On a Farther Shore (5 page)

Carson’s assignment to write about herself in her first-year English class resulted in a strange, impenetrable essay that suggested she
had great expectations without explicitly saying what they were. It opened moodily, with Carson describing herself as “a girl of eighteen” who loved the outdoors and who could never be happier than when in the glow of a campfire with the stars overhead. She continued, less gracefully, to explain her special relationship with that world: “I love all the beautiful things of nature, and the wild creatures are my friends. What could be more wonderful than the thrill of having some little furry animal creep closer and closer to you, with wondering but unafraid eyes?”

Carson went on to say that she was an avid reader and named some of her favorite writers, including Shakespeare, Milton, Dickens, and Mark Twain, the last for his “hatred of hypocrisy.” She said she didn’t care for contemporary writers, as the “realism in modern literature does not appeal to me.” Near the close of the essay, Carson’s tone turned pious. She wrote that she was an “idealist” and hinted at an ambition so lofty that it would ultimately bring her near God: “Sometimes I lose sight of my goal, then again it flashes into view, filling me with a new determination to keep the ‘vision splendid’ before my eyes. I may never come to a full realization of my dreams, but ‘a man’s reach must exceed his grasp, or what’s a heaven for?’ ”

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:

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
:

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.