Lost Woods by Rachel Carson Read Free Book Online

it is only ten o’clock.
    Mists are drifting over the valley. A grayness overhangs all the sky and the clouds seem heavy with unshed rain. It is an elemental landscape – a great rockpile atop a mountain, nearby a few trees that have been stripped and twisted by the mountain winds, a vast, pale, arching sky.
    Perhaps it is not strange that I, who greatly love the sea, should find much in the mountains to remind me of it. I cannot watch the headlong descent of the hill streams without remembering that, though their journey be long, its end is in the sea. And always in these Appalachian highlands there are reminders of those ancient seas that more than once lay over all this land. Halfway up the steep path to the lookout is a cliff formed of sandstone; long ago it was laid down under shallow marine waters where strange and unfamiliar fishes swam; then the seas receded, the mountains were uplifted, and now wind and rain are crumbling the cliff away to the sandy particles that first composed it. And these whitened limestone rocks on which I am sitting – these, too, were formed under that Paleozoic ocean, of the myriad tiny skeletons of creatures that drifted in its water. Now I lie back with half closed eyes and try to realize that I am at the bottom of another ocean – an ocean of air on which the hawks are sailing.

6
[1946]
An Island I Remember
    IN THE DECADE following the publication of Under the Sea-Wind in 1941, Carson worked on an extended profile of the ocean which would become The Sea Around Us. In 1946, after almost ten years in the federal government, Carson had accumulated enough annual leave for a month’s vacation in Boothbay Harbor, Maine, the site of a Bureau of Fisheries laboratory engaged in research on lobster reproduction, and a coastal area she had longed to visit.
    Carson along with her mother and her two cats rented a tiny, secluded pink cottage on the shore of the Sheepscot River west of town. It looked out to Indiantown Island, a mysterious, spruce-covered strip of lush forest where the wind rustled through the trees and at sunset a hermit thrush sang its eerie song.
    Carson fell in love with the beauty of Maine that summer and determined that one day she would have a place of her own there. She told her friend Shirley Briggs in a letter, “the only reason I will ever come back [to Maryland] is that I don’t have the brains enough to figure out a way to stay here the rest of my life.” Seven years later the success of The Sea Around Us enabled her to buy land and build a cottage along the Sheepscot on Southport Island.
    Among the unpublished fragments in Carson’s papers, there is no more arresting example of Carson’s ability to absorb her surroundings with all her senses, or of her pleasure in the diverse fabric of the natural world.
    IT WAS ONLY A SMALL ISLAND, perhaps a mile long and half as wide. The face it presented to the mainland shore was a dark wall of coniferous forest rising in solid, impenetrable blackness to where the tops of the spruces feathered out into a serrate line against the sky. There was no break in that wall anywhere that I could see, no suggestion of paths worn through island forests, no invitation to enter. At high tide the sea came up almost to the trees, with only little patches of light colored rock showing at the water line, like white daubs made by a painter’s brush. As the tide ebbed and the water dropped lower on the rocks, the white patches grew and merged with each other, exposing the solid granite foundations of the island, so that now there was a high rocky rampart, on which grew the living green wall of the forest.
    There was perhaps a quarter of a mile of water between the island and the mainland shore where our cabin stood, its screened porch at the sea wall and its back against a steep hillside where ferns were dark among the rocks and the branches of great hemlocks reached down to touch the ground. Day after day the island lay under the summer sun,