On a Farther Shore by William Souder Read Free Book Online Page B

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 thunderstormswept 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:
    Comes a vapour from the margin, blackening over heath and holt,
    Cramming all the blast before it, in its breast a thunderbolt.
    Let it fall on Locksley Hall, with rain or hail, or fire or snow;
    For the mighty wind arises, roaring seaward, and I go.
    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 beguilinglines 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.

THREE
Biologizing
    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 fromboats 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