On a Farther Shore

by William Souder

  The AMA was troubled by accounts of poisonings involving children who accidentally ingested lindane, which was usually formulated as pellets or in a white granular form for use in home vaporizers. In one case an eighteen-month-old toddler who ate one and a half pellets of lindane while her mother was putting a new vaporizer together was rushed to the hospital where she spent the better part of seven hours convulsing and vomiting. She lived. So did several slightly older children who threw up and went into convulsions after drinking a homemade soft drink their mother had inadvertently “sweetened” with lindane crystals she mistook for sugar. Alongside such reports came stories about representatives of vaporizer makers who insisted that any child who ingested lindane would suffer nothing worse than a tummy ache.

  Of course, children can accidentally ingest and be poisoned by any number of chemical products common in most homes. The difference with insecticides is that they are poisons and when they are used as intended people are exposed to them on purpose. For the AMA, the use of insecticides in vaporizers was crazy: “Insecticidal poisons that are effective because of deliberate continuous pollution of the atmosphere have questionable safety. Their use in this manner is contrary to hygienic standards for safe atmospheric and working conditions.”

  By the spring of 1957, the questions surrounding synthetic insecticides were serious enough that one major manufacturer suddenly announced it would stop making them. The Thompson Chemicals Corporation, which was based in Los Angeles, said it was halting its production, distribution, and research on “presently known” insecticides, saying that after twelve years of study the company was convinced the “wide-scale” use of insecticides on agricultural crops offered only temporary benefits in pest control and were “at best palliative, and will perhaps prove dangerous and uneconomic in the long run.” The people at Thompson were also worried that the “ingestion of presently employed insecticides” might be hazardous to “humans and other warm-blooded animals,” a possibility they said was “of a highly serious nature.”

  These sentiments were not unanimous. In 1954, Dr. Wayland J. Hayes, Jr., chief of the Toxicology Section of the U.S. Public Health Service, delivered a paper to a meeting of the American Public Health Association in which he pooh-poohed concerns about chronic DDT poisoning in humans, as no case of it had ever been confirmed. Hayes argued that humans—like animals—stored DDT in fat tissue, but only up to a threshold level, beyond which no increased storage occurred regardless of continued exposure to DDT. In theory, then, since chronic DDT poisoning had never been observed, it must be all but impossible, as evidently a person could not store enough in his or her fat tissues to get sick.

  This was true, Hayes insisted, even though a recent study of meals served in restaurants had found widespread DDT contamination of food. Although some foods did not contain detectable amounts of DDT, many did—especially fatty items or foods that were fried in fats—and a “balanced meal” in an American restaurant was almost certain to include a serving of DDT. Hayes did not say whether the DDT came from some treatment in the restaurants or if it arrived on the food fresh from the farm. But the amounts, Hayes pointed out, were smaller than the doses that incarcerated volunteers had taken without ill effect. Hayes published his report the next year in the American Journal of Public Health, which touted the article as an antidote to the “baseless rumors of the hidden dangers of DDT.”

  The safety of DDT was also official policy at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, which in 1957 authorized an aerial spraying campaign against the gypsy moth over three million acres of New York, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania. The department said the public had become “unduly alarmed” over the alleged hazards of DDT spraying to both human health and wildlife. DDT, said the officials, was deemed safe in small doses by the U.S. Public Health Service and had been in widespread use in the United States and around the world for more than a decade. They said there was no evidence that a single spraying of DDT at a rate of one pound per acre would harm mammals or birds and would kill only a few fish.

  One age was passing into the next. For a half century, the idea of preserving the natural world had been seen as our obligation to the earth’s bounty—which was meant for our use but which required our care. The enactment of game and fish laws, the intelligent management of resources, the establishment of wildlife refuges, and the preservation of pristine wilderness—each instance an example of self-imposed restraint—all belonged to the larger cause of conservation. Conservation was a hopeful, noble, and inherently nonpartisan cause, a quest for the betterment of the world. Its foundation was the conviction that we could protect and enjoy what nature had provided—in perpetuity. From generation to generation, a well-tended earth would endure.

  But in 1939, the means for undoing nature itself had been discovered in laboratories in Europe and the United States. DDT and nuclear fission were to become the twin agents of a great change of heart and will. In virtual lockstep, the two technologies, deadly and yet beguiling, were perfected in war and then loosed on a world living uneasily at peace. In the 1950s, their residues—unseen and unbidden—turned up everywhere, a feast of radionuclides and chlorinated hydrocarbons. Fearful of radioactive fallout and largely oblivious to the dangers of pesticides, everyone fed themselves both poisons. This was the new age, a time when nature—that part of existence outside of humanity—would no longer be the main object of concern. Now it was to be the total environment, ourselves included. In the age of conservation, the species that had needed our protection were the animals and birds and fish. In the new age of environmentalism the species that most needed our help would be us.

  One age was ended, another begun. The world was ready to know this. All it would take was someone who recognized what was happening and who was willing to say it out loud.

  In the summer of 1957, Rachel Carson—along with her mother and Roger—moved into a new house, a spacious brick rambler with large windows that Carson had had built among the trees on a large corner lot in a wooded section of Silver Spring called Quaint Acres. Carson was tired. Roger was an energetic boy who needed more supervision than she could have imagined. The months following the publication of The Edge of the Sea were otherwise unproductive. In 1956, Carson served on the Conservation Committee of the National Volunteers for Stevenson. Attentive as always to the smallest publishing considerations, Carson earlier that year expressed her unhappiness with the sales of The Edge of the Sea, which had begun sliding down on the New York Times bestseller list after reaching number four. She told Paul Brooks she was disappointed in Houghton Mifflin’s advertising, which she thought relied too much on occasional large ads rather than a constant stream of smaller ones. The latter, she thought, would help the book more. She said once the book dropped off the bestseller list it would be “hard to get it back on.” Carson was also annoyed that some bookstores had removed The Edge of the Sea from their window displays—though she admitted there probably wasn’t anything Houghton Mifflin could do about that.

  Polite but understandably defensive, Brooks wrote back telling Carson they had already spent $20,000 on advertising for The Edge of the Sea and sending her a long list of newspapers and magazines in which ads had been placed—calling it “one of the strongest such lists that has ever come across my desk.” He also reminded her that the book had already sold seventy thousand copies—a strong showing and especially so given the Atlantic coast orientation that they always knew would limit its appeal in the western part of the country. Brooks said he felt sure the book would continue to sell steadily for years to come, bestseller or not.

  Meanwhile, Carson’s work stalled. Life magazine invited her to write an article on the jet stream and how it affects weather—offering the tempting sum of $5,000. But the project bogged down in a disagreement between what Carson thought the story was and what the editors at Life wanted. When the whole idea was finally scrapped, Carson told Marie Rodell that she was henceforth “allergic to Life.” One idea that never went anywhere at all cam
e from Dow Chemical, which was putting up a new plant on the Texas gulf coast and asked if Carson would write about twenty-five words to go on a plaque for the building’s state-of-the-art aquarium. Rodell told the company it was “extremely unlikely” that Carson would agree to such a thing—whereupon Dow made it clear that they were prepared to pay whatever it took to get Carson’s participation. Carson declined to name a price.

  Carson’s vague idea for a book called “Remembrance of the Earth,” about the origins of life, would not itself come to life and slowly faded from her thoughts. She made no progress on “The World of Nature” for Simon and Schuster and confessed to Dorothy Freeman that she felt “terribly alone” with her problems. She said she was sometimes overcome with panic that she would not see Roger through to adulthood and was haunted by thoughts of what would become of him if something happened to her. Carson was also bitter about the dramatic change in her personal circumstances. Caring for Roger would surely complicate her writing just when her career was taking off. “Sometimes I think I can’t go on,” she told Dorothy. “At other times it seems possible. But always I know I must. Life is such a queer business—great visions, great opportunities opened up, and then a door slammed. I don’t understand it; I never will.”

  Carson’s mood remained bleak. It was looking as if the “Lost Woods” project was not going to happen, as the landowners of the Southport Island property wanted an exorbitant price. Carson told Dorothy it had been a year since she had actually believed she’d ever write again. But now she at least had a magazine assignment, a piece called “Our Ever-Changing Shore” that she’d been asked to write for Holiday. Carson’s plan was to write it from personal recollections of some of her favorite places—the high dunes near Provincetown on Cape Cod, Plum Island in Massachusetts, St. Simons Island in Georgia. Her biggest challenge, she told Marie Rodell in a contemplative letter, would be trying to explain the pristine beauty of the shore when development was devouring untouched sections of it seemingly everywhere:

  The undisturbed shore is one of the best places to see Nature at work: in the geologic cycles by which the relation of sea and land is undergoing constant change, and in the flow of life by which species come and go, new forms are evolved, and only those that can adjust to a difficult environment can survive. Yet when man takes over all this is changed. Within the long cycles of the earth what we do probably makes little difference; yet within the restricted cycle that is completed within one person’s life the shore can never again be itself once man has “developed” it.

  The dismal truth is that shores such as we are proposing to describe are fast disappearing, and may well do so completely within the life of some of us.

  Early in 1956, Carson got into a running feud with the Musical Masterpiece Society, which offered monthly recordings to members much as the Book-of-the-Month Club sent out a book selection each month. Carson subscribed—but then decided the recordings were inferior and canceled her membership. When another shipment arrived the month after she’d quit, Carson paid for it anyway. She then started getting notices that her account was delinquent. Furious, she wrote the company a scalding letter, reviewing the facts that showed her blameless and her account not in arrears. Leveraging her notoriety, Carson went on acidly:

  In case my name is not familiar to you, I suggest you consult the membership records of the Authors’ Guild, the P.E.N. club, and the National Institute of Arts and Letters. You might also look in Who’s Who. After this research, you might conclude that I am a reasonably responsible person, quite able to pay the small sum involved, and not at all likely to endanger my credit by neglecting it if I owed it.

  The amount Carson supposedly failed to pay was $3.80.

  Carson didn’t like change, which sometimes challenged even her belief in science. Exhilarated by the technologies that had allowed men such as William Beebe and Jacques Cousteau to probe the depths of the ocean and that were enabling biologists to begin exploring the inner workings of the human cell, Carson was at the same time dismayed by the onslaught of chemical poisons that had contributed to what would soon be called the “green revolution” in agriculture—a period of explosive growth in crop production made possible by improved seed stocks, new plant hybrids, and the massive application of chemical fertilizers and pesticides. Much of this was happening in underdeveloped countries where food scarcity was a long-standing problem. But the use of pesticides on such a massive scale was progress that came at too great a cost, Carson thought.

  There were also questions that Carson seemed to prefer not be asked, problems that should not be solved, places that ought to remain unvisited. When the Soviet Union launched Sputnik in October 1957—which was followed into orbit a month later by a second Russian satellite—Carson was appalled. She thought everyone now faced a “strange future” and confided to Dorothy that it made her feel ill. This was only partly a concern about the inevitable uses of rocketry in warfare. Fascinated by the sea, so much of which is dark and cold, Carson was terrified at the thought of humanity extending its reach into the infinitely darker and colder and more mysterious realm that was outer space. Human beings had an affinity for the sea—the cradle of life—and it was only natural that they would venture there. But to visit space would be to part company with the earth and become disconnected from the biological and geological cycles from which all life and all human intelligence had arisen. Where then after that? It was all, Carson thought, “deeply disturbing.”

  Earlier that year Carson had turned fifty. No longer young, not yet old, she seemed not to belong entirely to the time in which she was living. She paid little attention to a changing culture that was leaving behind such relics as Richard Jefferies and H. M. Tomlinson, or to the new tastes of a younger generation that no longer knew or cared about the classical music she loved. Carson enjoyed listening to concerts and classical recordings, but never mentioned coming across any other kind of music, even though it would have been hard not to. In July 1954, while the crew of the Lucky Dragon was confined to Tokyo University Hospital, a young Memphis truck driver named Elvis Presley recorded a song called “That’s All Right,” and popular music hadn’t been the same since.

  If Carson was aware of the extent to which nuclear fears had penetrated middle-brow entertainment she didn’t seem to consider it important—though she would have enjoyed at least one of Hollywood’s less-cheesy endeavors, a 1957 film called The Incredible Shrinking Man. Based on a clever and disturbing novella titled The Shrinking Man by Richard Matheson, it’s the story of a man named Scott Carey who begins to grow smaller after his boat drifts though a strange mist during an otherwise placid day at sea. At first Carey notices he’s losing weight. Then one day he finds he’s looking directly into his wife’s eyes—even though he’d always been four inches taller. Carey continues to shrink. His distraught wife begins to see him as a child. Their sex life gets weird and then stops. He’s harassed and beaten by a group of young boys. Eventually he ends up living a desperate existence in his basement, where he is terrorized by a spider and by his own cat. And he keeps getting smaller.

  Matheson, unspooling the story in a series of flashbacks while Carey tries to stay alive as he approaches microscopic proportions, reveals what’s happening midway though, when the doctors who have been studying Carey’s condition tell him they’ve found a “toxin” in his body. And they have an idea what may have produced it:

  Tell us something, they said. Were you ever exposed to any kind of germ spray? No, not bacterial warfare. Have you, for instance, ever been accidentally sprayed with a great deal of insecticide?

  No remembrance at first; just a fluttering amorphous terror. Then sudden recollection. Los Angeles, a Saturday afternoon in July. He had come out of the house, heading for the store. He had walked through a tree-lined alley, between rows of houses. A city truck had turned in suddenly, spraying the trees. The spray misted over him, burning on his skin, stinging his eyes, blinding him momentarily. He yelled at the driver.

>   Could that possibly be the cause of all this?

  No, not that. They told him so. That was only the beginning of it. Something happened to that spray, something fantastic and unheard of; something that converted a mildly virulent insecticide into a deadly growth-destroying poison.

  And so they searched for that something, asking endless questions, constantly probing into his past.

  Until, in a second, it came. He remembered the afternoon on the boat, the mist washing over him, the acid sting on his body.

  A spray impregnated with radiation.

  And that was it; the search was over at last. An insect spray hideously altered by radiation. A one-in-a-million chance. Just that amount of insecticide coupled with just that amount of radiation, received by his system in just that sequence and with just that timing; the radiation dissipating quickly, becoming unnoticeable.

  Only the poison left.

  Strictly speaking, a “toxin” is a biologically produced poison—snake venom, for example. But technicalities aside, Matheson’s story—which was told all the way through in that same rattling machine-gun style—neatly combined the twin fears of the modern age. Toxicologists actually have a name for the thing Matheson imagined, the synergistic combination of two poisons that results in a single more powerful one. It’s called “potentiation.” The symbolism would not have been lost on Carson.

  The threat of radioactive fallout was more realistically explored in Nevil Shute’s bleak, postapocalyptic 1957 novel, On the Beach. Set in the not-too-distant future of 1963, the book tells the story of humanity’s last days on earth in the aftermath of a “short, bewildering” war in which nuclear exchanges involving a handful of small countries equipped with primitive atomic bombs spin out of control into an all-out thermonuclear conflagration among the superpowers. Military officials in the United States, Russia, and China—their civilian leadership all killed in the initial bombings—exhaust their nuclear arsenals. Now everyone in the Northern Hemisphere is dead, either blown to bits or fatally sickened by a vast cloud of radiation that is moving inexorably southward, steadily blotting out what remains of civilization. In Australia, where most of the action takes place, the survivors know they have only months to live.