It's official: I signed a contract with Islandport Press in Maine to publish my novel titled: Biography of the Sea. A coming of age story about a young woman named Galene who befriends Rachel Carson on the eve of the publication of Silent Spring. Carson inspires Galene to become a marine scientist but a summer fling with a boy from away derails her plans. Years later, having finally achieved her ambitions, Galene rarely looks back at the island community she left behind. That is, until news arrives that her family home—and the shoreline that shaped her—is about to be lost to developers. Returning to the island she thought she’d outgrown, Galene must face the past she abandoned and the choices that carried her away.

One of my first jobs out of college in the middle '80s was managing the data for a group of scientists monitoring the tributaries (rivers) that fed into the Chesapeake Bay. I asked to come along with a team who monitored the Anacostia River for a myriad of pollutants and water quality markers. 

I showed up to their office early one morning dressed in jeans, t-shirt and sneakers. Back then there were no weather apps and if you didn't watch or listen to the morning news (which why how could you when you had to shower and catch the metro before 7 am) there was no way to know what was in store unless you looked to the sky.

Two scientists met me at their dilapidated offices in a rundown building at the National Harbor. I knew something was up when they reached for bright yellow rain gear hanging on hooks on their office walls. I didn't ask if they had extra. I saw one of them snicker as they drove me to the boat that would take us on the river.

It was not exactly a cruiser. The vessel was a small outboard filled with equipment. There was barely any room for me to sit. While they barked out orders to each other and me, slinging various instruments over the gunnel of the boat and into the depths, I watched a refrigerator float by in water the color of sludge. At the time, the Anacostia River was a hot mess. Overloaded with industrial pollutants from years of neglect, the river was feeding it all into the Chesapeake Bay. Which is why the government cared. It was contaminating a vital shellfish industry.

The rain came. Heavily. A deluge. I was soaked and shivering and neither of the scientists showed any empathy while we were out in the elements. It was a lesson in humility for sure. 

After that, I knew I needed to learn more through field experiences. I switched my major from urban planning to environmental studies and pursued jobs that allowed me to work side-by-side with scientists in the field. I've monitored numerous streams and lakes with biologists. I've co-planned urban forest renewal projects with renowned tree ecologists. I've learned about climate change from geologists analyzing sediments dredged from the depths of the deepest lake in New York State. 

For me the most logical thing is to relay the knowledge I've gained from so many esteemed scientists into lay terms. That's why I went into education. Which leads me to the experiences of Rachel Carson.

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I've avoided discussions about the election this year due to temperament of some of the people who want to engage. I'm not into rage. I also try to put things into perspective and have faith that we all try our best.  I thought about the years after Rachel Carson published Silent Spring, the tumultuous years, between 1962-1964 when she died.  Besides the Cold War and threat of nuclear attack, John F. Kennedy was assassinated. When I was growing up, there was a newspaper in the desk of our house dated from the day he was killed with a blaring headline "Kennedy Assassinated". In my youth, I had no idea the impact that had on our country. I looked up letters Rachel Carson wrote to her friend Dorothy days following the assassination of John F. Kennedy and found some comfort. 

"In those first awful days after the assassination I found myself distraught on going to bed..." So she re-read her book Under the Sea Wind and found that the subject matter, the "timelessness" of the ocean put things into perspective. Things will go on. Time continues, and nature has a way of grounding us. Of humbling us.

During these winter months, I hope you too can find some peace by picking up a book and reading, or stepping out into nature and calming your soul. 

Source: Rachel Carson. Always, Rachel. Edited by Martha Freeman. Beacon Press, 1995.

I like decisiveness. I like things to happen. I'm a doer. I see trends and  take action. These are personality traits that have served me well over time even if things haven't gone my way. I have confidence in decisions when the research points in a particular direction. It's not hard to see which way the wind blows.

Maybe that's how Rachel Carson felt when she waited for the right time to publish her seminal work Silent Spring. She spent years gathering data before writing the book.

Unfortunately, she didn't live very long to see the seismic shift in public attitudes she inspired. The movement to ban DDT. The public awareness that led to the 1970s environmental movement. Because she died in 1964, two years after Silent Spring was published.

My journey to write a novel based on Rachel's struggle to finish Silent Spring, began at the Breadloaf Environmental Conference in Middelbury. I workshopped the first few chapters with a special group of people who provided encouragement and offered suggestions. A year later, I stayed at Rachel's family cottage to complete my manuscript. And since then,  I've had this sense of urgency to get it out into the world. I've entered it into contests and it has placed as a finalist. I've got a novel that, while not perfect, is waiting for the right editor.

One of the reasons I wrote this novel is because I found many of the Gen Z students in my ecology class didn't know who she was. Then the 3 Body Problem tv series comes out and the main character is reading Silent Spring. The book rockets to #1 on Amazon. I know the time is right for this novel to get out into the world.

When I was in graduate school I worked on a research project for my faculty mentor. Her thesis was that with the lumber and mining industries folding in the western states there would be a lack of infrastructure and services for the populations near federal lands. This she presumed would be a disaster as the populations aged. What I found while digging through Forest Service demographic data was the opposite. Demographers predicted that the Baby Boomers with wealth would retire in these communities (think Bozeman, Montana) and there would be an economic boom. I brought this information with all of my sources documented to my faculty advisor and she gave me a deadpan look. Like this couldn't be possible. It didn't agree with her thesis. I knew I was right, and in the end, the data didn't lie.

When an intern with Save the River on the St. Lawrence, the board wanted me to set up a campaign to stop toxic waste. However, my research with state agencies informed me a more immediate problem was people's raw sewage ending up in the river because of faulty septic systems (or no systems). I developed an action plan that had no backing from the board. It wasn't until a decade later I learned they used my plan and it was a huge success.

Rachel must have felt similarly - the data don't lie - she knew she was right, something had to be done about the indiscriminate use of chemicals in nature. She faced her detractors in the chemical industry as she struggled to finish Silent Spring, all while fighting cancer.

And in my own quest to publish a novel based about her, I fear the waiting. I think about Anita Shreve, who probably had more to write, and then died of cancer, of Hilary Mantel. I recently heard that Madeline Miller, author of Circe and Song of Achilles, has long covid and it has derailed her plans to write a sequel. A friend told me a story about a guy who spent two years on a documentary and non-fiction book and had to stop because of a freak accident. 

Life is fleeting and anything can happen.

"Time itself is like the sea, containing all that came before us, sooner or later sweeping us away on its flood and washing over and obliterating the traces of our presence, as the sea this morning erased the foot-prints of the bird." Rachel Carson Field Notes Nags Head October 9, 1950 Source: Rachel Carson: Witness for Nature by Linda Lear. 

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​I spent a week at a cottage on the Sheepscot River, Maine,  to finish the edits of my manuscript. While there, a group of children were combing the rocky shore for sea life. Their father was in the military and they had two weeks off to stay at the cottage next door before they were moving again. ​One of the boys, named Finn - ten years old- spent hours exploring the tidepools, finding sea urchins, baby lobster, and hermit crabs. His enthusiasm was contagious. He wore a group of necklaces that looked handmade around his neck, and bounced from one rock to another with the dexterity of a mountain goat,  managing not to slip on the slick wrackweeds.


Tidepools are formed during the low tide and the creatures that are left behind have adapted to living at the edge of the sea. The species that reside there are entirely different because for a period of time, twice a day, they live in suspension until the sea comes back to greet them. Their ecological niche and ability to adapt to the harsh conditions of the tides is awe-inspiring.

​Around the time Rachel Carson published Silent Spring, the picture here appeared on the cover of Seventeen Magazine with the headline: How to make a boy say wow! And this too: How to get the most from a college visit. The message? Go to college and find a husband.

Rachel's Silent Spring unsettled a lot of scientists, specifically chemists working for the chemical industry who had everything to lose financially from her radical thesis. So they questioned it. Were we over using chemicals? Was the government not protecting its citizens?

Her message rattled farmers dependent on chemicals to protect their crops from pests, and scientists who advocated DDT would eradicate pests plaguing majestic street trees like the Elm. There was also the fact that our government used DDT during World War II to protect troops stationed in Italy and the Pacific against malaria. Everything she proposed in her book went against the standards of the time.

Predictably, she was ridiculed and demeaned by the press, by politicians, public figures who represented the agricultural industry, and by heads of corporations.

However, she had the public in her favor. In fact, the letters to the editor of The New Yorker after Rachel's excerpts appeared in their June 1962 issue were overwhelming in her favor. Many were from state agencies of fish and wildlife that wanted copies of the magazine to distribute to politicians in their region. Luckily, an archivist saved me some time by providing a list of the handful of letters unfavorable to the article, and the majority that were favorable. So I didn't have to comb through each one. I went right to the disgruntled letters. 

"In any large scale pest control program in the area, we are confronted with vociferous, misinformed, ...bird-loving...citizenry that has not been convinced of the importance of agriculture..."

Another wrote that her work was misleading. It produced fear and didn't educate.

Another stated that her reference to the selfishness of the chemical industry is from her Communist sympathies.

And we can live without birds and animals, but not business. Isn't it like a woman to be scared?

There were other attacks on Rachel after Silent Spring was published in the fall of 1962. She handled it with grace. In a CBS  documentary titled The Silent Spring of Rachel Carson, she didn't lose her composure as she adamantly defended her work. As a counter-point, the show also interviewed chemist Dr. Robert White Stevens who claimed if we were to follow her advice, man would return to the Dark Ages. An over-generalization if I ever heard one.

In her statement before the Senate Government Operations Committee in 1963, she raised awareness that the indiscriminate application of pesticides. Their ubiquitous presence in the environment, she intimated, could be wreaking havoc on humans, and there was no effort to examine the implications at a national level. 

I think what she demonstrated is if you know you're right about something, people eventually come around to the same conclusion. And they come to respect you for your determination. So as long as you can hold on to your conviction, whatever that might be, without losing your dignity in the process.

Source: New York Public Library The New Yorker Records. 

Rachel was first alerted to the detrimental effects of DDT while working for the government after World War II. Reports of massive fish kills at processing plants and government research facilities after widespread spraying of DDT trickled into her office at the Fish and Wildlife Service. She took note. DDT was popular with the U.S. government. It was credited for saving thousands of servicemen from getting sick while serving overseas where malaria was still a threat. After the war it was used heavily in areas to kill insects that threatened crops, forests, and urban trees. Local governments frequently blanketed whole neighborhoods with DDT to prevent Dutch Elm disease. As we know now, it didn't work. But the spraying did alarm bird enthusiasts who noticed dead robins and other songbirds blanketing the grounds after a spray.

Rachel began writing about her concerns which gained the attention of people who agreed with her. They wrote her letters, letting her know about incidents in their neighborhoods. Beekeepers lost entire hives, pond owners found dead fish floating to the surface, birds collapsed at feeders, writhing in pain on the ground. She filed these anecdotes away, determined to spend more time researching the cause and effect of mass spraying of these chemicals and the consequences to wildlife, and possibly, humans. 

After years of collecting data from government reports, newspapers, and scientific experts, she published serialized versions of her work in The New Yorker in 1962. And all hell broke loose with the chemical industry. This was before her seminal work on the topic - Silent Spring was published. 

​As famous as she was from winning the National Book Award for The Sea Around Us, Rachel was averse to public speaking and aggrandizement, much to the chagrin of her agent. When The Edge of the Sea hit the New York Times Bestseller list in the fall of 1955, she had numerous requests to speak at public events and declined most of them. 

She was a solid "NO" to the numerous requests from magazines to run a profile on her as well. Rachel didn't see her author life as a brand and didn't seek the attention. I'm not sure if she was afraid of the scrutiny she would receive by allowing the press into her personal life, or her natural shyness, but it doesn't mean she wasn't focused on the success of her work.

Indeed, The Edge of the Sea and another book about life at the sea, albeit, a non-scientific and philosophical take, Anne Lindbergh's Gift from the Sea exchanged places on the top ten list throughout 1955-56 on various news outlets. Rachel takes note of it in letters to her friend, Dorothy. 

"...I truly-even now-don't expect The Edge (The Edge of the Sea) ever to reach #1 spot, but I'd be happy that it is Mrs. Lindbergh's book and not something sensational or trashy."

Trashy included the book about a woman who under hypnosis discovers she'd lived another life decades earlier. After years of being at the top ten, Rachel doesn't hold back on her disdain for losing rank to Bridey Murphy (1956) which hit #1 on Chicago Tribune in 1956. "I think this silly Bridey Murphy thing is going to scoot right up and crowd Mrs. Lindbergh...The Edge by the way is No. 6- up one." And then weeks later,  "That wretched Bridey Murphy thing has displaced Mrs. Lindbergh! That is really a blow. "

Rachel didn't have to deal with today's social media spotlight that casts rays well beyond the reach of newspapers or magazines of her time. And she wasn't in a position to write anything with a pseudonym like Elena Ferrante, you don't get the chance to write a biography of the sea, and a scathing indictment against the chemical industry anonymously. Yet, her detachment from public scrutiny allowed her to write one of her most challenging work of all--Silent Spring (1962).  And then all hell broke loose. 

With that in mind, I've gotten to 7k words in this novel set in Maine that has Rachel as a 'macguffin' in the story. And I'm thinking with the holidays coming, this might be time to shut down my own social media, and detach myself from that public for a few weeks so I can keep writing. 

Happy Holidays everyone! See you in the New Year. 

Sources:
William Souder. On a Farther Shore. The Life and Legacy of Rachel Carson. 2012. 

​Always, Rachel. The Letters of Rachel Carson And Dorothy Freeman. 1952-1964. Edited by Martha Freeman.

Rachel had a best friend, Dorothy. They met in Southport, Maine, where both owned a summer cottage. They wrote to each other constantly while Rachel was working on her book The Edge of the Sea (1955). In fact, Rachel dedicated the book to Dorothy and her husband Stan Freeman. Their friendship provided Rachel with stability she needed while maintaining her household (her mother passed and she had to adopt her niece's son, Roger) and adapting to her fame after winning the National Book Award for The Sea Around Us.

In her letters, Rachel told Dorothy:
"All I am certain of is this: that it is quite necessary for me to know that there is someone who is deeply devoted to me as a person, and who also has the capacity and understanding to share, vicariously, the sometimes crushing burden of creative effort." 

It may sound glamorous, but being an author means spending a boat-load of time alone. Just you and your laptop at a cafe, desk, library. Whatever. Rachel spent a lot of time writing at her home in Maryland so she could spend her summers in Maine with Dorothy. They would watch the tides, collect specimens, and listen for veeries singing in the woods. 

Rachel had other, less personal connections, scientists she relied on for data, editors, nature writers, and people of influence in the world of literature. Unassuming by nature, she was not shy about approaching people for assistance and guidance. That's a benefit in the world of writing. Writing, as Rachel says in another letter to Dorothy: "is hard and full of anguish and disappointments, but I also know it brings deep satisfactions and rewards that have nothing to do with best-sellerdom."

Many of those satisfactions are in making connections with librarians, archivists, authors, and the many people involved in the publishing process.  And let's not forget the readers. It may only take one avid fan, as Dorothy was for Rachel, motivating an author to keep going. It helps having people believe in you. 

Source: Always, Rachel. The Letters of Rachel Carson and Dorothy Freeman 1952-1964. Edited by Martha Freeman. 1995.