On a Farther Shore (28 page)

Despite the uncanny synchronicity between Carson and Dorothy—the conviction that their thoughts and feelings about life were identical—their relationship surely meant different things to each of them. For Carson, Dorothy was the one great love of her life. To Dorothy, Carson was the person who’d opened a world for them to share, one in which the birds would always sing, the rhythm of the sea would never cease, and the words for everything would endure.
When Carson finished
The Edge of the Sea
, she decided to dedicate it to “Dorothy and Stanley Freeman—who have gone down with me into the low-tide world and have felt its beauty and its mystery.” Overwhelmed, Dorothy and Stan asked her to consider this carefully. Carson answered that her only concern was whether
The Edge of the Sea
was a good enough book for the purpose. “I thought of waiting for another,” Carson said, “but who knows what else will be written, or how that will turn out.”

C
arson was determined to make
The Edge of the Sea
different from the guidebooks that commonly grouped organisms together by taxonomy—whether that was finches with finches or crabs with crabs. Instead, she planned to organize her marine subjects according to the communities they shared and the habitats in which they could be found. This ecological approach not only reflected emerging scientific principles—much as she explained them in her lecture to the AAAS in Boston—but would also make it easier for readers who actually wanted to go down to the ocean and know what kinds of plants and animals they were seeing.

Practical utility remained an essential part of the idea in spite of Carson’s conviction that it could be made as readable as
The Sea Around Us
. As Carson drafted and revised early versions of the manuscript, its evolution to the longer and less discursive book it would become moved closer to what she had in mind. A few other books had taken similar approaches, notably Douglas Wilson’s
Life of the Shore and Shallow Sea
.

Published in 1935,
Life of the Shore and Shallow Sea
was really a
book about the near-shore marine environments, and how they are influenced by tides, waves, light, temperature, and the like. The inhabitants of these regions, rather than simply being cataloged, were considered according to specific characteristics or life stages. So the chapter “Locomotory Movements,” for example, looked at animals that swim, others that drift or walk or burrow their way into the sand, and some—like the cuttlefish or the octopus—that travel by means of water-jet propulsion. Wilson’s cast of characters necessarily grew big and varied, from urchins to marine mammals such as seals and whales. Offering an observation that was well ahead of its time, Wilson also speculated on the daily movement of plankton and small marine animals from deep water to near the surface after dark that would soon take center stage in the debate over the “phantom bottom.”

But
Life of the Shore and Shallow Sea
, although nicely illustrated with photographs, was a challenge for amateur beachcombers to use. Plus, Wilson was British and so were his shoreline and its denizens. A better model, Carson thought, was a handsome book—already regarded as a classic—called
Between Pacific Tides
by Edward F. Ricketts and Jack Calvin.
In the spring of 1951, as Carson was again marshaling a group of expert correspondents to help her with information and fact checking, she had written to Dr. T. A. Stephenson at University College in Aberystwyth, Wales. Stephenson had recently published a paper on the Florida Keys that Carson admired, and she wondered when he might do something similar on northern Florida and the Carolina coast. Carson was interested in this research, she said, as it related directly to her current project:

Had she written to Stephenson a few months later—this was just before
The Sea Around Us
came out—Carson might have been less deferential toward
Between Pacific Tides
. As it was, she had already told Brooks in a less guarded moment that if the guide to the Atlantic coast turned out well they could proceed to do one on the Pacific shore. Whether Carson would have taken herself to the other side of the continent to work for months on coastlines she did not know is doubtful; she never did. But she had a few things in common with Ed Ricketts, who was the primary author of
Between Pacific Tides
. Ricketts was a kindred spirit in his passion for low tides and surf-pounded shores, and like Carson he knew what it was like to publish something at the wrong time. Beyond that, they could not have been more different.

Ricketts was originally from Chicago. He was ten years older than Carson and not so well educated, having departed abruptly from Illinois Normal State University after a messy encounter with a married woman. He traveled some, held various jobs, did a stint in the army, and ended up at the University of Chicago where—with another interruption following another dicey sexual escapade—
he fell under the influence of a professor named W. C. Allee.

Allee didn’t invent ecology, but he was on his way to becoming a towering figure in its emergence as a way of understanding the natural world. Like other scientific disciplines, ecology developed slowly and unevenly from early origins, particularly in Greek philosophy. It began to have recognizable principles in the nineteenth century and finally started to flourish in the twentieth. By the 1930s ecology was a robust science, and it owed a lot to the work of Allee, whose studies focused on animals not as individual organisms, but as
groups
. Allee had worked on marine ecology at Woods Hole early in the century, and in 1931 his book
Animal Aggregations
would establish itself as one of the foundations of ecological science.

In this same period, the studies of plants and animals were becoming more integrated, and researchers began talking about “biomes,” large-scale segments of the total environment that could be understood
only by learning how the life forms occupying them interacted and how such interactions were subject to environmental influences. The ocean is a biome, and within it are multiple zones that have unique characteristics—among them the intertidal zone over which the sea regularly advances and retreats, and where the life forms are adapted to the dramatic change in conditions that takes place several times each day.

Ricketts had gotten married and moved to the Monterey area in California, near the Hopkins Marine Station, which was the West Coast version of the Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole. Monterey Bay, sheltered from the high Pacific surf in places and deep in the middle—the Monterey Canyon, as it’s called, is more than eleven thousand feet deep—is home to an abundance of marine life. Ricketts loved exploring the tidal pools and mudflats around the area.
He opened a biological supply company called Pacific Biological Laboratories, shipping specimens around the country and managing to eke out a living despite the Depression. The catalog started out with a few items—sponges, jellyfishes, corals, and such—but as the business expanded it came to include many other marine organisms, as well as rats, cats, and snakes.
Ricketts operated out of a dilapidated house on a section of the waterfront called Cannery Row, across the street from one of the area’s most popular brothels.

Part scientist and part salesman, Ricketts was also a proto-bohemian.
He believed there was another dimension of knowledge that resided outside of everyday experience—a place where the truth behind everything could be perceived as whole and perfect—and he liked to talk about “breaking through” to that place in small ways, always hoping for more.
Free in his thoughts, free in his behavior, Ricketts hated the idea of social restraint in all its forms. He sometimes wore a beard and regarded his marriage vows more as suggestions than rules whenever it suited him to do so.

The lab on Cannery Row became a hangout for an assortment of pretty girls, writers, artists, and other colorful types who loved Ricketts and appreciated his willingness to keep the place well stocked
with phonograph records and cold beer. One member of this informal association was a young writer named John Steinbeck, who had a success in 1935 with a book of stories called
Tortilla Flat
that was soon followed by three memorable novels about the downtrodden and the dispossessed:
In Dubious Battle
,
Of Mice and Men
, and finally
The Grapes of Wrath
, which would come out in 1939, the same year as
Between Pacific Tides
. In 1945, Steinbeck published a raucous novel called
Cannery Row
, about a ragtag Depression-era group of friends whose lives in a crummy waterfront community center on their spiritual leader and benefactor—a marine biologist named Doc, whom Steinbeck based on Ed Ricketts.

In May 1948, at the end of a long day in the lab, Ricketts got in his car and went to buy a steak for dinner.
He failed to stop as he approached the tracks of the Southern Pacific Railway and was hit by the Del Monte Express coming from San Francisco. Ricketts died three days later from injuries sustained in the crash, shocking everyone on Cannery Row, some of whom probably suspected he was not mortal. Ricketts was fifty-one when he died, but people who knew him said he looked ten years younger.

Steinbeck had studied biology and was captivated by Ricketts and by Ricketts’s love of the intertidal seashore. For several years they contemplated the idea of coauthoring a guidebook to Pacific coastal marine life. In the spring of 1940, Ricketts and Steinbeck came up with a slightly different plan.
They chartered a seventy-six-foot fishing vessel, the
Western Flyer
, and with its captain and crew of four, embarked on a four-thousand-mile collecting trip into the Sea of Cortez—more commonly known as the Gulf of California—which lies between the Baja peninsula and Mexico proper. Moving from one anchorage to the next, they went ashore at each stop to observe and collect and catalog marine organisms. They also pondered what such life forms might teach us about ourselves in order to—as Ricketts would put it—break though to a more far-reaching view of life:

Given the unusual collaboration between Ricketts and Steinbeck, it was not surprising that the book that resulted from this forty-day odyssey was big and wonderful and strange.
Sea of Cortez
was almost six hundred pages long and divided into two parts—a narrative of the trip and a descriptive inventory of the species collected. Ricketts handled the scientific section; both men worked on the narrative, which was based on journals kept by the captain of the
Western Flyer
and by Ricketts, as well as Steinbeck’s own idiosyncratic impressions. The narrative tracked their journey as they visited different kinds of coastal environments—rocky headlands, tidal flats, beaches, coral reefs, and muddy, stinking thickets of mangrove. There’s a salty, ironic flavor to the travelogue portion of the narrative, which is interrupted at one point for a lengthy and nearly impenetrable excursion into Ricketts’s metaphysics of “non-teleological thinking.” This was his idea—now a generally accepted principle—that biology does not operate as preferential striving toward some ultimate objective. If, for example, one regards evolution as a teleological process, then one sees the product and
purpose
of evolution as a better or “higher” organism. But the reality is that evolution only results in organisms better suited
to prevailing conditions. Simply put, nature does not have a plan—it just happens.

Sea of Cortez
was published on December 5, 1941, two days before the attack at Pearl Harbor, and it suffered the same fate as Carson’s
Under the Sea-Wind
, collecting a handful of nice reviews before being swallowed up and lost in the turbulence of war. Carson presumably read
Sea of Cortez
—she read everything about the ocean and sea life—and she might have felt an affinity for the narrative portion of the book, as it was more like her own writing than was the unadorned, factual text of Ricketts’s
Between Pacific Tides
.

What drew her strongly to
Between Pacific Tides
was not the narrative—there was hardly any—but its approach. Ricketts organized the book around the different kinds of shoreline encountered on the Pacific coast. These were further subdivided according to the marine life that was present within discrete zones that were differentially governed by the tides and surf. So a “rocky shore” on the open coastline, for example, could be divided into four zones, segmenting it from a few feet above the high-tide line, where organisms could be classified as “marine life” only by virtue of intermittent wetting from the spray coming up from the surf, down through the high-tide and mid-tide reaches, all the way to the levels of the lowest tides. This was useful, as any reasonably alert person could find his or her way to these places-within-places and identify what was living there from Ricketts’s plainspoken descriptions. In some cases, Ricketts supplemented the straightforward catalog of species with more entertaining information: