On a Farther Shore (53 page)

“Furthermore,” the
Times
wrote, “the committee makes it clear that there is a great deal that we still do not know about the long-range effects upon human beings of continued ingestion of even small quantities of these chemicals, which can enter the human body through the food we eat, through inhalation, and through skin absorption. The dire effect of ingesting large amounts of the chemicals has never been in doubt.”
In the same issue of the paper, the
Times
reported that Jerome Wiesner, the president’s science adviser and head of the pesticides committee, was urging Congress to establish a “large environmental health center” that would study the effects of pesticides on wildlife and human health. Wiesner said that while the extent of the danger was still unknown, pesticides were a potentially greater hazard than radioactive fallout.

Dorothy wrote to Carson to say how “powerfully happy” she must be and that May 15, 1963, would “go down in history as Rachel’s triumph.” Dorothy marveled again at the perfect note struck by the title
Silent Spring
and the satisfaction she took that a woman had written it. She said Rachel Carson’s name would be remembered long after Gordon Cooper’s—the Mercury astronaut who was at the time orbiting the earth.

The committee report made a number of recommendations for studying the effects of pesticides and measuring the extent to which they had contaminated the environment. It said hazards to wildlife should be considered in registering pesticides under the Federal Insecticide, Fungicide, and Rodenticide Act. And it pointedly called for funding to determine what harm the government’s own spraying programs might be doing, noting that those projects had received about $20 million in 1962, while no money at all had been allocated for concurrent field studies of their effects on the environment. The report made specific reference to Rachel Carson when it concluded by saying that federal agencies involved in the regulation or use of pesticides should launch programs to educate the public about their potential dangers and their “toxic nature,” a reality that should have been self-evident, but that now required reinforcement following the publication of
Silent Spring
. President Kennedy issued a statement along with the report, ordering the “responsible agencies” to implement its recommendations and to begin preparing legislation that could make that happen.

But as the report was more carefully considered it became apparent that internal divisions among the committee members had rendered it balanced to the point of being ineffectual. There was nothing in the report that required or even suggested an immediate reduction in pesticide use. On the contrary, the report stated flatly that “The panel believes that the use of pesticides must be continued if we are to maintain the advantages now resulting from the work of informed food producers and those responsible for control of disease.” With this premise, all of the recommendations for more studies of pesticides—necessary as they might be—hinted that the actual view of the government was that pesticides were innocent until proven guilty.

Joseph Alsop, the Washington columnist for the
New York Herald Tribune
, took the position that the report was all talk and no action. “
If Rachel Carson is right—and the chances are that she is largely right—something ought to be done about it,” Alsop wrote. “Furthermore, the something done needs to be considerably sterner than the
report of the President’s scientific advisers, which had the approximate power of an old lady’s moral lecture to a confirmed drunk.”

Carson told Dorothy Freeman she’d bought a new car that was so easy and pleasant to drive that riding in it was like floating. Plus, it had seat belts and, in a concession to Roger, a radio.
In early May 1963 she said she was desperate to talk to Dorothy in person, as there were “things I need to say to you, but they should be said with my arms around you.” This would be difficult, as Stan Freeman, whose health had been in decline in recent years, was ill again, and Carson had to tell herself that having a visit from Dorothy was impossible for now. “I think we must drift for the present,” she said. The hardest truth was that Carson wasn’t sure she could make it to Maine for the summer. There were rumors—Dorothy said she didn’t know how they started—that Carson might even rent out her cottage that year.

But at the end of May, Carson and Roger flew to Maine and stayed five days with the Freemans. Carson had decided to go up for the summer at Southport Island after all, but first she had to return home for an appearance before Congress, where Connecticut senator Abraham Ribicoff’s committee on government operations had summoned her for hearings on how to coordinate a federal response to the environmental hazards of pesticides.
Carson appeared on June 4, 1963, and found Ribicoff plainly on her side and spoiling for a fight over pesticides.

One recommendation of the president’s pesticide panel had been that the U.S. Department of Agriculture end a practice called a “protest registration” through which a pesticide found to be unsafe by the department could be put on the market for a period of time anyway, without informing anyone it had been disapproved. Secretary of Agriculture Orville Freeman had already told Ribicoff’s committee that he supported getting rid of protest registrations—but when the press had asked for a list of such disapproved products currently on the market, Freeman’s agency had said no. Furious, Ribicoff said the USDA
had until the end of the day to release the list—otherwise he’d read it on the floor of the Senate the next day.

Carson entered a long, prepared statement into the record, rehearsing the widespread environmental contamination by pesticides—and noting the growing evidence that living organisms everywhere on the planet were accumulating pesticides in their bodies. Carson also made a number of specific recommendations, including endorsing the pesticide committee’s call for more research, but also arguing that citizens needed recourse when the areas where they lived were being sprayed against their wishes and that much greater restrictions on the sale and use of pesticides were needed. Ribicoff questioned Carson closely as to whether she advocated a ban on pesticide use. She said she did not—and she agreed with Ribicoff that this had been a false charge made against
Silent Spring
.

Carson also took questions from Senator Ernest Gruening of Alaska—who a year later would distinguish himself by being one of only two senators to vote against the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution expanding U.S. involvement in Vietnam. Gruening wanted to know whether Carson supported the idea of creating a new federal agency—he thought it might be called the Department of Ecology—that would take over the regulation of pesticides and other environmental matters. Carson said she thought that would be a good thing to do.

Carson and Roger—accompanied by Carson’s assistant Jeanne Davis—got up to Southport Island on June 25, 1963, arriving in time for Roger to start a month-long summer camp.
Carson told Dorothy one reason she was determined to go to Maine that summer was that she so disliked the idea of being an invalid. She thought she could manage on her own if she was careful. Her heart condition was one consideration. Another was her back, in which she’d recently suffered a compression fracture. Her doctors warned that this meant any kind of fall could have serious consequences. Even so, Carson sent Dorothy
a note that read: “Would you help me search for a fairy cave on an August moon and a low, low tide? I would love to try it once more, for the memories are precious.”

One day in early September 1963, Carson and Dorothy drove to the southern tip of Southport Island, to the village of Newagen where the lovely Newagen Seaside Inn was surrounded by lush gardens and a wide lawn that looked west, toward Griffith Head on the other side of Sheepscot Bay. After lunch they walked outside, taking in the view. The sky was blue and it felt like summer still, and they listened to the sound of the wind threading through the spruces and the surf falling against the rocks along the shoreline. There were monarch butterflies drifting over the grounds, all heading in the same direction, one after another, each pulled onward by the invisible force of the migratory instinct. Carson and Dorothy talked about the butterflies, and their complex life cycle, in which several generations live and die over the course of thousands of miles of travel in the space of a single year.

Back home in Silver Spring a few days later, Carson wrote to Dorothy, mentioning the butterflies and saying what a happy memory they were. They had realized on that fine, warm day that none of the ones they saw then would return. Remarkably, this hadn’t seemed sad at the time. Carson thought it was because both of them knew that every living thing must come to the end of its days, and that it was only natural that it should be this way. The monarch’s life cycle is measured in only months, Carson said. “
For ourselves, the measure is something else, the span of which we cannot know. But the thought is the same: when that intangible cycle has run its course it is a natural and not unhappy thing that a life comes to its end.”

Carson’s cancer was spreading quickly now.
After a long day at the hospital, X-rays showed lesions had invaded the entire left side of her pelvis—which accounted for the new pain and lameness Carson had experienced over the summer. Dorothy, still in Maine and hoping to cheer Carson, wrote letter after letter describing her days at Southport Island, telling Carson about the birds and the plants and sometimes imagining the two of them walking together under the
moonlight along Sheepscot Bay.
Dorothy recalled that after one such walk long ago she’d told Carson she looked like alabaster.

In October 1963, Carson started a course of testosterone and phosphorus treatments her doctors thought would reduce her discomfort and difficulty walking. This mattered to Carson, as she was scheduled to give a speech at the Kaiser Medical Center in San Francisco later that month. But she was losing confidence that she was up to it, as every day her pain—which now moved randomly from one part of her body to another—increased. Sometimes she couldn’t walk at all.
Dorothy commiserated, saying she wished Carson could make the trip to California without pain and fear for how she would hold up. She mentioned some of the things she and Carson had seen and done together when they first met. She said she knew now they’d never see or do those things again, but that she was content that it must be so.

The trip to San Francisco was arduous, though Marie Rodell went along to help Carson manage.
A local newspaper account of her speech described Carson as a “middle-aged, arthritis-crippled spinster” whose earth-shaking book on the dangers of pesticides had produced a packed house at the Fairmont Hotel.

Carson told Dorothy how exciting it had been to fly over the Grand Canyon.
She loved San Francisco and said if she had another life to live she’d happily spend at least a few years of it there. Somehow she managed a visit to the redwood forest at Muir Woods the morning before her talk, though it was frustrating to see such a place from a wheelchair. The sightseeing was exhausting but not nearly so bad as Carson imagined it would have been to sit all day through the presentations that preceded hers. She told Dorothy she wasn’t sorry she’d gone, but that it had been foolish to travel all the way across the country when her physical condition was so poor.
When she got home, Carson told Dorothy she had no further obligations and could “afford to be dopey.” She had begun taking sleeping pills regularly and was spending most of her time in bed. She said she looked forward to staying awake long enough to read the autographed copy of
The Quiet Crisis
that Stewart Udall had sent her.

Some days were better than others, though Carson said her routine now rarely changed. She got up sometimes, depending on how she felt and whether she could make her way around the house with a walker.
She assured Dorothy that she was not in constant pain and maybe even feeling a little better—
though in one letter she said she had to stop writing, as her hand would not work any more that day.

Carson had agreed to donate her personal papers to Yale University, and in November 1963 she began digging through old manuscripts and correspondence with publishers.
She said it was quite an experience—happy in a way she hadn’t anticipated. She told Dorothy she wished they could have done the task together, as there was an air of “dewy freshness and innocence and wonder” that brought back not only memories of her first literary efforts, but also of the early times with Dorothy in Maine. Later that month, Carson found it hard to write to Dorothy for several days after the assassination of President Kennedy on November 22, 1963. Carson said she felt as if she’d lost a member of her family and that his killing brought on feelings of “
shock, dismay, and revulsion at the black aspects of our national life—the bigotry, intolerance and hatred preached by so many.”

Although she now had severe, continuous pain in her neck—and had more trouble making her hands work—Carson went to New York in early December to accept the Cullum Medal from the American Geographical Society.
Worried about shipping a portion of her papers to New Haven, she brought them instead to New York so Marie Rodell could later deliver them to Yale. Stan and Dorothy Freeman went down to the city for the event and spent a few hours with Carson.
Dorothy wrote to Carson afterward and said she had never imagined she would see Carson out of bed again after she’d left Maine that fall, and that seeing her up on the dais “looking so fresh and lovely” had brought her near tears.

A week before Christmas 1963, Carson’s much-loved cat, Jeffie, died. Carson was devastated, but said she was in one way relieved as she had been concerned for some time about what was to become of both Jeffie and Roger when she died. She thought it was unlikely
that whoever would raise Roger—a question for which she had no concrete answer—would also take the cat. Now, she told Dorothy, she had one less worry.
A few days later, Carson said how much she was looking forward to a visit from Dorothy over the holidays. Now that the solstice had arrived the days would be getting longer, and maybe—against all odds—they would yet have another summer together at Southport Island.