Carson concluded by saying that she’d chosen PCW because it was a Christian college, “founded on ideals of service and honor,” where she could reach a “fuller realization of my self” and thus play her part on “the stage of life.”
Although Carson would never back away from her childlike fascination with cute, furry animals—it was something she hung on to for life—her choice of the words “vision splendid” was startling. It’s possible, though unlikely, that Carson simply invented the phrase for her essay and put it in quotes for emphasis—or that it was something she’d heard or read without remembering where. What seems more probable is that she was referencing a thoroughly religious book of poems titled The Vision Splendid, published in 1917 and written by John Oxenham, a pen name for the English writer William Arthur Dunkerley. The title poem was a meditation on the parallel Oxenham saw between the terrible cost of victory in World War I—at the time still not yet in hand—and Christ’s death on the cross. It began like this:
Here—or hereafter—you shall see it ended,
This mighty work to which your souls are set;
If from beyond—then, with the vision splendid,
You shall smile back and never know regret
Carson had grown up during the war, heard her brother’s stories, felt the normal patriotic allegiance to America’s commitment in the cause. But how a dead soldier’s gaze from heaven could have had any bearing on her hopes of becoming a writer was a mystery. If the vision splendid was a view of the world from the afterlife then what good was it in the here and now? Maybe Carson simply liked the words without knowing what they meant. For her next theme, Carson wrote about field hockey. She earned a B+ on both papers.
Carson entered college as an English major. She skipped taking a science class her freshman year, when most PCW students got that requirement out of the way. In her sophomore year she signed up for biology—the entry-level class in a program in the midst of an upheaval. In the fall of 1925, the department had offered only three courses: general biology, botany, and human physiology. By Carson’s senior year, there would be ten courses, including advanced botany, general zoology, invertebrate and vertebrate zoology, histology, microbiology, genetics, and embryology. The force behind this change was one of the most compelling figures on campus and head of the biology department—she was actually the entire biology department—Professor Mary Scott Skinker.
Miss Skinker was an object of fascination among the students, who thought her uncommonly beautiful and almost ethereal in her bearing—she exuded an airy, incorporeal remoteness that may have been due to the fact that she was nearsighted and refused to wear glasses. Slender and graceful, Skinker had dark eyes and wore her hair in a loose swirl atop her head. At PCW, everyone dressed for dinner, meeting in the chandeliered dining room of Berry Hall before taking their places at tables set with linen and silver, where faculty members guided the conversation and provided the occasional instruction on proper etiquette. Mary Scott Skinker’s stylish wardrobe, which usually included a rose pinned at her left shoulder, was always closely watched at dinner. For a time rumors of a serious suitor circulated, as boxes of flowers arrived for Miss Skinker every few days, though eventually these stopped coming. Skinker later told one of her former students that she had given up on the idea of getting married while she was at PCW.
A dynamic and demanding teacher, Skinker was not averse to handing out a low grade when it was deserved. People were curious as to whether even a clever, hardworking girl like Rachel Carson could get an A in her class. What nobody anticipated was that Carson would be transformed by biology and by Miss Skinker. Not only did she earn A’s, Carson began to think about changing her major to biology. She mulled this decision carefully, and for a time would contemplate only adding biology as a minor. As a junior, she found herself happily spending more and more time in the cramped little laboratory on the top floor of Dilworth Hall, which always smelled of formaldehyde. Sometimes Carson and her lab partner would go back after dinner to dissect specimens in the wan light given off by the tungsten-filament bulbs that hung on wires from the ceiling and swayed when the winter wind was up.
The field of biology was then in a primitive state relative to what it would become during Carson’s lifetime. DNA wouldn’t be fully described for another three decades and little was known about the molecular basis of life. A living cell was described as a membrane containing “protoplasm,” a fluid, unstable jumble of varied substances and structures believed by some biologists to be composed of filaments or fibers, while others thought it was more like a mass of bubbles. All living things were known to be made of cells, and processes within cells were understood to regulate metabolism and heredity. Biologists were keenly interested in chromosomes, distinct structures within cells whose precise separations during cell division were visible in a light microscope. It had been proposed that specific segments of chromosomes called “genes” were involved in heredity. But how this worked remained a mystery.
Biology in the 1920s encompassed tangential subjects—including hygiene, food safety, agronomy, public health, nutrition, and sanitation—that reflected an intersection between science and home economics, a prominent feature in the education of women. Standard biology texts also explored the concept of eugenics, a frankly racist and xenophobic field that proposed to improve the human species by means of selective reproduction. The idea was that “race improvement” could be achieved by encouraging persons with superior physical, mental, and moral attributes to marry and mate—while discouraging inferior people from breeding. One popular textbook suggested that eugenics should be the official policy of the state and that anyone wanting a marriage license should have to pass a physical examination first. Immigrants, the book advised, should be rigorously screened to exclude those with undesirable characteristics, and it would be prudent for “feeble minded” persons to be confined to government-run work camps.
Much in vogue after the turn of the century, eugenics flourished—as an idea if not as a policy—until Nazi Germany extended the concept to its logical conclusion in the Holocaust.
Evolution figured prominently in biology instruction in the 1920s, although some high school programs downplayed or excised Darwin’s theory following the 1925 conviction of a schoolteacher named John Scopes in the so-called Monkey Trial in Tennessee, where it was illegal to teach evolution. For Skinker and her students, evolution was settled science. The earth was then estimated to be about three billion years old—it’s closer to four and a half billion—and all living forms were believed to have descended from earlier organisms, although no one could answer how life had arisen in the first place. Carson learned these lessons well, as evolutionary theory would later be central to her writing about the sea.
Skinker taught that all life was interconnected, and seen in the light of evolution this meant, as Carson came to realize, that every day in the world offered evidence of all the years of the world that had come before. Skinker naturally saw extinction as an inevitable aspect of evolution, and she was alert to the fact that human carelessness about the environment could sometimes hasten the disappearance of species that might not otherwise be endangered. This holistic view of the living world—and our place in it—was already being called “ecology,” though the term wasn’t yet in common use and didn’t figure in Skinker’s teaching as an identifiable discipline.
The prospects for anyone determined to live as a writer were then—as now—uncertain. But for a woman, a career in science was an even more daunting undertaking. Women had a hard time earning advanced degrees in science, and those who did often ended up teaching at women’s colleges that—like PCW—had limited programs that perpetuated the underrepresentation of women in science. In 1925, the National Academy of Sciences—America’s most elite scientific organization—elected its first-ever woman member when Florence Rena Sabin, a physiologist from Johns Hopkins, joined the 229 men in the group. Even the gifted Miss Skinker had gotten only as far as a master’
s degree from Columbia and now spent much of her time arguing for more rigorous academic standards at PCW while dreaming of perhaps one day earning her doctorate.
Carson, who never seemed to consider the advantages or disadvantages of any career choice, continued to write. She worked as a reporter for the Arrow, a twice-monthly campus magazine. In the spring of her sophomore year, she won a prize for a short story called “Broken Lamps,” a dark, formulaic tale about a young civil engineer disenchanted with his life and his wife, but who is redeemed when the wife suddenly falls desperately ill, causing him to see that he truly loves her. In 1928 she published a fine—if dubiously spelled—poem in the Arrow:
March
I know a marsh-girt hill where brown paths cross
And intermingle till they touch the sky.
There troops of shadows pitch their tents among
The thorn trees, guant [sic] and gnarled before the blast.
In sombre [sic] dun and green the moss entwines
Slow figures on the crags that face the dawn,
Where wind-tossed geese in shadow squadron sail,
And beat their wings against the foam-flecked sky.
But by then, Carson had fallen under Miss Skinker’s spell. One night in the lab, Carson confessed to a friend that she’d begun to think about how to merge her two interests. “I have always wanted to write,” Carson said, “but I don’t have much imagination. Biology has given me something to write about.” In late February 1928, Carson told Skinker she was going to declare biology as her new major. Skinker was shocked, and insisted on discussing the decision at length, though in the end, as Carson told a friend, she’d been a “peach” about it.
There’d been a heavy snowfall the weekend before, and that night, with Orion ablaze in the black sky above, the girls of PCW had a sledding party—mostly on aluminum trays liberated from the dining hall. Carson and another girl riding together on one breakneck downhill run hit a bump that pitched them off and sent them tumbling through clouds of snow. Their knickers and sweaters soaked, the girls finally came in, showered, and then, dressed in pajamas, sat before the enormous fireplace in Woodland Hall, eating sandwiches and potato salad. Then they turned off the lights and by the firelight sang songs until the clock on the mantel chimed midnight. Carson was deliriously happy.
Carson and another girl in biology started privately referring to Skinker as “the big boss.” Carson said that she felt “safe” with her affairs now firmly in Skinker’s hands, but she was rudely questioned by her classmates, who disapproved of the change from English to biology. Their complaints, Carson said, were monotonous. She amused herself by dissecting a dogfish, which was terrific fun, though it made Carson and everything she touched smell awful. She could hardly wait to begin embryology in her senior year.
In March 1928, friends arranged a date for Carson to attend the annual PCW prom. The young man, named Bob Frye, was a junior at nearby Westminster College. Carson bought silver slippers a size too small—all the girls did this—and spent a few days trying to break them in before the dance. In a letter to a friend after the event, Carson declared that she’d had a “glorious time” and that she had enjoyed the dim lighting and the mirrored walls at the Schenley Hotel. More memorable than anything else, though, was one of the chaperones, the radiant Mary Scott Skinker: “Miss Skinker was a perfect knockout at the Prom,” she wrote. “She wore a peach colored chiffon-velvet, with the skirt shirred just about 8 inches in front and a rhinestone pin at the waist. Then she wore a choker necklace of rhinestones and two longer ones of tiny pearls.”
Evidently, there was nothing relevant to report about Bob, though she mentioned going with him to a basketball game the next day and said that it had been an “awfully nice weekend.”
Carson saw Bob Frye at least one more time that spring. And then she never dated again.
Not long after Carson finalized her decision to switch to biology, Miss Skinker said she had something important to tell Rachel. She said she couldn’t discuss it yet, but assured Carson that she would be among the first to know. A few weeks later, Carson learned that Miss Skinker planned to take a leave of absence to complete work on her PhD and would not be at PCW for Carson’s senior year. Skinker would spend the summer studying at the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole, Massachusetts, and then go to either Johns Hopkins or Cornell for her doctorate.
Disconsolate, Carson for a while imagined she might transfer to Johns Hopkins herself. She applied for admission to the graduate program in zoology at Hopkins and was promptly accepted. But in the end Carson realized that her scholarship and the money she already owed to PCW would keep her there. By the middle of her senior year, Carson owed PCW close to $1,400, an impossible sum. She proposed taking a mortgage on two of her father’s lots but was told by the bank that mortgages on vacant land were hard to obtain, and even if she could get one it was unlikely to reflect the true value of the property. Instead, she was advised to offer the two lots directly to PCW as collateral and to arrange a payment plan she could manage by installments after graduating and finding work. To Carson’s relief, PCW agreed to this. Carson signed the formal agreement on January 28, 1929, nine months before the American economy collapsed.
Skinker was replaced by a woman named Anna Whiting. Whiting held a PhD in genetics from Iowa State University, where she’d concentrated on cattle breeding. She was thrilled to have a job at PCW because her husband was a professor at the University of Pittsburgh. But Whiting turned out to be unqualified to teach any of the advanced biology coursework Carson had signed up for, and she was inept in the lab. Carson and her classmates felt they knew more about the material than their professor, and Carson spent her senior year wondering if she would learn enough to survive in graduate school if she ever got to attend one. To keep their spirits up, Carson and a couple of her friends organized a science club and named it Mu Sigma Sigma—in tribute to Mary Scott Skinker.
Carson’s thoughts about life after PCW were also shaped by a singular experience—a moment of profound insight—that had come to her one night while going over an English assignment. The reading was Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s long and complicated poem “Locksley Hall.” It was late, and outside the dorm a fierce thunderstorm swept over the darkened campus. As rain beat against her window and thunder rocked the hillsides, Carson sat straight up as she came to the poem’s closing lines, in which the narrator tells of a storm advancing over the moors toward the ocean:
Comes a vapour from the margin, blackening over heath and holt,
Cramming all the blast before it, in its breast a thunderbolt.
Let it fall on Locksley Hall, with rain or hail, or fire or snow;
For the mighty wind arises, roaring seaward, and I go.
Carson, who had never laid eyes on the sea, felt a sudden, powerful conviction that it was, in fact, in her destiny—the place to which her newfound love of science would one day lead. Here, she realized, was the thing she longed to write about, even though she had yet to make its acquaintance.
Now again, as she had with the “vision splendid,” Carson took inspiration from an unlikely source. Although it’s possible to interpret Tennyson’s ending as a call to adventure at sea—as Carson did—the consensus reading of those lines is that the narrator is on his way to join the British army. When the poem was published in 1842 that same army was engaged in imperialistic enterprises around the world that are agreeably—some would say sickeningly—referenced earlier in the poem. In fact, “Locksley Hall” is a disturbing, racially intolerant tale in which the narrator, desperate to obliterate the pain of a failed love affair, imagines himself traveling to some wild place within reach of the empire where he can conquer the “savage” natives.
The poem’s much better remembered line—In the spring a young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love—has the amiable connotation usually given it only when considered outside the context of Tennyson’s dark verses. It’s hard to understand how Carson could have
read “Locksley Hall” without perceiving the narrator’s torment and feeling the violent twist of his emotions—even if she cared not for the fancies of young men. To be moved by just a handful of beguiling lines in a poem so otherwise brutal, so much bigger and more ominous, required a rare ability to focus only on a detail that interested her while setting aside a whole world of bewildering complexities.
And yet that is exactly what Carson did. This kind of tunnel vision would prove to be a defining trait.
THREE
Biologizing
The Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole, Massachusetts—a quiet seaside village on the inner arm of Cape Cod once known mainly for its guano fertilizer works—was America’s preeminent scientific field station. Established in 1888, the MBL by the mid-1920s had become a regular summer gathering place for scientists and students to pursue research—either in the many nearby inshore marine environments or at one of the coveted benches in the Crane laboratory, a massive redbrick building that also housed a tremendous and ever-expanding library.
During her time at PCW, Mary Scott Skinker had spent summers doing research in protozoology (an outdated term that formerly referenced a diverse group of aquatic single-celled animals) at the MBL. As Carson prepared to begin her senior year, Miss Skinker encouraged her to consider an MBL summer research fellowship after graduation. It was a thrilling prospect. At PCW, biology students worked mostly on pickled specimens—fish and reptiles and, worst of all, cats, whose stiff, gruesome corpses smelled awful. At Woods Hole, students collected live specimens along the shoreline, in the marshes, and from boats out on the waters of Buzzards Bay. And the immersion in biology there was total—Skinker had written one of her other students at PCW that there were no distractions at Woods Hole, nothing beyond “the biological world.” Skinker sent Carson clippings from a Woods Hole weekly newsletter, the Collecting Net, which Carson told a friend made her “crazier than ever to go there.” Woods Hole, Carson said, “must be a biologist’s paradise.” Plus, it was on the ocean.
On a Farther Shore Page 4