silver Spring now seemed unimaginable. Carson, whose moods were becoming more erratic, said it was often hard to keep going from one day to the next, but as long as she could stay at least a little busy she could manage—maybe even get well.

  “I shall feel better soon, I’m sure,” she wrote. “The present great weariness is due to the very heavy radiation I’ve had, undoubtedly. And the ‘misery’ in my side will presumably disappear. Sometimes I wish I had nothing to do, but probably it is better to keep my mind occupied.”

  Carson tried to keep up with scientific and environmental news. In December 1962 she’d been pulled into a fight over the use of dieldrin against the white-fringed beetle in Norfolk, Virginia. Earlier in the fall, larval grub worms of the beetle—a voracious and indiscriminate plant eater—had been discovered in the area, and the Virginia Agriculture Department responded with a plan to spread nine thousand pounds of granular dieldrin over three thousand acres of mostly residential lawns and gardens. Stories about the program in the Virginian-Pilot ignited public outrage. The news that dieldrin was already being heavily applied to golf courses and private lawns in Norfolk deepened divisions in the community.

  Norfolk’s new city library said it could not keep up with demand for Silent Spring. Eventually, Virginia’s governor, Albertis S. Harrison, Jr.,
got involved. He said he’d read Silent Spring, but that weighing the risk of going ahead with the dieldrin program against the economic damage that could result if the beetle went unchecked, the treatment plan should proceed. Even Carson’s old outfit, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, agreed, telling the Virginian-Pilot that dieldrin was “extremely destructive to wildlife” but stopping the white-fringed beetle was essential and there was nothing else to be done.

  After a lawsuit failed to obtain an injunction, the program began in March when a turbine blower towed behind a jeep started spreading dieldrin throughout the city. Interviewed by the Virginian-Pilot, Carson said an application rate of three pounds per acre for dieldrin was “quite heavy.” She was dismissive of official claims that the treatments were safe and would be carefully supervised. “They always say that,” she said. Carson reminded everyone that many of the most egregious misuses of pesticides she’d uncovered in researching Silent Spring had occurred in government-run programs.

  Carson took a more academic interest in another below-the-radar environmental issue in early 1963. It was a subject she’d been concerned about for years—a pattern of warmer temperatures and rising sea levels. In March, a group called the Conservation Foundation convened a small, private scientific conference to consider the possibility that the burning of fossil fuels was causing a rise in heat-trapping atmospheric carbon dioxide. A report from the conference was moderately alarming—and a preview of things to come.

  “It seems quite certain,” the report read, “that a continuing rise in the amount of atmospheric carbon dioxide is likely to be accompanied by a significant warming of the surface of the earth which by melting the polar ice caps would raise sea level and by warming the oceans would change considerably the distributions of marine species including commercial fisheries.”

  The report said the “biogeochemical” regulation of the earth’s climate was not well understood but that in general the climate was stable over long periods of time. The natural “buffering mechanisms” that made it so now appeared to be inadequate to moderate the effects of changes to the atmosphere caused by human activity. This was reason for serious concern, maybe not at the moment but in the years to come: “The effects of a rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide are world-wide. They are significant not to us but to the generations to follow. The consumption of fossil fuel has increased to such a pitch within the last half century that the total atmospheric consequences are matters of concern for the planet as a whole.”