On a Farther Shore (23 page)

As splendid as this news was, it came at the end of a season of accolades—the biggest of which was the National Book Award, which
she learned she’d won in early January.
Although she misplaced the original letter from Oxford informing her of the prize, a whirlwind of planning for the presentation took place over the next several weeks
as there was a heavy schedule of interviews and receptions connected with Carson’s visit to New York. The award ceremony was held at the Hotel Commodore.
At the head table with Carson were the poet Marianne Moore, who’d won for
Collected Poems
and who looked tiny under an enormous tricornered hat, and James Jones, who’d won the fiction award for
From Here to Eternity
.
Jones was widely rumored to have been a compromise winner after the judges could not decide between
The Caine Mutiny
and
The Catcher in the Rye
. The women wore
corsages. Jones, dressed in a light-colored suit that made him appear even larger than he was, looked like he wanted to slug somebody.

In her acceptance speech, Carson said that an author’s “real education” begins on publication day, when you learn how people react to what you have to say. She said she had been struck by the number of readers who were surprised by the popular success of
The Sea Around Us
even though it had a lot of science in it. This didn’t seem right to her—Carson said science was not a realm unto itself, and anyway, science and literature had the same aim, which is to “discover and illuminate truth.”

Carson added a cautionary note that seemed apt in a world inclined to war in a nuclear age. She said that by studying the natural world and seeing it in the context of a history billions of years long, human follies came into perspective. “
Perhaps if we reversed the telescope and looked at man down these long vistas,” she said, “we should find less time and inclination to plan for our own destruction.”

It was a good time.
RKO, the movie company, began work on a documentary based on
The Sea Around Us
—an unexpected fulfillment of Carson’s earlier speculation that such a film could be made. It was to be written and directed by Irwin Allen, who would one day become famous as the “Master of Disaster” for films such as
The Towering Inferno
. Carson tried to be helpful to the project, searching for
existing film footage and correcting Allen’s script, which she disliked enough that she threatened to remove her name from the film.
When Carson saw a first cut of the movie in January 1953, she was shocked that many of the factual errors she had pointed out in the script had nonetheless ended up in the movie. Oxford complained to RKO, and
Marie Rodell complained to Oxford, mentioning the possibility of a lawsuit.
In February, Allen and Carson met in New York to resolve their differences and, based on changes Allen agreed to make to the film, Carson withdrew her objections.

The finished film—though wildly uneven—was a colorful and entertaining look at the marine environment. Allen got the story started off on an inept biblical note by commingling Carson’s explanation of the origins of the earth with her allusion to Genesis. Much of the movie appeared to have been filmed in the big aquarium at Marineland in Florida, though there were also pretty sequences shot underwater on coral reefs and others showing the surf crashing on spectacular coastlines. Some scenes—including a “fight” between a shark and an octopus and another in which a snorkel diver slashed open the belly of a small, harmless shark—were staged and must have distressed Carson, as they suggested the ocean was a dark, menacing place. But Allen didn’t have to supply any artifice for the film’s most grisly segment, the bloody harpooning of a large baleen whale by a commercial whaling vessel. The movie ended scarily with scenes—some real and some fake—of icebergs calving off Arctic glaciers. The voice-over offered the disturbing thought, made to seem far more immediate than Carson had explained in the book, that the earth was warming and the seas were rising and perhaps would not stop before inundating much of human civilization.

When Oxford proposed a new printing of
The Sea Around Us
with a dust jacket adapted from the film, Carson said absolutely not, as
it would “cheapen and misrepresent” the book. Allen’s film went on to win the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature, but Carson always hated it, and she likely regretted a missed opportunity to have worked with someone else.
In March 1952, Marie Rodell had
met with a young French marine researcher named Jacques Cousteau, who expressed interest in collaborating with Carson on a movie about the sea. Cousteau said he was about to embark on a long ocean expedition aboard his ship
Calypso
. Rodell thought this sounded interesting, and she found Cousteau charming. But she declined on Carson’s behalf because she’d also heard that Cousteau’s recent invention—the Aqua-Lung—was “no good.”

In the spring of 1952, Carson got away to Key West to work on the seashore book and to escape the unceasing requests for her time. She told Oxford that she’d have little room for promotional work in the coming months, as she was planning a research trip to Woods Hole and a vacation in Maine. Still on leave from U.S. Fish and Wildlife, Carson had decided she would not return.
On her resignation, which took effect in June, Carson gave as her reason for quitting “to devote my time to writing.”

That summer, flush with success,
Carson bought some land on Southport Island near Boothbay Harbor. She admitted that it felt “strange and inappropriate” to think of herself as an “owner” of a piece of the seashore. The lot was 350 feet deep, heavily wooded, and had a 140-foot frontage on Sheepscot Bay. It was near the village of West Southport, not far from the Hendricks Head lighthouse, and about a half mile south of a promontory called Dogfish Head.

Carson ordered a spacious cottage that would be ready the next summer.
It was long and low, and featured a writing study with built-in varnished bookshelves and desk, plus a worktable where Carson could examine marine specimens. The main room was finished in knotty pine and had a redbrick fireplace. An enormous window overlooked the bay, filling the cottage with light. A long deck with white railings was perched between the cottage and a shrubby bluff, down which a narrow, winding, root-tangled path led to the rocks and tide pools at the shoreline.

At low tide, a large, uneven tableland of rock emerged along the shore. Directly below the cottage was a small, gravelly shallow area that could almost be called a beach. The tide pools were full of mussels,
periwinkles, sponges, urchins, barnacles, and seaweeds. Although the rocks were treacherous when wet, a steady and sufficiently curious person could inch out onto them to inspect the pools, or venture to the edge and gaze at the open ocean beyond the widening funnel of the bay to the south. West across the bay were the sun-bleached rocks of Georgetown Island. Sometimes the swell of the North Atlantic swept into the bay in long, smooth columns, and the water was dotted with the brightly colored floats of countless lobster traps. Carson said that whales occasionally ventured into the bay and could be observed “
blowing and rolling in all their majesty.”

Back in New York, Marie Rodell moved her office from East Fifty-fourth Street to Fifth Avenue.

S
outhport Island belongs to a network of rocky peninsulas and islands that project into the ocean from Boothbay Harbor, Maine, bordering the estuaries of the Damariscotta and Sheepscot rivers. The island lies close to the mainland, to which it is connected by a bridge. It is about three miles long from north to south, a little less than half that wide across at its broadest point, and is shaped like a shark’s tooth. Heavily wooded, the island’s forest is dominated by spruce and fir, with maples, birches, and other hardwoods mixed in. The shoreline is steep almost everywhere.
In 1953, Southport Island had 250 permanent residents and another 368 families owned summer properties there. When Rachel Carson built her cottage she became Southport Island’s second most famous part-time citizen, the first being
the actress Margaret Hamilton, who lived in a house on an islet just off the island’s southern tip and who was said by everyone to be much nicer than her most memorable character, the Wicked Witch of the West in the 1939 movie
The Wizard of Oz
.

In the 1880s a Massachusetts Civil War veteran named Constant Whitney began visiting Southport Island with his family on summer
vacations. In 1887 he bought a parcel of land on the shore of Sheepscot Bay, not far from the village of West Southport, near a steamer landing at the rocky point of Dogfish Head. At first the family camped there in a tent, then for several summers more they inhabited a rough single-room house that had a loft above. They dug a well that provided water for them and for several nearby cottages, and that also served as the community refrigerator, with milk and other perishables kept cool in buckets lowered to just above the water.

One summer a shipload of lumber washed ashore directly in front of the cottage. Family legend has it that Constant Whitney declared that as the Lord had seen fit to provide him with the materials for a house it was his duty to build one. He did so, moving a little closer to the water. Whitney and his heirs gradually expanded the new cottage in the ensuing years, adding a kitchen, bedroom, and bathroom, plus an expansive porch on the front that looked out grandly over the bay. The cottage was passed down through the family, one generation to the next, until it belonged to Constant’s granddaughter, Dorothy Freeman, and her husband, Stanley.

In 1939, Stan and Dorothy bought a sloop and moored it in the cove near the cottage. Sixteen and a half feet long, with a white lapstrake hull and a green canvas deck, she was a “Town Class” design, which originated in Marblehead, Massachusetts, and at the time was the official racing class of the Southport Yacht Club. Her sail number was 158. This matched the first number chosen in the Selective Service lottery just before the war, and the Freemans named her
Draftee
. Stan and Dorothy loved cruising on the bay, and Stan and their son, Stanley, Jr., raced
Draftee
every Saturday and Sunday in July and August.

On Stan Freeman’s birthday, July 15, 1951, his son and daughter-in-law gave him a copy of
The Sea Around Us
, telling him to be sure to bring it to Maine so they could read it, too. The Freemans took turns reading aloud from Carson’s book on
Draftee
as they cruised on Sheepscot Bay that summer. A year later Dorothy was surprised to read in the local paper that Rachel Carson had purchased property
in, of all places, West Southport—and was going to build a summer home there. Just before Christmas she decided to send Carson a note welcoming her to the island, mailing it to the famous author by way of her publisher in New York and having no idea what, if any, response to expect. Carson surely received hundreds of letters every month.

But Carson did respond. She sent Dorothy a note thanking her for the “thoughtful and charming” greeting from her new neighbors. Carson said she’d been in love with the Boothbay Harbor area for a long time and now looked forward to having a summer writing retreat. She said she hoped to be in her cottage by June—and asked the Freemans to please stop by to get better acquainted. Dorothy could scarcely believe it.

A
half year later, on June 2, 1953, the Freemans got up early at their home in West Bridgewater, Massachusetts, to watch the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in London on their new television. Film of the twenty-seven-year-old monarch’s installation had been flown to North America for broadcast on TV within hours of the actual ceremony. This would have been the most interesting event of the summer had they not gone up to Southport Island and
called on Rachel Carson at her new cottage after suppertime on July 12. In the evening light of midsummer Stan and Dorothy walked down the short, rocky path to Carson’s back door and into a different life.

Carson liked the Freemans right away. Although they were older than she was, Carson felt the three of them—but especially she and Dorothy—were much alike in their feelings for the Maine coast and for nature in general. Dorothy was pretty and vigorous. She had a New England accent, so that her new friend’s name came out as
Rachul Cahsin
. Stan was tall and handsome, with a high forehead and thinning hair. He was an accomplished amateur photographer who won over Carson when she learned he liked to take pictures of the many kinds of wildlife that visited Sheepscot Bay. Carson insisted they come back in a few weeks to inspect the shoreline below her cottage. The tides would not be so extreme as they were in the spring or
later in the fall—when shore explorations were best—but there would still be wonderful things to find among the rocks.
Carson advised them to wear sneakers and pants they could roll up, but promised that if anyone had to go in over their knees she’d do it, as she would have a change of clothing close at hand. The Freemans, starstruck yet also surprisingly at ease with Carson, were eager for another visit.

The collecting expedition came off one Sunday in early September.
It was a happy affair. Marie Rodell was up from New York for the weekend and everyone, including Carson’s mother, Maria, got on well. Carson had advised Stan and Dorothy to come in the late afternoon in time to catch the falling tide.
Dorothy was startled by the wealth of sea life that, unbeknownst to her previously, dwelled in the tide pools and crevices of the shoreline at West Southport. Carson—demonstrating an unsuspected agility—showed them how to climb along the slippery rocks and where to stop and peer beneath an overhang or reach into the water to retrieve a specimen. Dorothy watched as Carson all but stood on her head to peer into the recesses of a small cave at the sea anemones clinging to the stone.