On a Farther Shore

by William Souder

  Between the research trips to Chincoteague and Plum Island, Carson had managed to take an entire year’s allotment of vacation in one four-week block. She had always wanted to see the Maine coast, and in July Carson and her mother—accompanied only by their two cats now that Marjorie and Virginia were grown—drove six hundred miles to Boothbay Harbor. They rented a cottage on the eastern shore of the steep-sided estuary of the Sheepscot River, which was less a river where it met the ocean than a long, broad saltwater bay rimmed with rocky tide pools that filled and emptied with the ebb and flow from the open sea. The cottage was hidden away in a forest of spruce and birch, and built so close to the water that Carson thought if she jumped out a window she’d fall in. There wasn’t another cottage in sight and the only sounds were the cries of the birds, the tolling of a bell buoy, and the lapping of the water on the rocks. Sometimes when the wind came in from the south Carson could make out the sound of crashing surf.

  Carson lost herself in bird-watching and exploring the tidal zone. She thought even the cats noticed how the water rose and fell. Enraptured, Carson wrote a letter to Shirley Briggs, telling her that if she could only figure out how to manage it she’d happily spend the rest of her life in Maine. Or the summers at least. Carson said that every night around sunset, they heard what she thought was the ethereal call of a hermit thrush. “I have never before heard the hermits,” she admitted, “so am not sure, but it sounds the way one ought to sound.”

  Of all the places she’d visited on the Atlantic shoreline, the Maine coast was the one she wished to call home. Living by the sea and learning to read the changes that come over it as the days and months progressed through the seasons was something she’d been thinking about for a dozen years, ever since she’d discovered a remarkable book in a corner of the Pratt Library in Baltimore. The book was Henry Beston’s Outermost House. Though not so well known or as overtly metaphysical as Walden—to which it is often compared—The Outermost House inspired in its readers an awe and longing for nature not unlike what many people felt in reading Thoreau’s classic. To those who know it, The Outermost House is one of the great American books. Set on the outer arm of Cape Cod, the book follows the unfolding events of a single year as one might watch them from the window of a snug cottage standing on a high section of beach and looking out over the breakers upon the Atlantic Ocean—which is more or less just how it happened.

  Beston was born in 1888 in Quincy, Massachusetts. Tall, sturdy, and disarmingly handsome—he looked a little like Ernest Hemingway—Beston attended Harvard and in the winter of 1915–16 served with the Section Sanitaire Américaine No. 2, an ambulance unit attached to the French army fighting World War I. Beston was nearly killed by an artillery shell at the Battle of Verdun, where more than three hundred thousand soldiers died in one of the grimmest struggles of the war. He returned to Massachusetts suffering the effects of combat fatigue and—much as Henry Williamson had done under similar circumstances—began writing.

  In 1923, Beston did a magazine piece about the Coast Guard operations on Cape Cod, where nightly beach patrols were conducted alongside the crashing surf no matter the weather. Accompanying the patrols on their six-mile rounds, Beston found the experience bracing and a therapeutic distraction from the memories of war. In 1925 he bought thirty-two acres of sand dunes above the beach near the Eastham Life Saving Station, on the outer arm of Cape Cod about a third of the way up from the elbow where it bends to the north toward Provincetown. Here Beston built a two-room cottage, twenty by sixteen feet, that featured an abundance of shuttered windows, a brick fireplace, and an outdoor pump that was a surprisingly reliable source of fresh water. Beston, who envisioned the place as a weekend retreat, named it the Fo’castle. He kept a small writing desk and several comfortable chairs in the main room, where he often provided shelter and company for the beach patrol and was rumored to harbor the occasional bootlegger. One night when the surf was churning, Beston took in fifteen injured and waterlogged fishermen who had made it through the breakers after their boat caught fire and sank directly offshore from the cottage.

  Beston stayed at the Fo’castle in the fall of 1925. A year later he was back for what he planned as a two-week stay. It turned into nearly four months, during which he began keeping a journal of what he saw and did. Beston continued his visits to the Fo’castle in every season through 1927, and as his manuscript grew he found that it could be assembled as if he had been there continuously over the course of a single year. It was a beautiful and vigorous life as he roamed the beach and the dunes—after walking on sand for a few months, Beston, who was over six feet tall, said he weighed 190 pounds and was “as strong as a bear.” The Outermost House was published in the fall of 1928. Early on in the book, Beston explained his decision to live in the Fo’castle as a function of the irresistible pull of the sea in front of the cottage, the swampy lowlands behind it, and the high hills of clay and sand on which it stood:

  Outermost cliff and solitary dune, the plain of ocean and the far, bright rims of the world, meadow land and marsh and ancient moor: this is Eastham; this the outer Cape. Sun and moon rise here from the sea, the arched sky has an ocean vastness, the clouds are now of ocean, now of earth. Having known and loved this land for many years, it came about that I found myself free to visit there, and so I built myself a house upon the beach.

  Beston began his chronicle of a year on the beach as summer gave way to autumn. He followed the fading sun as it came back fainter each day and for ever-quickening hours, through quiet days and stormy ones, sometimes all but blinded by the dazzling sand and other times alone with his thoughts in the absorbing dark of night. Onward into winter and then spring and back to summer, in one vivid, tactile passage after another, Beston watched a world of air, sand, and water, finding in just these three ingredients a universe of meaning. There were spectacular shipwrecks and moments of serenity so intense that Beston felt himself lost in a cosmic panorama:

  Night is very beautiful on this great beach. It is the true other half of the day’s tremendous wheel; no lights without meaning stab or trouble it; it is beauty, it is fulfillment, it is rest. Thin clouds float in these heavens, islands of obscurity in a splendour of space and stars: the Milky Way bridges earth and ocean; the beach resolves itself into a unity of form, its summer lagoons, its slopes and uplands merging; against the western sky and the falling bow of sun rise the silent and superb undulations of the dunes.

  When Carson first read The Outermost House, the idea that such a life could be lived left an indelible impression—though any thought that she might one day retreat to the seashore must have seemed impossibly remote. In 1940, while she was working on Under the Sea-Wind in the library at Woods Hole, Carson and two friends had taken a day trip out to Eastham. They walked up the beach and soon enough found the Fo’castle, which Carson recognized at once from Beston’s description of it. Carson was transfixed and sat for a long time on the dunes gazing out to sea. She said she was going to write a letter to Beston about the experience, but she put it off, and the moment of imagining herself inside the picture he’d created in The Outermost House passed.

  The Conservation in Action series had given Carson a chance to write something that went outside the usual boundaries of government work, but it did not alleviate the longings she had confessed to William Beebe in 1945. She was searching for something, and the failure of Under the Sea-Wind still ached. As always, her thoughts turned toward the ocean.

  Carson was impressed by the torrent of new sea-related scientific findings published in the years after the war. She kept files of clippings and technical papers about waves and weather and currents, and was particularly interested in what was being learned through the increased sophistication of sonar. One observation that had at first baffled researchers was the discovery of a “phantom bottom” in the ocean. Everywhere around the world, sonar soundings taken during the day indicated a depth of only around 250 fathoms, even in areas known to be many times as deep. At night
, however, this “deep scattering layer,” as the sonar-reflecting region was also known, vanished. Researchers eventually determined that the phantom bottom was alive and comprised a variety of fish, squid, and tiny marine creatures such as krill that make a daily migration out of the depths at nightfall to feed on plankton near the surface. Biologists already knew that marine life tended to congregate at the surface after dark, as netting operations were more successful at night. Migration remained one of Carson’s favorite themes, and the global scale of this heretofore undetected mass movement of animal life was amazing, as the community of marine organisms within this movable realm would ultimately turn out to be the largest discrete biomass on earth.

  By 1948, Carson had begun thinking about a new book, one that would explore our dependence on the ocean—which she believed was going to increase as the land endured the ever-greater degradations of modern civilization. She made plans to visit Woods Hole to work in the library at the end of the summer, but she delayed this trip and instead went up at the end of September for an eight-day fish-census cruise aboard the Albatross III, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s latest incarnation of the former Bureau of Fisheries research vessel. Equipped with sonar, dredging winches, laboratories, and refrigerated fish storage rooms—and now powered by an 805-horsepower diesel engine—the 179-foot-long steel-hulled ship could cruise for 4,500 miles without refueling.

  Carson began enlisting a group of experts she hoped would help her with information and might review the book for accuracy. One of these was the marine biologist Henry Bigelow, who was an expert on waves and the oceanographic curator at the Museum of Comparative Zoology at Harvard. Carson hoped Bigelow would have access to the great backlog of unpublished ocean research that had accumulated during the war. He didn’t, but he did eventually agree to read and comment on a chapter about waves when Carson had it done.

  Carson was not shy about asking eminent scientists to read and correct her work, or to give up their own hard-earned findings. It was a stepwise process. When someone agreed to help she often asked for an introduction to the next expert in the chain. Most of them cheerily joined the team, even though Carson was essentially an unknown writer. It helped that as she built out her network many of the people with whom she corresponded liked her writing and understood that she was someone who could translate hard science into digestible prose—although this took a few scientists outside of their comfort zones. One university professor Carson consulted about the geology of the sea floor told her he didn’t comprehend flourishes such as “sense of the sea” or “dominance of the sky.”

  An unusual source was the Norwegian ethnographer and explorer Thor Heyerdahl, with whom Carson initiated a brief and strained correspondence. Heyerdahl believed—incorrectly—that Polynesia had been originally colonized by people who crossed the Pacific Ocean from South America. In 1947, Heyerdahl and a crew of five built a forty-five-foot-long balsa raft, the Kon-Tiki, and sailed it 4,300 miles from Peru to the Tuamotu Islands in an attempt to prove his theory, in the end proving only that it could be done. A no-doubt skeptical Carson wrote to Heyerdahl requesting information about South American colonization of the South Pacific. Heyerdahl wrote back, politely informing Carson that he was himself at work on a book about the Kon-Tiki expedition and was not in a position to share information, though he promised to keep her in mind and let her know when his book was out.

  Carson—who might or might not have known Heyerdahl was writing a book that she might eventually compete with—probably couldn’t decide if he was an expert or a nut. She waited more than a year and then wrote again to Heyerdahl, this time asking him about the phantom bottom. Carson had heard that at night great numbers of small squid jumped onto the Kon-Tiki as it drifted westward over the open ocean. Did Heyerdahl think the deep scattering layer might, in fact, be made up mainly of squid?

  Heyerdahl, civil but again testy, reminded Carson that his book about the voyage—titled simply Kon-Tiki—was already out in six languages and was being translated into seven more. All of his important observations, he said, were in the book. In the meantime, he faced another deadline for a second book about his ethnographic theory of Polynesian settlement and was too busy to give her a detailed answer. He said, however, that he felt pretty sure that the deep scattering layer was not squid, or certainly not mainly so. It was true that shoals of squid sometimes launched themselves out of the ocean like flying fish, and had on occasion “bombarded” the raft. But this happened both at night and in the daytime. At night, they had observed a diverse assortment of marine life around Kon-Tiki, including luminous plankton and tiny copepods—but also larger fish. One night, they saw the phosphorescent trails of three large bodies passing below them that appeared to be longer than the raft. Heyerdahl said he didn’t think of himself as an expert, but he was inclined to believe that the scattering layer was mostly plankton. In the end Carson decided to leave the exact composition of the deep scattering layer an open question.

  Carson had meanwhile signed on with an agent. She talked with several before settling on Marie Rodell, an editor and mystery writer who was just launching a literary agency in New York. Carson sent Rodell a chapter about the formation of an island that she’d already written for “Return to the Sea,” as she was calling the new book. Rodell sent it around to several magazine editors, hoping to sell parts of the book as Carson completed them. Rodell also shopped Under the Sea-Wind to book publishers for a possible reissue. But nothing happened on either front.

  Undaunted, Carson sent Rodell several copies of Under the Sea-Wind, along with a note wondering if she should personally inscribe one for Rodell. “When you have made me rich and famous,” Carson joked, “it might be nice to have.”

  SIX

  Author Triumphant

  By February 1949, Carson had finished two more chapters of “Return to the Sea” and told Rodell she had another two “reasonably well in mind.” It’s hard to know if this was true—Carson tended to exaggerate her progress and underestimate the time she’d need to complete new material. But she was immersed in work on the book. A month later she told Rodell that she’d written less than she’d hoped to, though in revising one of the completed chapters she had so enlarged it that it could now be split in two.

  In April, Rodell—working hard for one of her first clients—discussed the book with the editor in chief of Oxford University Press in New York, who expressed interest. By May she was in serious discussions with Oxford. Carson wanted an advance of $1,000 on signing a contract. Oxford preferred to split that into two payments of $500, one at signing and the other later. On June 3, 1949, Oxford sent Rodell the contract for “Return to the Sea,” along with a request that they be allowed to read each chapter as it was finished. Carson resisted this, telling Rodell she wanted to revise the chapters with her alone and show them to Oxford only after a final polishing. Meanwhile, Carson made plans for a helmet-diving trip in Florida in July.

  Shirley Briggs accompanied Carson on this adventure, which could only be described as a failure, though it would be transformed into a mythological feature of Carson’s biography. Carson and Briggs arrived in Miami at the same time as a stretch of bad weather. They went out several times, only to be turned back by rough seas and murky water. Carson thought the storm clouds made the many small barrier islands look “lonely and melancholy.” Between these unsuccessful excursions, Carson and Briggs amused themselves by wading in the surf and enjoying dinner at Howard Johnson’s.

  Carson finally got to climb into the water in a protected area of Biscayne Bay that was about eight feet deep. She was surprised by the sudden lightness of the eighty-four-pound helmet once she went under the surface. Carson descended on a ladder that nearly touched the bottom and spent a few minutes gazing out of her rapidly fogging faceplate. This surely took a large measure of courage for the swimming-challenged Carson, who said her anxiety was increased by the disconcerting whooshing sounds of the pump as it sent air down the line and into her helmet
. A strong current was running and Carson had been warned not to stray from the boat. So she clung to the ladder, feet firmly planted in a bed of seaweed. She saw a few brightly colored fish and climbed back up.

  Carson carefully recorded her impressions of being underwater in a small, blue Collegiate notebook. She also unself-consciously wrote to William Beebe—a man who’d walked over miles of ocean reef and ridden the bathysphere a half mile down into the abyss—with a full accounting of what she referred to as her “diving experiences.” She said that the difference between having dived and not having dived was “tremendous.” In fact, she said, the whole world now seemed different to her.

  A couple of weeks later Carson was off again, this time with Marie Rodell to join another collecting cruise aboard the Albatross III. On July 27, 1949, the two women boarded the ship at Woods Hole, bound for a two-week fish-census trip to the Georges Bank. Carson later remarked that few women had been out on such a vessel and that probably fewer still had ever visited the Georges Bank fishing grounds.

  It was a hot morning. Rodell thought the Albatross III looked “small and uninviting” as it lay alongside the wharf. The crew warned them—in Carson’s case unnecessarily, as this was her second time aboard—that the narrow ship was notorious for its heavy roll in any kind of sea. Rodell said the ship’s sideways heaving through the waves was hard to describe, but it seemed they corkscrewed along in a “figure eight,” with a pause midway around. On the second day the weather turned cold and windy. Rodell and Carson sat in the wheelhouse and watched the sonar tracing the ocean bottom. Carson found this thrilling, especially when the Albatross III, after traveling for hours above areas of level sea floor, at last passed over the sheer canyon walls that outline the Georges Bank, and the bottom fell away sharply into the abyss. The dredging hauls—a deafening clank and grind of winches and cables—were mostly disappointing, with only a few unremarkable fish coming up in the nets. The crew tagged some flounder and haddock. One day they saw a couple of sharks and a school of dolphins. They had several days of fog.