Under the Sea-wind: A Naturalist's Picture of Ocean Life

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As I was finishing this book I was reflecting on how much of Carson's writing I found familiar - and then it dawned on me just how much of the world does not live close to the coast; how many people have never witnessed anything she describes first-hand. To them this book must feel like reading a piece of science fiction describing another world.

Those who dwell … among the beauties and mysteries of the earth are never alone or weary of life. Whatever the vexations or concerns of their personal lives, their thoughts can find paths that lead to inner contentment and to renewed excitement in living. Those who contemplate the beauty of the earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts. There is symbolic as well as actual beauty in the migration of the birds, the ebb and flow of the tides, the folded bud ready for the spring. There is something infinitely healing in the repeated refrains of nature—the assurance that dawn comes after night, and spring after the winter.I imagine Rachel somewhere along the Atlantic coast, sometime in the late 1930s, the ocean breeze tussling her hair, salt spray in her face, learning firsthand what a trawl and a gill net are, and all the other terminology of the fishermen; learning the names of the seabirds that dived and soared around her – sanderlings, skuas, jaegers; and of course, learning all the mysterious creatures that live in the waters below. Carson continues her marine expedition farther and deeper into the ocean, to return in the final paragraphs to this central interconnectedness of life — perhaps, she poetically suggests, our only real taste of immortality: The appeal of The Sea Around Us, written more than seventy years ago, remains strong today, partly because so much of what it describes has changed little—to our eyes, at least—and sometimes not at all. The weeds that grow today in the Sargasso Sea, Carson tells us, are exactly the same plants Columbus saw when he sailed by in 1492. (Interesting, no?) But the book’s critical virtue is not really in its vast subject—how the earth’s ocean was formed, how it generated life as we know it, how its tides and currents and waves determine what grows and evolves, shaping and re-shaping the land it surrounds—but in how Carson writes about it. It doesn’t matter if recent marine science says she got some things “wrong.” Her only obligation, to paraphrase what Henry James once said about the novel, is the obligation to be interesting. [3] She does that unfailingly, I think, nearly all of the time. Nature writing at its best in vivid, lyrical prose. She writes about ocean and shore life so you feel you are there. The reader follows birds, fish, crustaceans and even eel! You follow an interlude in these creatures’ respective lives. It is utterly amazing the extent to which Carson makes the reader feel part of their aquatic existence. Violent storms, dense fog and lulling, lapping seas under blue skies. Predators and prey, the cycle of life to death to food and new life. In the Inuktitut language the term for snowy owl is ookpik. In 1963 it was made into a stuffed toy, became wildly popular as a national symbol, and produced several children’s books called “Ookpik the Owl.”

Bryson, Michael (2002). Visions of the Land: Science, Literature, and the American Environment from the Era of Exploration to the Age of Ecology (Under the Sign of Nature). Charlottesville,VA: University of Virginia Press. ISBN 0813921074. Sunbathing bores me, I'm too old to build sandcastles, and I neither swim nor surf. For me, the inevitable summertime trip to the beach is not about any of these things; it's an opportunity to inhabit, however briefly, the margin where land and sea engage in a constant, ever-changing relationship that is one of the great drivers of life on, and the life of, the planet. It's a zone of interchange between the three great planetary ecosystems of earth, air and ocean and one which played a crucial role in the evolution of life itself. A trip to the seaside is an opportunity to contemplate the sea in all its multifaceted glory. Famed as a scientist whose timely book on chemical poisons had served as a warning to the world about the insatiable nature of corporate greed, she was at the same time an important writer, one of the finest nature writers of her century. And it is for her literary excellence, not her cry of warning, that in the end, she may be best remembered. After 10 years of uneventful river habitation, the eels are drawn by instinct downriver returning to their place of birth, a deep abyss near the Sargasso Sea where they will spawn and die. It is the most remarkable journey, as is that of the newborn spawn originating from two continents, who float side by side and drift towards those same coastal rivers their parents swam from, a voyage of years and over time the two species will separate and veer towards their continent, the US or Europe.Meanwhile the fish, drained of life by separation from water, grew limp as all its struggles ceased. Like a mist gathering on a clear glass surface, a film clouded its eyes. Soon the iridescent greens and golds that made its body, in life, a thing of beauty had faded to dullness. A passage like this deserves to be studied alongside Modernist poems by Stevens and Bishop; it is surely a meditation on artifice in nature and who—or what—creates it. But I think Carson’s curiosity—and her feeling of wonder—often surpasses theirs. The island lay in shadows only a little deeper than those that were swiftly stealing across the sound from the east. On its western shore the wet sand of the narrow beach caught the same reflection of pallet gleaming sky that laid a bright path across the water from island beach to horizon. Both water and sand were the color of steel overlaid with the sheen of silver, so that it was hard to say where water ended and land began.” Celebrating the mystery and beauty of birds and sea creatures in their natural habitat, Under the Sea-Wind--Rachel Carson's first book and her personal favorite--is the early masterwork of one of America's greatest nature writers. Evoking the special mystery and beauty of the shore and the open sea--its limitless vistas and twilight depths--Carson's astonishingly intimate, unforgettable portrait captures the delicate negotiations of an ingeniously calibrated ecology.

The grebe soon drowned. Its body hung limply from the net, along with a score of silvery fish bodies with heads pointing upstream in the direction of the spawning grounds where the early-run shad awaited their coming. Horned Grebe. Via Wikimedia. And the eels lay offshore in the March sea, waiting for the time when they should enter the waters of the land, the sea, too, lay restless, awaiting the time when once more it should encroach upon the coastal plain, and creep up the sides of the foothills, and lap at the bases of the mountain ranges. As the moon waned and the surge of the tides grew less, the elvers pressed forward toward the mouth of the bay. Soon a night would come, after most of the snow had melted and run as water to the sea, when the moon’s light and the tide’s press would be feeble and a warm rain would fall, mist-laden and bittersweet with the scent of opening buds. Then the elvers would pour into the bay and, traveling up its shores, would find its rivers. The second book is a quiet tour de force. Carson avoids the temptation to patronise either the reader or the world she is bringing to life. There is none of the wallowing in anthropomorphic inaccuracy that mars much popular nature writing and the science is lucidly explained without leaving out the hard bits. The reader is immersed in a new and wonderful world, one where everything really is connected to everything else. "There is," as she writes, "no drop of water in the ocean, not even in the deepest part of the abyss, that does not know and respond to the mysterious forces that create the tide." This sense of the sea and all its constituents as part of an interrelated system infuses the entire book. Under the Sea-Wind captures the beauty, violence, and complexity of the sea and life connected to it. The book reveals the interconnectedness of nature, which includes humans. We are part of the never-ending drama that makes the sea a magical, mysterious, and merciless place. Through her gift as a writer and knowledge of the sea, Carson reminds us land-bound creatures—even those of us nestled in the Appalachian mountains—that our world extends beyond the land to the depths of the sea.

Chambers, John Whiteclay II, ed. The Oxford Companion to American Military History. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999, 819-830. Is wonder still possible, given our climate crisis? Wonder implies some degree of leisure and time; it requires slow, sustained, and contemplative attention—a luxury that, perhaps, we can no longer afford. Even Carson, when she wrote the new preface for the revised 1961 edition of The Sea Around Us, couldn’t help but inject an urgent warning about the practice of dumping nuclear waste into the ocean. She called the previous assurance that the sea was so large as to be inviolate a “naive” belief. Today, as dire emergencies unfold, rationalizing time spent merely appreciating the natural world seems even more difficult. During the COP26 climate conference, protesters held up signs spelling doom and chanted: “If not now, when? When?” Greta Thunberg summarily declared the conference a failure, dismissing it as a meaningless PR event for “beautiful speeches.” Celebrating the mystery and beauty of birds and sea creatures in their natural habitat, Under the Sea-Wind—Rachel Carson’s first book and her personal favorite—is the early masterwork of one of America’s greatest nature writers.