On a Farther Shore

by William Souder

  But as the report was more carefully considered it became apparent that internal divisions among the committee members had rendered it balanced to the point of being ineffectual. There was nothing in the report that required or even suggested an immediate reduction in pesticide use. On the contrary, the report stated flatly that “The panel believes that the use of pesticides must be continued if we are to maintain the advantages now resulting from the work of informed food producers and those responsible for control of disease.” With this premise, all of the recommendations for more studies of pesticides—necessary as they might be—hinted that the actual view of the government was that pesticides were innocent until proven guilty.

  Joseph Alsop, the Washington columnist for the New York Herald Tribune, took the position that the report was all talk and no action. “If Rachel Carson is right—and the chances are that she is largely right—something ought to be done about it,” Alsop wrote. “Furthermore, the something done needs to be considerably sterner than the report of the President’s scientific advisers, which had the approximate power of an old lady’s moral lecture to a confirmed drunk.”

  Carson told Dorothy Freeman she’d bought a new car that was so easy and pleasant to drive that riding in it was like floating. Plus, it had seat belts and, in a concession to Roger, a radio. In early May 1963 she said she was desperate to talk to Dorothy in person, as there were “things I need to say to you, but they should be said with my arms around you.” This would be difficult, as Stan Freeman, whose health had been in decline in recent years, was ill again, and Carson had to tell herself that having a visit from Dorothy was impossible for now. “I think we must drift for the present,” she said. The hardest truth was that Carson wasn’t sure she could make it to Maine for the summer. There were rumors—Dorothy said she didn’t know how they started—that Carson might even rent out her cottage that year.

  But at the end of May, Carson and Roger flew to Maine and stayed five days with the Freemans. Carson had decided to go up for the summer at Southport Island after all, but first she had to return home for an appearance before Congress, where Connecticut senator Abraham Ribicoff’s committee on government operations had summoned her for hearings on how to coordinate a federal response to the environmental hazards of pesticides. Carson appeared on June 4, 1963, and found Ribicoff plainly on her side and spoiling for a fight over pesticides.

  One recommendation of the president’s pesticide panel had been that the U.S. Department of Agriculture end a practice called a “protest registration” through which a pesticide found to be unsafe by the department could be put on the market for a period of time anyway, without informing anyone it had been disapproved. Secretary of Agriculture Orville Freeman had already told Ribicoff’s committee that he supported getting rid of protest registrations—but when the press had asked for a list of such disapproved products currently on the market, Freeman’s agency had said no. Furious, Ribicoff said the USDA had until the end of the day to release the list—otherwise he’d read it on the floor of the Senate the next day.

  Carson entered a long, prepared statement into the record, rehearsing the widespread environmental contamination by pesticides—and noting the growing evidence that living organisms everywhere on the planet were accumulating pesticides in their bodies. Carson also made a number of specific recommendations, including endorsing the pesticide committee’s call for more research, but also arguing that citizens needed recourse when the areas where they lived were being sprayed against their wishes and that much greater restrictions on the sale and use of pesticides were needed. Ribicoff questioned Carson closely as to whether she advocated a ban on pesticide use. She said she did not—and she agreed with Ribicoff that this had been a false charge made against Silent Spring.

  Carson also took questions from Senator Ernest Gruening of Alaska—who a year later would distinguish himself by being one of only two senators to vote against the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution expanding U.S. involvement in Vietnam. Gruening wanted to know whether Carson supported the idea of creating a new federal agency—he thought it might be called the Department of Ecology—that would take over the regulation of pesticides and other environmental matters. Carson said she thought that would be a good thing to do.

  Carson and Roger—accompanied by Carson’s assistant Jeanne Davis—got up to Southport Island on June 25, 1963, arriving in time for Roger to start a month-long summer camp. Carson told Dorothy one reason she was determined to go to Maine that summer was that she so disliked the idea of being an invalid. She thought she could manage on her own if she was careful. Her heart condition was one consideration. Another was her back, in which she’d recently suffered a compression fracture. Her doctors warned that this meant any kind of fall could have serious consequences. Even so, Carson sent Dorothy a note that read: “Would you help me search for a fairy cave on an August moon and a low, low tide? I would love to try it once more, for the memories are precious.”

  One day in early September 1963, Carson and Dorothy drove to the southern tip of Southport Island, to the village of Newagen where the lovely Newagen Seaside Inn was surrounded by lush gardens and a wide lawn that looked west, toward Griffith Head on the other side of Sheepscot Bay. After lunch they walked outside, taking in the view. The sky was blue and it felt like summer still, and they listened to the sound of the wind threading through the spruces and the surf falling against the rocks along the shoreline. There were monarch butterflies drifting over the grounds, all heading in the same direction, one after another, each pulled onward by the invisible force of the migratory instinct. Carson and Dorothy talked about the butterflies, and their complex life cycle, in which several generations live and die over the course of thousands of miles of travel in the space of a single year.

  Back home in Silver Spring a few days later, Carson wrote to Dorothy, mentioning the butterflies and saying what a happy memory they were. They had realized on that fine, warm day that none of the ones they saw then would return. Remarkably, this hadn’t seemed sad at the time. Carson thought it was because both of them knew that every living thing must come to the end of its days, and that it was only natural that it should be this way. The monarch’s life cycle is measured in only months, Carson said. “For ourselves, the measure is something else, the span of which we cannot know. But the thought is the same: when that intangible cycle has run its course it is a natural and not unhappy thing that a life comes to its end.”

  Carson’s cancer was spreading quickly now. After a long day at the hospital, X-rays showed lesions had invaded the entire left side of her pelvis—which accounted for the new pain and lameness Carson had experienced over the summer. Dorothy, still in Maine and hoping to cheer Carson, wrote letter after letter describing her days at Southport Island, telling Carson about the birds and the plants and sometimes imagining the two of them walking together under the moonlight along Sheepscot Bay. Dorothy recalled that after one such walk long ago she’d told Carson she looked like alabaster.

  In October 1963, Carson started a course of testosterone and phosphorus treatments her doctors thought would reduce her discomfort and difficulty walking. This mattered to Carson, as she was scheduled to give a speech at the Kaiser Medical Center in San Francisco later that month. But she was losing confidence that she was up to it, as every day her pain—which now moved randomly from one part of her body to another—increased. Sometimes she couldn’t walk at all. Dorothy commiserated, saying she wished Carson could make the trip to California without pain and fear for how she would hold up. She mentioned some of the things she and Carson had seen and done together when they first met. She said she knew now they’d never see or do those things again, but that she was content that it must be so.

  The trip to San Francisco was arduous, though Marie Rodell went along to help Carson manage. A local newspaper account of her speech described Carson as a “middle-aged, arthritis-crippled spinster” whose earth-shaking book on the dangers of pesticides had produced a packed
house at the Fairmont Hotel.

  Carson told Dorothy how exciting it had been to fly over the Grand Canyon. She loved San Francisco and said if she had another life to live she’d happily spend at least a few years of it there. Somehow she managed a visit to the redwood forest at Muir Woods the morning before her talk, though it was frustrating to see such a place from a wheelchair. The sightseeing was exhausting but not nearly so bad as Carson imagined it would have been to sit all day through the presentations that preceded hers. She told Dorothy she wasn’t sorry she’d gone, but that it had been foolish to travel all the way across the country when her physical condition was so poor. When she got home, Carson told Dorothy she had no further obligations and could “afford to be dopey.” She had begun taking sleeping pills regularly and was spending most of her time in bed. She said she looked forward to staying awake long enough to read the autographed copy of The Quiet Crisis that Stewart Udall had sent her.

  Some days were better than others, though Carson said her routine now rarely changed. She got up sometimes, depending on how she felt and whether she could make her way around the house with a walker. She assured Dorothy that she was not in constant pain and maybe even feeling a little better—though in one letter she said she had to stop writing, as her hand would not work any more that day.

  Carson had agreed to donate her personal papers to Yale University, and in November 1963 she began digging through old manuscripts and correspondence with publishers. She said it was quite an experience—happy in a way she hadn’t anticipated. She told Dorothy she wished they could have done the task together, as there was an air of “dewy freshness and innocence and wonder” that brought back not only memories of her first literary efforts, but also of the early times with Dorothy in Maine. Later that month, Carson found it hard to write to Dorothy for several days after the assassination of President Kennedy on November 22, 1963. Carson said she felt as if she’d lost a member of her family and that his killing brought on feelings of “shock, dismay, and revulsion at the black aspects of our national life—the bigotry, intolerance and hatred preached by so many.”

  Although she now had severe, continuous pain in her neck—and had more trouble making her hands work—Carson went to New York in early December to accept the Cullum Medal from the American Geographical Society. Worried about shipping a portion of her papers to New Haven, she brought them instead to New York so Marie Rodell could later deliver them to Yale. Stan and Dorothy Freeman went down to the city for the event and spent a few hours with Carson. Dorothy wrote to Carson afterward and said she had never imagined she would see Carson out of bed again after she’d left Maine that fall, and that seeing her up on the dais “looking so fresh and lovely” had brought her near tears.

  A week before Christmas 1963, Carson’s much-loved cat, Jeffie, died. Carson was devastated, but said she was in one way relieved as she had been concerned for some time about what was to become of both Jeffie and Roger when she died. She thought it was unlikely that whoever would raise Roger—a question for which she had no concrete answer—would also take the cat. Now, she told Dorothy, she had one less worry. A few days later, Carson said how much she was looking forward to a visit from Dorothy over the holidays. Now that the solstice had arrived the days would be getting longer, and maybe—against all odds—they would yet have another summer together at Southport Island.

  After Dorothy made a four-day visit to Silver Spring—they both agreed it had been wonderful—Carson more objectively assessed her future. She felt that she’d talked too much about her illness and how little time she likely had left. There was scarcely a place anywhere on her body that didn’t hurt now. One of her doctors had lately reminded her that she’d lived with cancer for three years. Carson said she thought he wanted to add—but didn’t—that she shouldn’t expect much more time now. Only a few days after Carson told Dorothy this, Stan Freeman died of a heart attack at the kitchen table in West Bridgewater as he watched birds come to a feeder he’d just filled.

  Carson was crushed by the news. She said she regretted burdening Dorothy with her own health worries. She added that she was “going to be around for quite a while” and planned to spend as much of that time as possible taking care of Dorothy. Carson went up to West Bridgewater for the funeral. One ray of happiness during this somber visit was getting better acquainted with Stanley, Jr., and his wife, Madeleine. Carson told Dorothy how impressed she was that the father’s “sweetness and gentleness” lived on in his son. When Stanley, Jr., took Carson to the airport to go home, he told her that whatever his father would have done for her, he was now prepared to step in and do. She told Dorothy she was fortunate to have such a fine son.

  Two months later, it was early spring in Maryland when one of Carson’s doctors stopped in at the house for what he said was “just a social call.” He endorsed Carson’s plan to go soon to see Barney Crile at the Cleveland Clinic. The cancer had spread to Carson’s liver, and during the several weeks she was hospitalized in Cleveland she was near death. She told Dorothy about an out-of-body experience she had that was pleasant. In early April she was strong enough to go home, though hardly well. Dorothy came down for a visit. When she got home after a couple of days she told Carson she was glad that she could now picture what the days were like for her. On the morning of April 14, 1964, Dorothy wrote to Carson, telling her that she felt “a great sense of peace” and that her first thought every morning was to wonder how Carson had slept the night before. She said how nice it was that birds sang every morning outside the house in Silver Spring. Later that same day, Carson’s heart stopped. She died before the sun went down. She was fifty-six years old.

  Among the things Carson left behind was the letter for Dorothy that she had written over the course of several days about a year earlier. It was full of goodbyes and Carson’s wish that Dorothy remember not the sadness of their last times together, but the many joys that had come before. “I think you must have no regrets in my behalf,” Carson wrote. “I have had a rich life, full of rewards and satisfactions that come to few, and if it must end now, I can feel that I have achieved most of what I wished to do.”

  Carson was cremated. Her brother, Robert, insisted on burying some of her ashes next to their mother’s grave and reluctantly agreed to let Dorothy Freeman spread the remainder on the ocean at Southport Island.

  On May 4, 1964, the tide at Newagen was high at five in the morning. Dorothy drove down to that end of the island at six thirty to catch the ebbing tide. The day was calm and clear, and the ground swell broke against the rocks like the pulse of the ocean. Dorothy found a cleft in the granite where the water rose up with each wave and she poured the ashes into the edge of the sea, followed by a white hyacinth. She realized she had no idea what to do next. It was so lovely. Dorothy sat down and stayed there a long time, watching the birds and the blue ocean, until the tide turned again.

  Epilogue

  In the half century since the publication of Silent Spring, America has embraced the book’s central message unevenly—the country’s efforts to protect the environment have been a mix of progress, partisanship, and pigheadedness that Rachel Carson would find familiar. It’s hard to imagine her in this world now. She would like writing on a computer—there’s nothing like Microsoft Word for an obsessive reviser—and she would find the ability to retrieve almost any kind of information from the Internet a joy. The great breakthroughs in biology that have unlocked the inner workings of the cell and the genome at the molecular level would astonish and delight her. Other changes would be less comfortable. It’s likely she would be dismayed by e-books and smartphones and social networking and that she’d be mortified by the steady demise of the great newspapers and magazines that were so large a part of the culture of her times. She would struggle to comprehend the newly virulent resistance to science that now clouds issues such as evolution and climate change—which she would surely see not as “issues” at all, but as facts not open to disbelief.

  While com
piling information for Carson’s obituaries, Anne Ford—who was head of publicity at Houghton Mifflin—wrote down her recollections of the author. She remembered Carson once being described as a “nun of nature.” It was an odd thought, but one that matched up with Ford’s memory of Carson’s bedroom, an “austere” cell in which she said it was easy to see that its occupant craved simplicity and order—and the peace and quiet that came in the bargain.

  Because the environmental movement survived the end of the Cold War, the context in which it was born, Carson can be credited not only with putting the movement into motion but for doing so in a way that would allow it to eventually stand on its own. Silent Spring was many things—plea and polemic and prayer—but most important it was right. This was eventually conceded even by some early skeptics. In the fall of 1963, Secretary of Agriculture Orville Freeman invited Carson to join President Kennedy in dedicating the Pinchot Institute for Conservation Studies in Milford, Pennsylvania, at the ancestral home of Gifford Pinchot.

  Carson declined.