On a Farther Shore (7 page)

Carson’s story was a familiar one in biology, where even brilliant students sometimes falter when it comes to actually doing hands-on science. Some are clumsy; others are careless or indifferent to the precision required in carrying out a well-controlled experiment. Or they lack the insight needed to formulate hypotheses that can be experimentally tested—the essence of the modern scientific method. Carson’s admission that she would be content working in the library contained a whiff of self-recognition. It was, in fact, an allusion to what would become for her both a refuge and a lifelong wellspring of inspiration.

As she hit one dead end after another Carson could not make up her mind whether the problem was her or her subject.
At Johns Hopkins she briefly narrowed her focus to snakes, and at one point
got curious about the pit organ sensory system in vipers. Sometimes her specimens were delivered alive, and one day she took a friend to the lab to see a crate full of rattlesnakes. As the two women peered in through the mesh top of the container, several thick-bodied specimens disengaged themselves from the tangled mass on the floor of the cage and, tongues flicking, slowly raised their heads.

The next several years saw a winding-down of one phase of Carson’s life and a halting transition into the next. At Johns Hopkins, Carson again assumed her favorite role, that of the hardworking student.
Her days were long, beginning just after seven with breakfast at the university cafeteria and often continuing into the evening. Carson estimated that class time and lab research occupied almost fifty hours every week, with the balance of her waking moments left to studying. Organic chemistry was her most demanding class, while botany, a subject that didn’t interest her, nonetheless provided the welcome diversion of an occasional field trip. Carson eventually earned a hard-won B in chemistry and surprised herself with an exemplary performance in physiology.
She told a friend that she liked living in Baltimore, which had a pleasant climate and seemed to be slightly better off economically than Pittsburgh. The atmosphere at Johns Hopkins was decidedly southern, and Carson loved listening to the accents of her classmates.

As absorbing as her studies were, Carson was not insulated from the hard times besetting the country.
In her second year at Hopkins she became a half-time student and found work as a lab assistant in the medical school, where she helped maintain colonies of rats and fruit flies. Carson hoped to earn enough to make payments on what she still owed to PCW—
and to help support her family, most of whom came to live with her early in 1930. They rented a large three-story house outside of Baltimore in the remote, mostly rural area of Stemmers Run. The house had no central heat but did have indoor plumbing and a big fireplace. A handsome grove of oaks sprawled over the
property, and a two-mile hike through the woods brought you to Chesapeake Bay. The house also featured—incongruously—a tennis court, a step up from the homestead back in Springdale. But life at Stemmers Run could hardly have been comfortable. Carson’s father was in poor health, weak and quiet and spent. Carson’s sister, Marian, divorced again, lived there, too, accompanied by her two energetic young daughters. Mrs. Carson, forever at Rachel’s side, seemed content to encourage her daughter’s studies and happily type her papers. It was apparent to everyone who saw them together how close Carson and her mother were.

Not surprisingly, with Carson the only wage earner in the household, PCW didn’t get the money still owed on her undergraduate studies.
In 1932, after many missed payments, Carson settled with the school by signing over the title to the pair of her father’s lots she’d offered as collateral back in 1929.
Much later, a neighbor at Stemmers Run would recall stopping in at the Carsons’ early one evening and finding the family seated at the table with only a bowl of apples for dinner.

In the lab, Carson’s problems multiplied.
She gave up on snakes and at one point tried to study embryonic development in squirrels. But she couldn’t get the animals to breed. She complained to a friend, “
I don’t have time to think any more.” Between working part-time and going to school part-time, she wasn’t making any progress at all. She began to worry that she was running out of time for an ambitious study.
Eventually Carson’s adviser suggested that she work on the pronephros in catfish—a project interesting to Carson mainly because it could be done quickly.
The pronephros is an embryonic precursor of the kidney, and at the time it was unknown whether it was retained as a functional excretory organ in the adult fish. Carson concluded that it wasn’t, and in June 1932, a full year behind schedule, she submitted a mostly descriptive one-hundred-page master’s thesis featuring drawings and photographs of histological sections. It wasn’t breakthrough science—but it was done.

When Carson later received letters of recommendation from her professors at Johns Hopkins, they all expressed confidence in her
teaching abilities but were tepid about the prospect that she would do meaningful scientific research. Whether they’d have thought differently had Carson had the resources to finish her degree on time, or that it was simply the case that she lacked a talent for research, Carson would never know. As the months and then years unspooled at Johns Hopkins, Carson’s fascination with biology remained intact, but her commitment to it as a career waned.

Through graduate school, Carson had steadily increased her efforts to earn money.
She started teaching biology in the summers at Johns Hopkins and worked as a lab assistant and zoology instructor at the University of Maryland in College Park,
which was a long ride from Stemmers Run by bus or train that Carson made several times each week. In the fall of 1932, Carson began work at Johns Hopkins toward her PhD. She would not complete this degree, but she did fall in love with an animal she studied for the first time: the American eel.

Carson had an enormous aquarium in her lab that was filled with eels, and contemplating their dark undulations as they glided from one end of the tank to the other made her think. Eels are migratory and have a complex life history that Carson found beguiling. Born in the open ocean, larval eels drift on currents toward the continental shelf, where they metamorphose into elvers, finger-sized and serpentine and so transparent they appear to be made of glass. The elvers move up through estuaries and eventually into freshwater streams and ponds, where they undergo a maturation that takes many years. As adults they return to the ocean for the long journey back to their breeding areas in and around the Sargasso Sea in the middle Atlantic. Carson could not stop thinking about the story of the eel.

Migrations like that of the eel are one of nature’s most literal examples of the continuity of life.
In the same lab where she studied her eels, Carson also kept some amoebas that caused her to think about this in a different context. As almost every student of biology comes to realize, amoebas—and indeed, all single-celled animals that reproduce by simply dividing in two—have a kind of eternal life. Although they can be killed, amoebas do not senesce and die, but rather divide
and live on. So every amoeba is arguably not an individual with a singular identity, but is rather part of the first amoeba—and thus an organism whose life originated in the mists of time and that might exist for as long as there are amoebas.
Carson thought another way to picture it was to imagine that within such species there must be “infinitesimally small molecular aggregates” that had been “alive” for millions of years and would be perpetuated indefinitely. Carson told all this to a friend, admitting that it was “a curious train of thought.”

Robert Carson collapsed and died one morning in the backyard at Stemmers Run in July 1935. He was seventy-one. Rachel, whose brother lived on his own in Baltimore, was now truly the head of the household at the age of twenty-eight. She had left the doctoral program at Johns Hopkins a year and a half earlier and continued with her several part-time academic jobs.
At the urging of Mary Scott Skinker, who had completed her PhD and gone to work for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, Carson in early 1935 had taken and passed civil service examinations in parasitology, wildlife biology, and aquatic biology.
In October she was hired as a field aide by the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries in their Baltimore office.
Her job entailed “assembling information for public distribution on the natural history and conservation of the fishes of the Atlantic Coast.”
These duties consisted mainly of writing short scripts for a radio program called
Romance Under the Waters
, which the bureau produced in partnership with the CBS Radio Network.
The job was, as Carson later reported, “intermittent.” When she worked, Carson earned $6.50 a day. On a personnel form that asked her to list the number and ages of any dependents living with her, Carson stubbornly answered that she had “1 totally; 3 partially” and left it at that.

The Bureau of Fisheries had come into existence partly by accident. In the mid-1800s, commercial fishermen in New England noticed a decline in fish numbers in coastal waters. In response, Congress in 1871 created the U.S. Commission of Fish and Fisheries—but
did not limit its charter to
the problems in the New England fishery. With no deadline to report on or resolve the issue, the commission became by default a permanent federal agency—the first one whose mission was the conservation of wildlife.

The commission initially made fishery surveys using navy vessels or revenue cutters borrowed from the Treasury Department, but by 1883 was operating two of its own ships, the first vessels ever designed for the purpose of marine research. The
Fish Hawk
, a 157-foot steam-and-sail powered schooner, conducted dredging and trawling operations along the eastern seaboard and served as a mobile hatchery. The
Albatross
, a majestic, white-hulled behemoth, was a 234-foot brigantine with twin two-hundred-horsepower steam engines and could carry more than 7,500 square feet of sail.

With a cruising speed of nearly ten knots the
Albatross
could go anywhere in the world, and it did. The first government vessel equipped with electric lighting from stem to stern—Thomas Edison designed the generator—it also carried submersible electric lights for attracting marine life at night. There were two well-equipped laboratories on board and dredging gear on deck that could collect specimens from the depths of the open ocean. The
Albatross
made collecting expeditions along the East Coast, out into the Atlantic, down through the Caribbean and the Gulf of Mexico, and into the Pacific. The ship traveled to the Galápagos Islands, Alaska, the Philippines, and into the Sea of Japan. Over a span of several decades, research done onboard the
Albatross
laid the foundation of modern marine biology.
Oceanic Ichthyology
,
the 1895 classic on deep-sea fish by George Brown Goode and Tarleton H. Bean, was based mainly on collections made aboard the
Albatross
.

The commission continued to grow. It added the maintenance of food fish in inland waters to its duties and eventually established ninety stocking hatcheries around the country. In 1887, the Commission of Fish and Fisheries established a Division of Scientific Inquiry, and in 1902 the commission itself was reorganized as the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries and moved into the Department of Commerce. In 1911
the bureau landed its most far-flung responsibility: jurisdiction over the Pribilof Islands, a tiny volcanic archipelago two hundred miles west of Alaska in the Bering Sea that was home to a few hundred people of Russian descent, about two hundred thousand fur seals, and an economy based almost entirely on seal hunting. Through prudent management of both the people and the seals, the seal population had steadily risen to more than 1.5 million by the time Carson joined the bureau in 1935.

Carson’s boss was Elmer Higgins, who headed what was by then called the Division of Scientific Inquiry Respecting Food Fishes. Every year, Higgins prepared a long report on the research activities of bureau personnel, including studies and findings published by the bureau itself, as well as papers and articles written for scholarly journals and the general press. In the mid-1930s, Higgins’s reports usually lamented the limited resources that curtailed all research activities and shut some down entirely. During the Depression, the bureau had come to depend increasingly on cooperative research programs with various state agencies and academic institutions. In 1936 the total budget for Higgins’s division was $109,000, about half of which was spent directly on field and lab investigations.

The annual summary emphasized emerging knowledge and the importance of conservation in promoting sustainable commercial and sport fishing. Higgins even occasionally used the still uncommon term “ecology” in discussing the study of specific marine environments—although the bureau did not hold all of the life forms composing such communities in equal regard, as some that preyed on commercially valuable species were regarded as “pests.” Between 1935 and 1937, for example, the bureau received a special appropriation of $125,000—more than its entire budget for a single year—to develop a chemical poison for the “eradication” of starfish in oyster farming operations.

Efforts to control or eliminate predatory species were consistent with the bureau’s mission as Higgins construed it—a mission that did not differ from the quest to understand and then subdue and dominate
nature that had existed since the dawn of civilization. In his 1936 report, Higgins explained that the “mastery and utilization of the forces of nature” arose from the knowledge gained through research that did not necessarily have such utilitarian purposes to begin with. Knowledge, he wrote, permits nature to be “harnessed, controlled, and directed to economic advantage.” When the practical applications of marine research aren’t immediately apparent, Higgins said, such knowledge nonetheless makes “permanent contributions to social progress” even if it takes time to figure out what those contributions are.

Carson seems to have looked upon the great wealth of scientific research suddenly at her fingertips in a completely different way. For one thing, her assignment—how glorious to have one again—was to write about science. What could be better? It was like getting paid to do homework, the very thing she was best at. As she went about the work of writing short, easily consumed radio scripts, the storyteller inside her came alive again. In early 1936, just months after starting at the bureau, after having her mother neatly type up the manuscript, Carson sent off a long, loosely written piece on Chesapeake Bay shad fishing to the
Baltimore Sun
—which promptly bought it.
Carson’s first newspaper story, “It’ll Be Shad Time Soon,” ran in the
Baltimore Sun Sunday Magazine
on March 1, 1936. Carson got a check for twenty dollars.