On a Farther Shore (8 page)

Over the next four years, Carson became a frequent contributor to the
Sun
, writing on a variety of wildlife subjects and being paid ten or twenty dollars for each. These stories involved little conventional journalism—Carson was not an interviewer or investigator by nature—and were more often than not about places she had never been and things she had never witnessed. She wrote about tuna fishing off Nova Scotia and oyster farming in the Chesapeake Bay. She wrote about how duck numbers were gradually increasing after years of wetland drainage and how overhunting had decimated waterfowl populations. She wrote about problems with starlings overwintering in the Baltimore area. Returning to one of her favorite subjects, Carson wrote a piece about eels and their incomprehensible migration
from the Sargasso Sea to the very same coastal bays and streams from which their parents had come, but which the new generation could recognize only by instinct. “Chesapeake Eels Seek the Sargasso Sea” ran in the Sunday
Sun
on October 9, 1938.

Carson also sold a couple of stories to the
Richmond Times-Dispatch Sunday Magazine
. In “Fight for Wildlife Pushes Ahead,” an ambitious, sweeping piece about the former abundance of North American wildlife before European settlement and the long, steady decline in animal populations that had followed, Carson’s consideration of these losses and the efforts then under way to reverse the trend hinted at the depth of her affection for the natural world:

In July 1936, Carson was appointed to a full-time position at the bureau as a junior aquatic biologist, and she was sworn in the following month. The job mainly involved writing reports on fisheries conservation issues—but also included some lab work in making age determinations of fish. Carson’s salary was $2,000 a year.

C
hristmas Eve 1914 was clear and cold in Flanders. Frost glittered on the no-man’s-land that lay between the opposing lines forming the western front, a quagmire of mud and barbed wire and stalemate that ran from near Dunkirk on the English Channel south to a point fifty miles northeast of Paris, then east toward the German border. On one side were the British, backed by Belgian and French soldiers. On the other side, in many places close enough so that the men in the trenches could call out to their enemies, were German and Prussian forces.

As the holiday season approached there had been talk of a cessation of hostilities, but leaders on both sides worried this would destroy fighting morale and undertook to prevent fraternization between the combatants. In mid-December, the British command had put forward a series of attacks along the line in hopes of heating up the stalled conflict, but these mainly produced shocking casualties—many by friendly fire—that only furthered the misery and doubt
in the trenches. Then, on the night before Christmas, the fighting stopped. Up and down the lines, candles were lit on the German side, and makeshift Christmas trees appeared on the parapets. The Germans began singing carols, and the British joined in. Before sunrise the artillery batteries were unattended, rifles had been laid down, and soldiers from both sides armed only with food and cigarettes and liquor had emerged from the trenches to meet in no-man’s-land, where they sang together and exchanged gifts. Handwritten signs went up with the words “You no fight, we no fight.” So it went through Christmas Day and, in some places on the front, for several more days after that.

And then the war resumed.

Among the participants in what came to be known as the Christmas Truce was a gangly nineteen-year-old private from suburban London named Henry Williamson.
The son of a stern bank clerk, Williamson was a sensitive young man. He had large eyes and sometimes wore a trim mustache that ended at the corners of his mouth.
Williamson had been at the front for just over a month and had witnessed, as he put it in a letter home, “a bitter and bloody struggle” that added up to “some of the most desperate fighting of the war.” The brief pause in hostilities at Christmas caused Williamson to question the war, which suddenly seemed to him futile. Having met the enemy on friendly terms—
Williamson had shaken hands with his German counterparts and merrily smoked a cigar with them—he discovered that soldiers on both sides were much the same: expendable pawns in a game played by politicians and generals. Many of the German soldiers Williamson met seemed to be waiters in civilian life. They were like himself, Williamson thought, inasmuch as they believed in their cause and yet could see its folly. Eventually, Williamson would be convinced that peace, not war, should be the natural state of the European community of nations—a conviction that would lead him down divergent paths, one into the English countryside and the other into the darkest realms of politics.

The trenches on the front—which in some areas had been dug into reclaimed swampland that was below sea level—were watery lagoons of filth, mud, and rotting flesh. Soldiers sometimes had to sleep standing up.
Only a few weeks after the Christmas Truce, Williamson came down with dysentery and had to be shipped home to England.
By March he was better, though he remained weak and admitted to nerves that left him feeling “joggy.”
That spring Williamson got accepted for training as an officer,
and in March 1917 he returned to the front as a lieutenant in the machine gun corps.
Williamson again saw heavy fighting, and after being injured and falling ill during two months of artillery bombardments and poison gas attacks, Williamson was again evacuated back to England.
He recovered and was returned to the war once more in the spring of 1918. It’s unclear what happened to him during his final three weeks of fighting back at the front, but he was “shaky” when he was sent home to convalesce again.

Williamson had begun a novel about his wartime experiences during one of his furloughs home, and after the war he devoted himself in equal measures to writing and
tearing around the countryside on a Norton motorcycle, a passion that would later morph into a love of sporty motorcars.
Sometime in the summer of 1919 Williamson discovered a slim memoir called
The Story of My Heart
by the English essayist and nature writer Richard Jefferies.

Raised on a farm halfway between London and Bristol, Jefferies from an early age indulged in frequent, solitary communion with the outdoors that began as an enthusiasm for hunting and tramping the countryside and evolved into a solemn reverence for nature. His reputation rested mainly on his nature essays, including the intense and revealing
Story of My Heart
, which he wrote as an autobiography. Published in 1883, just four years before Jefferies’s death, the book is an account of the author’s love of the natural world that is at times exquisite and in other places overripe with mystical mumbo jumbo. In the opening pages, Jefferies explains the connection to nature that
illuminated his innermost feelings as a young man, when he would make a daily hike to the summit of a hilltop from which he could survey the English countryside:

And so on.

Jefferies was an odd man, tall but stooped, enthusiastic but humorless. As a youth, he grew his hair long and wandered about with his gun and his deepening thoughts, much to the consternation of his neighbors. By the time he came to write
The Story of My Heart
Jefferies had acquired a set of unusual beliefs. He thought that all accidents and diseases were preventable—that the innumerable tragedies that befall human beings were the result of carelessness and stupidity. He saw no reason why everyone should not live long past the age of one hundred. He did not believe in God. He did not believe that things “happen for the best.”

On the contrary, Jefferies was stricken by the knowledge that good people often endure nightmarish lives, while those who do evil are just as often rewarded for their misdeeds. “
Human suffering,” he wrote, “is so great, so endless, so awful that I can hardly write of it.” He hated being indoors and disliked all quotidian activities, which he thought useless.
His natural companions, he wrote, were “the earth, and sun, and sea, and stars by night.” Jefferies believed that we are on our own in the universe and that if human affairs could be properly directed it would be by some wise and benevolent dictator.

And yet, in a rapturous passage in
The Story of My Heart
, Jefferies confessed that despite the countless cruelties of existence, his hunger for life was insatiable and the one thing he wanted was
more
of it all: “
I burn life like a torch. The hot light shot back from the sea scorches my cheek—my life is burning in me. The soul throbs like the sea for a larger life. No thought which I have ever had has satisfied my soul.”

Some readers found
The Story of My Heart
inspiring, while others thought it irreverent and dangerous. For Henry Williamson, scarred in equal measures by the terror and the folly of war,
The Story of My Heart
was profound—a true search for meaning in life that was as right and noble as what had happened to him on a night before Christmas in Flanders.
Reading the book was a transforming experience, one effect of which was to convince Williamson that he should commit himself to writing. And he did. In the coming years, Williamson’s output swelled—by 1924 he had produced five books.
He’d also been intrigued by a nature story he read during the same period, J. C. Tregarthen’s
Life Story of an Otter
. Convinced he could do better and having moved to rural Devon—“Devonshire” some people still called it affectionately—on that southwestern arm of Britain that separates the Atlantic from the English Channel,
Williamson began spending time with (of all things) an otter hunting club. In 1927 he published the book that would make him famous,
Tarka the Otter
.

A vivid and at times brutal portrayal of nature,
Tarka
was a peculiar book. Almost a genre unto itself—essentially the biography of a wild animal
—Tarka
offered a warm portrayal of the English countryside, brought to life by Williamson’s powers of observation and a knack for imagining how the world might look and feel to an energetic and playful nonhuman being that divides its life between land and water. But the story is grim, too. Nature is remorseless, a beautiful world also filled with privation and loss, mortal enemies and ultimately death. Williamson did not stint in depicting the daunting situations that would confront an otter in its struggle to survive and raise another generation of otters. Not the least of these difficulties was the endless pursuit of Tarka by local hunting parties and their
packs of dogs. In the story’s harrowing climactic sequence, Tarka is chased for ten agonizing hours before being swept away by the river in a fight to the death.

A few months after
Tarka
was published, Williamson received an unusual critique of the book from one of Britain’s strangest but most eminent public figures—the celebrated soldier, hero of Arabia, and author of
Seven Pillars of Wisdom
, T. E. Lawrence. Lawrence’s message was in the form of a letter, more than four thousand words long and in handwriting that Williamson said was “smaller than ordinary typewriting.” Lawrence, under the mistaken impression that this was Williamson’s first book, thought
Tarka
was an exhilarating “achievement,” but offered numerous page-by-page suggestions for improving Williamson’s style, which Lawrence felt was overly dependent on local jargon and generally too abrupt and “staccato.” Williamson, who might have taken offense, was instead grateful—and undoubtedly awed that such a famous man had taken an interest in his book. In a subsequent edition of
Tarka
, Williamson even made some of the changes that Lawrence had suggested—though he later thought better of this and returned future editions to the original language. Meanwhile, Williamson and Lawrence became friends, though they wrote letters far more often than they met face-to-face over the course of the next eight years.

Their long, affectionate correspondence ended on May 13, 1935, when Lawrence sent Williamson a telegram confirming a lunch date the two planned the following day. Leaving the telegraph office on his motorcycle, Lawrence swerved to avoid a bicyclist and crashed. He died of his injuries six days later. Williamson, in the middle of writing a new book that was proving difficult, buried himself in his work.

The new book had been inspired by the place Williamson, by now married and raising a family, had chosen to settle for a few years.
It was a cottage named Shallowford, which was on an estate owned by the Earl of Fortescue, about twenty miles east of the town of
Georgeham, in Devonshire. Shallowford was two stories, with four bedrooms upstairs and four rooms on the main floor. Built of lime-washed cob—a mix of mud, straw, and water similar to adobe—the cottage had a thatched roof, came with a small garden, and stood near the banks of the River Bray. Clear and cold, the Bray rose in the Devon moors, passed through the earl’s deer park, and thence flowed glitteringly beneath a lovely old triple-arched stone bridge that marked the upper boundary of a two-mile stretch of fishing rights included in the rent. On his first visit, Williamson had stood on the bridge and seen trout idling in the current. The Bray harbored native trout and seasonal spawning visits from sea-run trout and salmon, powerful fish that could be as big as a man’s leg.