Lost Woods

by Rachel Carson

  In recent reports from the Goteborg Laboratory in Sweden we find that where the rockweeds Fucus and Ascophyllum are growing, the water acquires a property that stimulates the growth of the sea lettuce, Ulva, and also of Enteromorpha. From other work we know that the sea lettuce itself produces a substance that apparently is needed for the growth of certain diatoms in artificial media.

  This is a plant-to-plant relation, but the ectocrines of the algae seem also to be concerned in an animal-plant relationship. In Japan, Miyazaki found that he could stimulate the spawning of oysters with a substance extracted from sea lettuce. This leads to a fascinating field of speculation. If indeed it is confirmed that ectocrines released into the sea by coastal vegetation induce both the flowering of the diatoms and the spawning of certain marine animals, a very neatly fitting chain of circumstances would result. The larval stages of many invertebrates, including oysters, feed on diatoms. The eggs of most lamellibranchs develop into free-swimming plantonic larvae within a few days, so that one and the same stimulus could produce the young animals and the plants that will serve as their food.

  A link between plant metabolites and animal reproduction is suggested by other observations. Rapidly maturing herring concentrate around the edges of patches of plant plankton, although the fully adult herring may avoid them. It has been suggested that “water-borne metabolites” influence the change of sex that regularly occurs in the mollusk Crepidula. The spawning adults, eggs, and young of some animals have been reported by Wimpenny [R. S. Wimpenny, a plankton expert] to occur more often in dense phytoplankton than in sparse patches. Others associate spawning of the copepod Calanus with dense phytoplankton. Recent research in the physiology of plant pigments seems significant in this connection, suggesting that the carotenoid pigments have a definite effect on sex and reproduction of animals.

  So, even in the waters of the sea, we are brought back to the fundamental truth that nothing lives to itself. The water is altered, in its chemical nature and in its capacity for inducing metabolic change, by the fact that certain organisms have lived within it and by so doing have transmitted to it new properties with powerful and far-reaching effects. This is a field for imaginative and creative studies of the highest order, for in it we are brought face to face with one of the great mysteries of the sea.

  19

  [1954]

  The Real World Around Us

  THE SORORITY OF WOMEN JOURNALISTS, Theta Sigma Phi, invited Carson to speak about her experiences as a woman writer at its annual dinner in Columbus, Ohio, in the spring of 1954. With an audience of nearly a thousand women, Carson barely touched on the subject of her new book, The Edge of the Sea. Instead she spoke more autobiographically than she had ever dared before.

  In the first part of her talk, Carson reflects on how she came to write about the sea, and her experiences sailing on it as a member of the crew of a U.S. Fish and Wildlife research vessel. The heart of her remarks, however, are devoted to her ideas about the meaning of life, particularly the crucial role natural beauty plays in the spiritual development of an individual or a society.

  The audience, moved by the depth of Carson’s concern and obvious passion, gave her an enthusiastic ovation, many women reaching out to press her hand as she left the hall. Although Carson never gave another speech of quite the same warmth and candor, its reception encouraged her to adopt a more personal style.

  [ … ] I CAN REMEMBER NO TIME, even in earliest childhood, when I didn’t assume I was going to be a writer. I have no idea why. There were no writers in the family. I read a great deal almost from infancy, and I suppose I must have realized someone wrote the books, and thought it would be fun to make up stories, too.

  Also, I can remember no time when I wasn’t interested in the out-of-doors and the whole world of nature. Those interests, I know, I inherited from my mother and have always shared with her. I was rather a solitary child and spent a great deal of time in woods and beside streams, learning the birds and the insects and flowers.

  There is another thing about my childhood that is interesting now, in the light of later happenings. I might have said, with Emily Dickinson:

  I never saw a moor,

  I never saw the sea;

  Yet know I how the heather looks,

  And what a wave must be.

  For I never saw the ocean until I went from college to the marine laboratories at Woods Hole, on Cape Cod. Yet as a child I was fascinated by the thought of it. I dreamed about it and wondered what it would look like. I loved Swinburne and Masefield and all the other great sea poets.

  I had my first prolonged contact with the sea at Woods Hole. I never tired of watching the tidal currents pouring through the Hole – that wonderful place of whirlpools and eddies and swiftly racing water. I loved to watch the waves breaking at Nobska Point after a storm. At Woods Hole, too, as a young biologist, I first discovered the rich scientific literature of the sea. But it is fair to say that my first impressions of the ocean were sensory and emotional, and that the intellectual response came leter.

  Before that meeting with the sea had been accomplished, however, I had a great decision to make. At least, I thought I had. I told you that I had always planned to be a writer; when I went to college, I thought the way to accomplish that was to major in English composition. Up to that time, despite my love for the world of nature, I’d had no training in biology. As a college sophomore, I was exposed to a fine introductory course in biology, and my allegiance began to waver. Perhaps I wanted to be a scientist. A year later the decision for science was made; the writing courses were abandoned. I had given up writing forever, I thought. It never occurred to me that I was merely getting something to write about. What surprises me now is that apparently it didn’t occur to any of my advisors, either.

  The merging of the two careers didn’t begin until several years after I had left Johns Hopkins, where I had gone to do graduate work in zoology. Those were depression and post-depression years, and after a period of part-time teaching jobs, I supplemented them with another part-time assignment. The Bureau of Fisheries in Washington had undertaken to do a series of radio broadcasts. They were looking for someone to take over writing the scripts – someone who knew marine biology and who also could write. I happened in one morning when the chief of the biology division was feeling rather desperate – I think at that point he was having to write the scripts himself. He talked to me a few minutes and then said: “I’ve never seen a written word of yours, but I’m going to take a sporting chance.”

  That little job, which eventually led to a permanent appointment as a biologist, was in its way a turning point. One week I was told to produce something of a general sort about the sea. I set to work, but somehow the material rather took charge of the situation and turned into something that was, perhaps, unusual as a broadcast for the Commissioner of Fisheries. My chief read it and handed it back with a twinkle in his eye. “I don’t think it will do,” he said. “Better try again. But send this one to the Atlantic.” Eventually I did, and the Atlantic accepted it. Since then I have told my chief of those days that he was really my first literary agent.

  From those four Atlantic pages, titled “Undersea,” everything else followed. Quincy Howe, then editor for Simon and Schuster, wrote to ask why I didn’t do a book. So did Hendrik Willem van Loon. My mail had never contained anything so exciting as his first letter. It arrived in an envelope splashed with the green waves of a sea through which van Loon sharks and whales were poking inquiring snouts.

  That was only the beginning of a wonderful correspondence, for it seemed Hendrik van Loon had always wanted to know what lay undersea, and he was determined I should tell the world in a book or books. His typing was amazing but his handwritten letters were almost illegible. Often he substituted a picture for a word, and that helped. After a few weeks of such correspondence, I spent a few days with the van Loons in their Connecticut home, during which I was properly introduced to my future publisher.

 
; To a young and very tentative writer, it was a stimulating and wonderful thing to have the interest of this great man, so overwhelming in his person and his personality, but whose heart was pure gold. Through him, I had glimpses of a world that seemed exciting and fabulous, and I am sure his encouragement had a great deal to do with the fact that my first book, Under the Sea-Wind, was eventually published.

  When that happened, however, on the eve of Pearl Harbor, the world received the event with superb indifference. The reviewers were kind, but that rush to the book store that is the author’s dream never materialized. There was a Braille edition, a German translation, and use of various chapters in anthologies. That was all. I was busy with war work, and when I thought at all about writing, it was in terms of magazine pieces; I doubted that I would ever write another book. But I did, and ten years after Under the Sea-Wind, The Sea Around Us was published.

  The fifteen years that I spent in fishery and wildlife conservation work with the Government have taken me into certain places where few other women have been. Perhaps you would like to hear about some of those.

  While I was doing information work for Fish and Wildlife, the Service acquired a research vessel for work at sea, specifically on the famous fishing ground known as Georges Bank, that lies some 200 miles east of Boston and south of Nova Scotia. Some of the valuable commercial fishes are becoming scarce on the Bank, and the Service is trying to find the reason. The Albatross III, as this converted fishing trawler was called, operated out of Woods Hole, making repeated trips to Georges. She was making a census of the fish population; this was done by fishing according to a systematic plan over a selected series of stations. Of course, various scientific data on water temperatures and other matters were collected, too.

  It was decided finally – and I might have had something to do with originating the idea – that perhaps I could do a better job of handling publications about the Albatross if I had been out on her. But there was one great obstacle. No woman had ever been on the Albatross. Tradition is important in the Government, but fortunately I had conspirators who were willing to help me shatter precedent. But among my male colleagues who had to sign the papers, the thought of one woman on a ship with some fifty men was unthinkable. After much soul searching, it was decided that maybe two women would be all right, so I arranged with a friend, who was also a writer, to go with me. Marie [Rodell] thought she would write a piece about her experiences, and declared that her title would be: “I Was a Chaperone on a Fishing Boat.”

  And so one July day we sailed from Woods Hole into ten days of unusual adventure. This is not the place to tell about the scientific work that was done – but there was a lighter side, especially for us who were mere observers, and there were unforgettable impressions of fishing scenes; of fog on Georges, where the cold water and the warm air from the Gulf Stream are perpetually at war at that season of the year; and of the unutterable loneliness of the sea at night as seen from a small vessel.

  As to the lighter side – a fishing trawler is not exactly a luxury liner, and both of us were on our mettle to prove that a woman could take it without complaining. Hardly had the coast of Massachusetts disappeared astern when some of the ship’s officers began to give us a vivid picture of life aboard. The Albatross, they told us, was a very long and narrow ship and rolled like a canoe in a sea, so that everyone got violently seasick. They described some of the unpleasant accidents that sometimes occur in handling the heavy gear. They told us about the bad food. They made sure we understood that the fishing process went on night and day, and that it was very noisy.

  Well – not all the things those Job’s comforters predicted came true, but a great many of them did. However, we learned in those ten days that one gets used to almost anything.

  We learned about the fishing the very first night. After steaming out through Nantucket Channel late in the afternoon, we were to reach our first fishing station about midnight. Marie and I had gone to bed and were sound asleep when we heard a crash, presumably against the very wall of our cabin, that brought us both upright in our bunks. Surely we had been rammed by another vessel. Then a series of the most appalling bangs, clunks, and rumbles began directly over our heads, a rhythmic thundering of machinery that would put any boiler factory to shame. Finally it dawned upon us that this was fishing! It also dawned on us that this was what we had to endure for the next ten nights. If there had been any way to get off the Albatross then I’m sure we would have taken it.

  At breakfast the next morning there were grins on the faces of the men. “Hear anything last night?” they asked. Both of us wore our most demure expressions. “Well,” said Marie, “once we thought we heard a mouse, but we were too sleepy to bother.” They never asked us again. And after a night or two we really did sleep through the night.

  One of the most vivid impressions I carried away from the Albatross was the sight of the net coming up with its load of fish. The big fishing trawlers such as this one drag a cone-shaped net on the floor of the ocean, scraping up anything lying on the bottom or swimming just above it. This means not only fish but also crabs, sponges, starfish and other life of the sea floor. Much of the fishing was done in depths of about 100 fathoms, or 600 feet. After a half hour of trawling the big winches would begin to haul in the cables, winding them on steel drums as they came aboard. There is a marker on every hundred fathoms of cable, so one can tell when to expect the big net to come into view, still far down in the green depths.

  I think that first glimpse of the net, a shapeless form, ghostly white, gave me a sense of sea depths that I never had before. As the net rises, coming into sharper focus, there is a stir of excitement even among the experienced fishermen. What has it brought up?

  No two hauls are quite alike. The most interesting ones came from the deeper slopes. Georges Bank is like a small mountain resting on the floor of a surrounding deeper sea – most of the fishing is done on its flat plateaus, but sometimes the net is dragged down on the slopes near the mountain’s base. Then it brings up larger fish from these depths. There is a strange effect, caused by the sudden change of pressure. Some of the fish become enormously distended and float helplessly on their backs. They drift out of the net as it nears the surface but they are quite unable to swim down.

  Then one sees the slender shapes of sharks moving in to the kill. There was something very beautiful about those sharks to me – and when some of the men got out rifles and killed them for “sport” it really hurt me.

  In those deep net hauls, too, there were often the large and grotesque goosefish or angler fish. The angler has a triangular shape, and its enormous mouth occupies most of the base of the triangle. It lives on the floor of the sea, preying on other fish. The anglers always seemed to have been doing a little fishing of their own as the net came up, and sometimes the tails of two or three large cod would be protruding from their mouths.

  Sometimes at night we would go up on the deck to watch the fishing. Then the white splash of electric light on the lower deck was the only illumination in a world of darkness and water. It was a colorful sight, with the men in their yellow oilskins and their bright flannel shirts, all intensified and made somehow dramatic by the blackness that surrounded them.

  There is something deeply impressive about the night sea as one experiences it from a small vessel far from land. When I stood on the afterdeck on those dark nights, on a tiny man-made island of wood and steel, dimly seeing the great shapes of waves that rolled about us, I think I was conscious as never before that ours is a water world, dominated by the immensity of the sea.

  However, it is a curious thing that one sometimes experiences a sense of the sea on land. A few years ago I had a wonderful opportunity to go far into the interior of the Everglades in Florida. Many people have crossed this great wilderness by way of the Tamiami Trail. That is better than not seeing it at all, but until one has penetrated far into the interior, into the trackless, roadless areas of the great swamp, one does not know the Everglad
es.

  The difficulties of travel there are great, and no ordinary means of transportation will do. But a few pioneering individuals have developed wonderful vehicles called “glades buggies.” They were first used, I believe, to prospect for oil in the interior of the Everglades. They are completely independent of roads; they can go through water, they can navigate the seas of “saw-grass” or even push through low-growing thickets of trees and shrubs; they can make their way – painfully but surely – over ground pitted with holes and strewn with jagged boulders.

  I learned about the glades buggies when I was on a trip for my office to the area that is now the Everglades National Park. At that time the Fish and Wildlife Service had responsibility for protecting the wildlife of the area. Two of us were staying at a hotel in Miami Beach, visiting various wildlife areas in the vicinity. When we heard about Mr. Don Poppenhager and his wonderful glades buggy, we decided to try to arrange a trip.

  Mr. Poppenhager had never taken a woman into the swamp and at first he was hesitant. He warned us that it was a very uncomfortable experience; we assured him we could take it and really wanted to go. So he agreed to meet us at a little store on the Tamiami Trail kept by a character known as Ma Szady.

  I think our elegant Miami Beach hotel had been a little suspicious of our comings and goings on strange errands and in strange costumes, but the morning we left for the Everglades trip was almost too much for them. One of the Fish and Wildlife men was to pick us up at 5 A.M. and take us over the trail. This was in the summer, and a tropical darkness still hung over Miami at that hour. Not wanting to arouse the hotel, Shirley [Briggs] and I crept down the stairs laden with all our strange gear. As we tiptoed through the lobby, the head of a very sleepy but thoroughly suspicious clerk rose above the desk. “Are you ladies checking out?” he asked. I don’t think his estimate of us rose when a very noisy, two-ton Government truck roared down the street and stopped at the hotel for its passengers.