On a Farther Shore (6 page)

Disconsolate, Carson for a while imagined she might transfer to Johns Hopkins herself.
She applied for admission to the graduate program in zoology at Hopkins and was promptly accepted. But in the end Carson realized that her scholarship and the money she already owed to PCW would keep her there.
By the middle of her senior year, Carson owed PCW close to $1,400, an impossible sum. She proposed taking a mortgage on two of her father’s lots but was told by the bank that mortgages on vacant land were hard to obtain, and even if she could get one it was unlikely to reflect the true value of the property. Instead, she was advised to offer the two lots directly to PCW as collateral and to arrange a payment plan she could manage by installments after graduating and finding work. To Carson’s relief, PCW agreed to this. Carson signed the formal agreement on January 28, 1929, nine months before the American economy collapsed.

Skinker was replaced by a woman named Anna Whiting.
Whiting held a PhD in genetics from Iowa State University, where she’d concentrated on cattle breeding. She was thrilled to have a job at PCW because her husband was a professor at the University of Pittsburgh. But Whiting turned out to be unqualified to teach any of the advanced biology coursework Carson had signed up for, and she was inept in the lab. Carson and her classmates felt they knew more about the material than their professor, and Carson spent her senior year wondering if she would learn enough to survive in graduate school if she ever got to attend one. To keep their spirits up, Carson and a couple of her friends organized a science club and named it Mu Sigma Sigma—in tribute to Mary Scott Skinker.

Carson’s thoughts about life after PCW were also shaped by a singular experience—a moment of profound insight—that had come to her one night while going over an English assignment. The reading was Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s long and complicated poem “Locksley Hall.” It was late, and outside the dorm a fierce thunderstorm
swept over the darkened campus. As rain beat against her window and thunder rocked the hillsides, Carson sat straight up as she came to the poem’s closing lines, in which the narrator tells of a storm advancing over the moors toward the ocean:

Carson, who had never laid eyes on the sea, felt a sudden, powerful conviction that it was, in fact, in her destiny—the place to which her newfound love of science would one day lead. Here, she realized, was the thing she longed to write about, even though she had yet to make its acquaintance.

Now again, as she had with the “vision splendid,” Carson took inspiration from an unlikely source. Although it’s possible to interpret Tennyson’s ending as a call to adventure at sea—as Carson did—the consensus reading of those lines is that the narrator is on his way to join the British army.
When the poem was published in 1842 that same army was engaged in imperialistic enterprises around the world that are agreeably—some would say sickeningly—referenced earlier in the poem. In fact, “Locksley Hall” is a disturbing, racially intolerant tale in which the narrator, desperate to obliterate the pain of a failed love affair, imagines himself traveling to some wild place within reach of the empire where he can conquer the “savage” natives.

The poem’s much better remembered line
—In the spring a young man’s fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love
—has the amiable connotation usually given it only when considered outside the context of Tennyson’s dark verses. It’s hard to understand how Carson could have read “Locksley Hall” without perceiving the narrator’s torment and feeling the violent twist of his emotions—even if she cared not for the fancies of young men. To be moved by just a handful of beguiling
lines in a poem so otherwise brutal, so much bigger and more ominous, required a rare ability to focus only on a detail that interested her while setting aside a whole world of bewildering complexities.

And yet that is exactly what Carson did. This kind of tunnel vision would prove to be a defining trait.

T
he Marine Biological Laboratory at Woods Hole, Massachusetts—a quiet seaside village on the inner arm of Cape Cod once known mainly for its guano fertilizer works—was America’s preeminent scientific field station. Established in 1888, the MBL by the mid-1920s had become a regular summer gathering place for scientists and students to pursue research—either in the many nearby inshore marine environments or at one of the coveted benches in the Crane laboratory, a massive redbrick building that also housed a tremendous and ever-expanding library.

During her time at PCW, Mary Scott Skinker had spent summers doing research in protozoology (an outdated term that formerly referenced a diverse group of aquatic single-celled animals) at the MBL. As Carson prepared to begin her senior year, Miss Skinker encouraged her to consider an MBL summer research fellowship after graduation. It was a thrilling prospect. At PCW, biology students worked mostly on pickled specimens—fish and reptiles and, worst of all, cats, whose stiff, gruesome corpses smelled awful.
At Woods Hole, students collected live specimens along the shoreline, in the marshes, and from
boats out on the waters of Buzzards Bay.
And the immersion in biology there was total—Skinker had written one of her other students at PCW that there were no distractions at Woods Hole, nothing beyond “the biological world.”
Skinker sent Carson clippings from a Woods Hole weekly newsletter, the
Collecting Net
, which Carson told a friend made her “crazier than ever to go there.” Woods Hole, Carson said, “must be a biologist’s paradise.” Plus, it was on the ocean.

Carson, with a recommendation from Miss Skinker, had reapplied to Johns Hopkins and earned a full scholarship.
In June, she graduated magna cum laude from PCW. That summer, again with help from Skinker, Carson also earned a scholarship to study at the MBL during the month of August.
She went first to Baltimore, where it was unusually hot, and spent a day exploring the Johns Hopkins campus. Then she caught a bus for Luray, Virginia, at the foot of the Blue Ridge Mountains, a half day away. Miss Skinker had invited Carson to join her on vacation at Skyland, a rustic turn-of-the-century resort perched atop a four-thousand-foot peak with commanding views of the Shenandoah Valley.

Cars could not ascend the difficult road to the summit, so Carson went up on horseback. It took about an hour, during which she was delighted by the forest and the birds, including a turkey that scuttled away as she approached. The best part, she said later, was reaching the resort and finding Miss Skinker coming up the path to meet her. The two women spent their days riding horses and playing tennis. Carson thought Skinker, who claimed to be a poor player but wasn’t, helped her game some. They passed their evenings sitting by a fire in their cabin and talking.

The oppressive heat had not abated back in Washington, D.C., where Carson went next to catch a train from Union Station to New York City. She spent a day sightseeing, riding a tour bus around Manhattan, lunching at a German restaurant, and taking the subway up to Columbia to climb the steps of the library. It was raining late in the day when she boarded a boat for New Bedford, Massachusetts. The boat passed the Statue of Liberty, just visible in the storm, and turned
east, following along the coastline of Long Island. Carson—looking for the first time at the sea and breathing salt air—said it was pleasant out on the deck later that evening, even more so after the boat passed Montauk and they were out of sight of land. Before dawn the next day Carson changed boats at New Bedford. Carson said the sixteen-mile trip across Buzzards Bay as the sun came up had been “glorious,” although the sea was running and it was rough.

Carson found Woods Hole and the MBL complex completely wonderful, better than she’d expected in every way. The apartment she shared with another researcher from PCW had hot and cold running water and was located just across the street from Crane lab, where her table was. She was especially taken with the library, which beckoned to her and seemed to have “everything.” And she discovered that no matter where you went, you were never far from the water. She loved this. The sea was all around her.

Carson wrote to a friend that Woods Hole was a “delightful place to biologize” and said she could see herself returning every summer. Researchers worked hard but also took time to enjoy the ocean and the beach. Carson said she was trying to learn to swim the crawl. She’d also had an adventure after a beach party on one of the islands in the bay when the boat she was on became lost in the fog on the return and had nearly been swept out into the open ocean.
Carson particularly liked exploring rocky sections of shoreline when the tide was low and examining the marine life that teemed in the tidal pools. Sea anemones and urchins fascinated her, and she became acutely aware of the power of the ocean currents, as these sometimes brought in unexpected treasures such as Sargasso weed or jellyfishes from warmer regions far away. Delicately fair-skinned, Carson said these hours on the shore and under the sun had at last convinced her she would never get a tan, though she believed that she had acquired a “weathered” look and a fresh set of freckles.
The U.S. Bureau of Fisheries had a sizable contingent of researchers at Woods Hole, and
Carson got to know them. One day they took her aboard their research ship for a day of collecting.

Carson also enjoyed collecting trips aboard the MBL’s “little dredging boat” on which they would steam up and down the waters of Buzzards Bay and sometimes the Vineyard Sound, seining the bottom to inspect the plants and animals of the sea floor. It was often a wild ride as the boat lurched against the weight of the net in rolling seas. But Carson loved discovering what came up from under the water: Mixed in with rocks and shells was a profusion of species—crustaceans and seaweeds, invertebrates and small fish—an embassy of living things she had never seen before, from a place she was just beginning to imagine.

She allowed her thoughts to “go down through the water,” so that what was unseen below gradually came clear to her and she could at last “see the whole life of those creatures as they lived them in that strange sea world.” The great variety of life in the sea impressed upon Carson that every living thing belonged to a larger diverse community of life that was sustained by interdependence and perpetuated across the vastness of time. Of all the lessons she’d learned well, this was the one she learned best.

But Carson’s two months of study at the MBL were not entirely happy. For the first time in her life she struggled. In the lab, Carson couldn’t decide what to work on. Even though she was surrounded by the marine environment that she felt destined to study and write about, Carson initially investigated the terminal nerve in reptiles. The terminal nerve, which belongs to the subset of the central nervous system known collectively as the cranial nerves, is associated with the sense of smell. At the time olfaction hadn’t been thoroughly described in reptiles and so Carson felt she might break new ground by studying it in lizards and snakes, and possibly crocodiles. She also remained interested in turtles, which had intrigued her at PCW. But this left her once again working on embalmed inland specimens, slicing and staining tissue sections for microscopic examination—the very same laboratory subjects and techniques Carson felt she had been
inadequately trained in after Miss Skinker’s departure from PCW. She was still heartsick over the way things had ended at PCW, which she described as a “near tragedy.” She wrote to a friend that she’d spent much of her time at Woods Hole trying to overcome the feeling that her last year at PCW had left her unready for real biological research work.

“
We thought we realized what it was doing to us,” Carson said of the classes at PCW with Anna Whiting, “but we didn’t. We couldn’t, there. I tell you frankly, I was a near-wreck the first week I was here. Didn’t know what I wanted to do, and had no ambition to do it! But I’m slowly recovering, and beginning to come to life mentally once more.”

Woods Hole was an intimidating place, the working retreat of many of the country’s leading scientists. Still woozy after four cloistered years at PCW, Carson had moved on to one of the main stages of American biology. And she had done so just as biology was becoming a more experimental science. Until the turn of the century, biology had been mostly about natural history, an “organismal” discipline that was mainly concerned with comparative anatomy, morphology, taxonomy, behavior, and, more recently, evolution.

In describing and differentiating species, biology was in many ways not that different from what it had been for Aristotle—a science that served mainly to enumerate and catalog the living world. Then, in the early part of the twentieth century, a number of researchers rediscovered the work of Gregor Mendel, the Austrian monk whose study of dominant and recessive hereditary traits in pea plants had led to his formulation of the laws of inheritance. Published in 1866, Mendel’s laws languished for three decades before becoming the basis of the new study of genetics. Biologists began putting less emphasis on characterizing “wild type” organisms found in the field, and more on exploring functional biology through experiments with captive colonies of species that bred rapidly and were easy to maintain: rats, salamanders, and, most significantly, a tiny prolific insect called
Drosophila melanogaster
—the fruit fly. Carson’s interest in dissecting wild
specimens to see how they were made was, if not yet quaint, at least musty—the back end of science rather than the cutting edge.

The MBL had always been generous in its acceptance of female students and researchers, though they were usually noticeably outnumbered by men.
Of the twenty-three students in an embryology class in 1897, six were women—one of whom was Gertrude Stein.
Ann Haven Morgan, arguably the country’s foremost freshwater ecologist when Carson was still at PCW, had taught at the MBL in the summers before the publication in 1930 of her classic
Field Book of Ponds and Streams
. Morgan’s little blue book with the red-edged pages—it was the same size and shape as a modern-day Audubon field guide—demonstrated a curiosity about nature and a competence in depicting it that suggested there ought to be no limits on what women could do in the field.
But Carson had never shared lab space with men, who arrived at the MBL better trained, and she marveled at how adept they were. She found that she had trouble distinguishing important features of the tissues she painstakingly sectioned from her specimens. It wouldn’t be until months later, back in Baltimore at Johns Hopkins, that Carson would begin to make tentative progress on her slides from Woods Hole. Meanwhile, long hours at the microscope hurt her eyes.