On a Farther Shore (4 page)

The new president packed his cabinet with reformers, including a lawyer from Chicago named Harold Ickes, who became secretary of the interior.
One of Ickes’s first orders of business in spite of the troubled times was to plan and oversee the construction of a new headquarters building for the Interior Department. Ickes and Roosevelt thought the building should make a statement. The result, a monument to a great country and a vast continent, cost $12.7 million and was finished in 1937. Built of granite and limestone, it stood seven glistening stories high, contained 2,200 rooms, and covered two city blocks just south and west of the White House. Enormous murals on the walls inside its long, ornate hallways depicted the sprawling diversity of peoples and lands for which the Interior Department was responsible. It was the first federal building to have escalators and among the first to be air-conditioned. By any measure
it was then, and is now, one of the most beautiful and inspiring buildings in Washington.

In May 1942, an assistant aquatic biologist named Rachel Carson, newly assigned to the Fishery Biology section of the Interior Department’s Fish and Wildlife Service, went to work in the building. Carson had an office on the third floor, room 3127, that had a south-facing window from which she could see trees and birds and the skies that hung over Washington as economic depression retreated and the nation found itself again at war.

At thirty-five, Carson had worked for the government for seven years, until then at field stations in Baltimore and College Park, Maryland. A pretty young woman with blue eyes and light brown hair that she wore short and tightly waved, Carson had fine features, stood five feet, four inches tall, and weighed 120 pounds.
Colleagues, most of them men, recognized her approach from the familiar clack of her high heels in the hallway. If Carson socialized with anyone outside the office, it went unremarked. Each day she took her lunch in the employee cafeteria, and at night rode the streetcar home to the house she shared with her mother, Maria Carson, on Flower Avenue in Silver Spring.

Carson’s job title was misleading. She did not work on aquatic biology or perform any other kind of investigative duty. She wrote pamphlets and press releases, and edited scientific papers generated by other Fish and Wildlife staff—most of whom thought she was the best at what she did.
Like all federal employees, Carson was subject to the Hatch Act of 1939 and had to declare, in writing, that she did not belong to any political party or group whose purpose included the overthrow of the U.S. government by force or violence. She also had to periodically acknowledge that she had no right to go on strike or to organize her fellow workers in a union. Not that any of those ideas would have occurred to her. Carson had been more than glad to have a good job and a regular paycheck during the Depression.
When she moved to the Interior Department headquarters in 1942, Carson was earning $2,600 a year.

Carson’s employment file did include one unusual item. In 1941, Simon and Schuster had published a book she’d written called
Under the Sea-Wind
. Hardly anyone had ever heard of it.

She always wanted to be a writer.
In 1918, at the age of eleven, Carson published her first article in the
St. Nicholas
magazine, a publication for boys and girls that featured a special section for young contributors. “A Battle in the Clouds,” told in a single, suspenseful paragraph, recounted the story of a Canadian flyer who, through bravery and imagination, survived a harrowing dogfight in the skies over France—only to die in a training accident. The “main facts” of these faraway wartime events, young Miss Carson reported, had come to her in a letter from her older brother, Robert, who’d recently enlisted in the Army Air Service. Carson’s well-told story was awarded a silver medal by the magazine.

News of this accomplishment arrived at a small white clapboard-sided home in Springdale, Pennsylvania, a hardscrabble town on the Allegheny River fourteen miles northeast of Pittsburgh. The house, a two-over-two design with a parlor and a dining room on the first floor and two small bedrooms on the second, stood plain and boxlike on sixty-five acres of woodland and open fields on the face of a high, steep hill that sloped to the south toward the river a mile away. There was a squat lean-to kitchen attached to the back of the house, and two outhouses, also in the back, were a short walk up the hill. Beyond the outhouses was an apple orchard sheltered beneath the hilltop. A porch overlooking the river valley ran along the length of the front of the house. In the yard there was a springhouse and, off to the side, a shed where a horse could be stabled. The house had no electricity or indoor plumbing, and was heated by small coal-grate fireplaces in each room.

Rachel Louise Carson entered the world in one of the upstairs bedrooms at one thirty in the morning on May 27, 1907. At three
weeks, little Rachel began regularly napping in a hammock on the front porch. When she was five months old, she contracted a severe case of chicken pox. By the time she was eight months old, according to her mother, Maria, Rachel had begun to talk and, when told not to put something in her mouth, would respond with a “roguish look.” As an older child, Rachel loved reading and being outdoors, regularly wandering the family property and looking at animals and birds, usually with her mother. It was a lovely setting, though, of course, a gray coating of ash from the steel mills downriver covered everything exposed to the sky.

The Carson house was crowded. In addition to her brother, Robert, Rachel had an older sister named Marian. Robert sometimes lived in a tent in the backyard. Neither Robert nor Marian finished high school. Robert’s air unit went to fight in France; he came home in 1919. Marian had gotten married at the age of eighteen, and for a time the couple lived with the Carsons. But Marian’s husband deserted her after a few months. She later divorced him and quickly remarried.

The family’s financial situation was always precarious. Rachel’s father, a loving but distant man also named Robert, had bought the Springdale house and property in 1900 for $11,000. Although he at different times held jobs as an electrician, an insurance salesman, and a night watchman, Mr. Carson never earned a salary sufficient to support the family. His main hope was to develop a residential neighborhood on their land.
In 1910 he advertised “large level lots” for $300 each, in cash or by installments. The lots sold poorly, and never for what the Carsons hoped they were worth. Maria supplemented their income by giving piano lessons.

Rachel continued submitting stories to
St. Nicholas
magazine, which published several.
Springdale’s school went only as far as the tenth grade, so Rachel spent her final two years of school at nearby Parnassus High, graduating in 1925. Famous with her classmates as a voracious reader and a superb writer, Rachel was an exceptional student,
as evidenced by the inscription to her in the yearbook during her senior year:

It was also said of Rachel that her mother awakened her every day to hear the birds singing in the morning sunlight, and that Rachel spoke to them as she headed off to school.

Rachel’s senior thesis, a sober, reproachful consideration of human potential titled “Intellectual Dissipation,” argued that a “thinking, reasoning mind” was our most valuable possession. Carson linked the cultivation of an active, educated intelligence to the conservation of natural resources. This didn’t track perfectly—Carson thought young people were overly concerned about “minerals and lumber” or the desire for “a stronger and more perfect body” at the expense of their intellectual development, without explaining how any of these concerns were exclusive of one another. But at the center of the essay was a celebratory passage on the importance of books—not just any books, but the very best kind of books, the kind that stayed with you forever. Like everyone who loves books, Carson felt at once awed and aggrieved that there was more to read than could ever be read, and that to choose to read one book was to forsake the chance to read a different one. “If you read this, you cannot read that,” Carson wrote. “The hour you spent today on the latest best seller can never be recalled.” How much better it would be, Carson continued, to spend that hour reading “real literature, something that would raise you a little higher than you were yesterday, something that would make you willing and able for your part in the work of the world.”

• • •

Pennsylvania College for Women—commonly known as PCW—was like an island, hidden away in the wealthy enclave of Woodland Road among the steep, ash-covered hillsides on the edge of Pittsburgh’s East End. Founded in 1869, PCW by the 1920s occupied nearly half of a horseshoe-shaped ridge that overlooked Fifth Avenue, where electric streetcars ran to and from the city proper for five cents a ride.
The base of the high ground on which the college stood formed a natural, wooded amphitheater. An expansive view to the north took in the gothic steeple of the Third Presbyterian Church, which rose sharply into the sky against a background of distant bluffs marking the Allegheny valley. The verdant campus featured neatly mowed lawns and well-tended walkways.

The college itself comprised a handful of buildings, of which the most imposing was Berry Hall, where Rachel Carson came to live as a freshman. Formerly a private mansion, the palatial structure, with its soaring ceilings on the inside and a dizzying profusion of peaked gables and crenellated walls on the outside, had sixty rooms, many still richly appointed with carpets and fine furniture. Said to have at one time been the largest residence in the county, it had been subsequently enlarged and connected by a covered passageway with Dilworth Hall, a vine-entombed brick building with heavy arches that had been the college’s first major addition when it opened in 1889. To Carson, coming from a house without even running water, her new home must have seemed opulent beyond belief.
She arrived on September 15, 1925, accompanied by her father and mother,
in a borrowed Ford Model T.

Carson had won a $100 scholarship in a statewide competition, and her parents planned to help pay her college expenses by continuing to sell off—and borrow against—the Springdale property.
Tuition in Carson’s freshman year was $200, room and board another $575.
Later, tuition rose to $300.
The Carsons managed to keep up for a couple of years, but eventually they fell behind, and Rachel would spend the second half of her college years accumulating knowledge
and debt in equal measures.
When one of Rachel’s classmates visited the Carson home, she noticed their dishes were the kind given out as premiums with rolled-oats cereal, the good china having been sold off to help pay the bills at PCW.

There were eighty-eight women in Carson’s freshman class. Half lived on campus; the others were “day students” who lived at home.
Students were not allowed to live on their own in apartments off campus and were not permitted to get married while in school—though this rule was sometimes broken, causing no end of delicious scandal within the student body, where such liaisons were regarded as adventurous and romantic, and were reliably kept secret from the faculty and administration.
There were regular teas and luncheons,
and a formal prom that was held at the swank Schenley Hotel early in the second semester each year. Attendees wore long gowns and white kid gloves.
Students were expected to go to Sunday morning services at a church of their choosing, and attendance at Sunday evening vespers on campus was mandatory.

The curriculum at PCW aligned with what would have been found at any liberal arts college,
though it was understood that the main aim of a young woman at PCW was to marry and become a homemaker—perhaps after working a year or two as a teacher—and that a higher education was for the purpose of personal growth and enrichment that would someday make one a better wife and mother.
Students at PCW studied English, history, science, math, foreign languages, and music. Everyone had to take physical education, and most of the girls played intramural sports.
Carson, dressed in blue bloomers, black stockings, and white tennis shoes, played goalie on a field hockey team that won three consecutive class championships.
At one game the cheering students had to share the spectators’ area with two goats and several dogs loitering on the scene. A later report had it that at least one of the goats had come from the Carson home in Springdale. In a team photograph, Carson appeared trim, athletic, and firm-jawed.

Carson suffered from acne, which at times covered her face and
shoulders. She had only a few, unusually plain dresses, all of them sewn by her mother.
Like most of the other girls, she wore a bobbed hairstyle, sometimes with a tight Marcel wave put in with a hot iron, so that her hair fit the shape of her head like a helmet.
Never shy in class, never unprepared, Carson always knew the answer to any question and was eager to give it.
A few girls who got to know her a little discovered that Carson also had a subtle wit, was alert to pretense or shallowness, and could be slyly observant of her classmates. But this was a side of her personality she rarely showed off. Mostly invisible, Carson came off as a quiet, awkward girl who usually skipped social events and was thought to be either a recluse or a studious bore. Some students resented her academic skills and the earnest impression she made on her instructors.

Maria Carson made regular weekend visits to PCW. She’d show up at Rachel’s dormitory room and spend hours talking and reading and typing papers for her talented daughter. Rachel’s classmates saw Mrs. Carson as a doting mother who was determined to see her daughter succeed academically. Maria had an education beyond what the meager circumstances of the Carson family might have suggested—and that was not typical of women at the time. Before she’d met Rachel’s father, Maria had graduated with honors in Latin from the Washington Female Seminary in 1887. Now approaching sixty, Maria was older than most of the other students’ mothers. She was friendly enough but seemed to have no interest in anyone other than Rachel.
One of Rachel’s friends would later recall that Mrs. Carson was without pretense—and said that if the queen of England had called on Rachel’s mother she would have answered the door in an “old calico housedress.”
Mrs. Carson spent so much time with Rachel that other girls in the dorm—who found Maria’s frequent presence there inappropriate—joked that Carson’s mother ought to have been paying tuition herself. Rachel heard but ignored these criticisms and seemed not to mind her mother’s visits.