On a Farther Shore (16 page)

A few months later, Carson found a place for the rejected chimney swift story, selling “Ace of Nature’s Aviators” to
Coronet
, which cut the piece extensively and paid Carson $55.
In early 1946, Carson pitched a story about bird banding to a new magazine called
Holiday
, which had yet to bring out its first issue. Her first draft of the piece was a bloated 6,000 words long. She eventually cut it to 3,500 words—which
Holiday
accepted, paying her $500. Things were not
always easy.
Months before putting out an FWS press release about an outbreak of red tide on the Florida gulf coast, Carson tried to sell an article about it over the course of a few weeks to
Collier’s, Reader’s Digest
, and
Coronet
. They all said no.

Carson was friendly with two women, both younger than she was, who’d recently come to work at Fish and Wildlife. Kay Howe and Shirley Briggs were both graphic designers, photographers, and illustrators. They worked on FWS publications and shared an office next to Carson’s. The three women were an island of femininity in the otherwise heavily masculine agency. Howe was pretty and had a sunny disposition; Briggs came off more sternly, though she bore a resemblance to Carson’s beloved college professor, Mary Scott Skinker.
The three of them sometimes lunched together, and they made “illegal” tea in an office closet almost every day.
Briggs found Carson outwardly ladylike and soft-spoken, but learned that she had firm opinions about government publications and could be “pungent” in private.

Everyone liked Carson. Friends called her “Ray.”
Howe thought she seemed on the frail side—though she also noticed Carson’s surprising stamina in the field. One time Carson had to spend a week in her friends’ office when a group of FWS regional directors temporarily took over Carson’s space for a conference.
Briggs, in a letter to her mother, reported that the three women spent part of their time together trying to figure out how to clean up Carson’s office when she got it back, as the men borrowing it smoked cigars constantly, dropping their ashes on the floor and “using strong language.”

Carson was an avid bird-watcher.
In the fall of 1945, she and Shirley Briggs joined a two-day Audubon Society excursion to Hawk Mountain in southeastern Pennsylvania. The “mountain” is only 1,506 feet in elevation, but the rocky outcroppings on its summit intercept the prevailing winds in such a way as to attract migrating eagles and hawks of all kinds. Once popular with hunters, Hawk Mountain was the first established refuge for raptors. During the fall flight, the great birds of prey flew by the mountaintop at close range,
and they could be observed passing at eye level and sometimes even from above as they flew below the viewing area.

At the office, Carson’s work was only a sometime source of inspiration. Most of the press releases she wrote did not suggest magazine stories and were usually routine updates about commercial fish and shellfish production. Carson also edited a steady stream of technical reports for the annual
Fishery Bulletin
.
One of these papers, “Biology of the Atlantic Mackerel (
Scomber scombrus
) of North America,” which concerned the fish’s early life history, must have been a bitter reminder that she’d already told this story herself, more artfully but to no greater notice.

This dreary work—there are only so many ways to report the sardine harvest—was occasionally interrupted by something that caused Carson to take notice. In August 1945, Carson wrote the first of three press releases on DDT that left an indelible impression with her.
On August 10, Carson issued a short but alarming notice to the operators of fish processing plants about the potential hazards of using DDT in their facilities. Carson reported that preliminary experiments indicated that DDT was toxic to animals and to humans when ingested, and its use in facilities where it could contaminate food products “might have serious consequences.” Exactly what the fish processors were to do with this information was vague. Carson’s release only advised them to “consult experts” about using DDT.

A couple of weeks later, on August 22, 1945, the FWS issued a much broader warning about DDT, this time including details of the latest findings from the ongoing DDT experiments at the Patuxent Research Refuge in Maryland. Carson didn’t write this release, but she read it with concern. The need to protect armed forces in Europe and the Pacific from insect-borne diseases during the war had been so urgent, the report said, that “its effects on other organisms had to be overlooked.” Now experiments showed that DDT killed birds and that even diluted amounts could be lethal to fish and other aquatic organisms.
Still unknown was whether DDT was even more injurious to wildlife when it was used in the repeated applications that could be expected as the pesticide came into general use. Applying DDT to large areas or in concentrated amounts was, in light of the new evidence, considered “dangerous.” In a telling passage, the release said flatly that natural enemies such as birds, small mammals, amphibians, and other insects were considered the “the cheapest, safest, and one of the best means of controlling insect pests.” Replacing these with the unrestricted use of DDT “could conceivably do more damage than good.”

Nine months later, in May 1946, Carson put out a longer and more detailed release on concerns the agency had about DDT. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service had compiled a new report intended to provide guidance for the safe use of DDT, though Carson’s announcement of this was in language that hinted there might not be any such thing as “safe.” The pesticide was likely to be injurious to wildlife, including commercially valuable species of fish and shellfish, unless it was applied only at “the lowest concentrations useful in insect control.” And even then, the best that might be hoped for was “minimal” harm to nontargeted species.

In the spring of 1946, Carson and Shirley Briggs were sent to the Chincoteague National Wildlife Refuge, at the southern tip of Assateague Island on the Virginia coast, to begin work on the first in a series of ambitious pamphlets describing the natural histories of the federal refuges and explaining the work the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service was doing in them.
The series, titled Conservation in Action, was Carson’s idea. As usual, her thoughts were expansive and literary. Conservation in Action would become a classic in the ordinarily unimaginative world of public information—and the high point of Carson’s career as a government biologist and writer.

Over the course of several days, Carson and Briggs tramped and rode by car over the refuge and visited other areas by boat. Carson, as
would be her habit on such expeditions, brought a copy of
Under the Sea-Wind
to give to the refuge manager. Chincoteague was a recent addition to the refuge system.
The government had purchased its nine thousand acres, about one-third of Assateague Island, in 1942. The refuge, which looked across the narrow channel to Chincoteague Island, was established in 1945 as part of the FWS’s plan for a system of staging and resting areas for waterfowl and other birds migrating along the Atlantic flyway on the eastern seaboard. Carson wanted everyone, whether they were visiting the refuge or only reading about it, to have a sense of why it was there and what it looked like, and early in
Chincoteague: A National Wildlife Refuge
, Conservation in Action 1, she offered a graceful description:

Because Chincoteague was primarily a rest stop for many migrant species, its assemblage of wildlife was ever-changing. In cataloging the many birds that visited the refuge over the course of the year, Carson paid close attention to these seasonal shifts. Owing to its proximity to the sea, Chincoteague enjoyed mild winters, and some thirty thousand ducks—mostly black ducks, but also pintail, wigeon, mallard, teal, and others—stayed in the refuge through the cold time of the year, while another ten thousand or so sea ducks puttered in the ocean waiting for spring. These were joined by migrants arriving from the south in March, a month of transformation leading to April, when the shorebirds came in. Through spring and into summer, bird numbers fell, reaching their lowest point in midsummer, which Carson described as “the ebb between the flood tides of migration.” Carson also wrote about oyster cultivation and clamming and about the special relationship between the refuge and its most famous inhabitants—the wild ponies of Chincoteague. No one knew how the ponies came to live there, but they were shaggy and rugged-looking as would befit animals that, as Carson put it, “live most of their lives within sight or sound of the surf.” These small, sturdy, feral horses no longer lived on Chincoteague Island itself, but instead grazed within the refuge boundaries on Assateague Island by permit. Once a year the ponies were rounded up and made to swim over to Chincoteague Island at low tide, where they were corralled and the herd was culled in an annual pony auction. In the fall of 1946, while the first Conservation in Action pamphlet was still in production, Carson, this time accompanied by Kay Howe, was sent out again to start work on the next installment in the series.

The Merrimack River rises in New Hampshire and flows south to Lowell, Massachusetts, where it bends to the east and runs to the Atlantic Ocean. As the river nears the coast it comes to a series of small islands in the main channel. Just below these, on the south bank, stands a town, uncommonly charming even by New England
standards, called Newburyport. The village is old but well preserved.
Settled by English immigrants in 1635, it became a thriving port and ship-building center in colonial times. Its narrow streets are lined with Federalist-period houses and overlooked by the gleaming white steeple of the Church of the First Religious Society. In the heart of the town, at the confluence of three broader avenues, is Market Square, a commercial district flanked by rows of handsome three-story brick buildings that were built after a fire destroyed several blocks of the downtown area in 1811. At the end of the long waterfront by the river, the houses change over to shingle-sided saltboxes and ramshackle cottages as the Merrimack widens into a broad estuary. Two miles farther east at the river’s mouth is the tip of Plum Island, a narrow wall of beach and high dunes that stretches along the coastline for eight miles to the south. Plum Island is separated from the mainland by a sound at its southern extremity and by a vast salt marsh closer to Newburyport on its northern end. The marsh, one of the most diverse and productive ecosystems on the Atlantic seaboard, is fed by the tides and by the Parker River, much smaller than the Merrimack, which comes into it from the west.

Since the earliest settlement in the area, Plum Island and the salt marsh had been an important resource for farmers, fishermen, clam diggers, sportsmen, and market gunners. Every summer farmers made several cuttings of marsh grass for hay. It was an unusual business, as the marsh was wet and soft and often inundated at high tide. The hay was dried by piling it in tall, domed stacks atop cedar posts driven into the mud. These “staddles,” as the hay stands were called, rose above the marsh like thatched villages. Once dry, the hay was removed on flat-bottomed scows called “gundalows,” or by dragging it out behind horses wearing “bog shoes,” wooden saucers the size of dinner plates that were clamped to the horses’ hooves and allowed the animals to walk over the muck. Fish camps and hunting shacks also dotted the island and the fringes of the marsh.

In 1929 a small, private bird sanctuary was established near the marsh. In 1942 the FWS acquired this tract and a large surrounding
parcel, more than 4,600 acres in all, including the southern three-fourths of Plum Island, for the creation of a permanent refuge. This further erosion of hunting opportunities went down hard.
The local residents, notably sportsmen and those who kept shacks on the island, were bitterly opposed to the establishment of the Parker River Wildlife Refuge, as it was designated. Meant to help restore duck numbers—which had plummeted in the 1930s and ’40s—the refuge was seen as an unwarranted seizure of a natural asset that belonged to the people who used it.

The situation at Parker River demonstrated that the idea of natural resource conservation was still a long way from general acceptance.
When Carson and Howe boarded the train to head north to begin work on
Parker River: A National Wildlife Refuge
, Conservation in Action 2, there’d been joking around the office that they should perhaps take disguises along, just in case. The Parker River assignment presented Carson with a challenge different from the one at Chincoteague. This time, in addition to capturing the natural majesty of the refuge, she had to make an argument for its existence—something that many people who lived near it didn’t want to hear. Carson and Howe arrived in Newburyport near the start of duck season, unwelcome emissaries from Washington.