When I travel I like to stop in local bookstores, see what treasures I might find. On my first solo trip from home after having my first child, presenting at a conference in Vermont on women nature writers, I took a few extra days to toodle through New England visiting dead relatives. I had a great great great. . .great uncle buried in Peacham (Vermonters say Peck-em, not Peach-Ham like I did when asking directions). He served in the Revolutionary War.
After spending the afternoon haunting the Peacham cemetery, admiring the lovely view of hills and trees, I drove on through New Hampshire and into Maine, a state chock-a-block with my dead ancestors. My family on my dad's side came over on the Mayflower, so we've pepper New England with our bones. I made one stop in New Hampshire for lunch and a bookstore browse. I still can't get over how tiny New England states are. I drove clear across New Hampshire with plenty of time for lunch and bookstore browsing! And the states are jam-packed with trees, or treelettes. I'm more accustomed to western states, big open landscapes, places that simultaneously let you breath and make you feel like a speck on the ass of earth. In New England, it felt like if I stood still too long a forest of tiny trees would swallow me up. In California, my home state, grow the tallest, fattest, oldest trees in the world: redwoods, giant sequoia, and bristlecone pines respectively. So these Blair Witch species are more like thick shrubs than trees, or the hedge maze in The Shining. No wonder so many horror films are set in New England. The landscape has an alluring beauty coupled with claustrophobic creepiness, especially when your on a cemetery tour. Very "They're coming to get you Barbara."
So I'm in the bookstore, and yes it's raining, and I find an old textbook-looking copy of Carson's The Sea Around Us, bland green cover with limey swirls like a screen saver pattern, three bucks and it's mine. Okay, honesty time. I tried to read it, like I had tried to read Silent Spring, feeling an obligation to actually read the work of a woman who had been so pivotal to the environmental movement (the one in the seventies that gave birth to Earth Day and saving the whales). But I need to be transported when I read. It's all about the old creative writing adage "show, don't tell." I need a book to let me snuggle up in its lap for story-time. Neither of her two later books did this for me. I appreciated the information they provided and genuflected to their influence in waking up the United States' collective conscious to our deprecating impacts on the environment, but the writing didn't move me. There I was in Carson Country, holding her book-of-the-month club best seller and I couldn't read it. What did I feel? Guilt, pure recently-baptized Catholic guilt. What kind of impassioned environmentalist was I? What was wrong with me? I kept the book, a souvenir of my shame, and finished my tour into Maine, the home state of my great grandmother (another blog coming for her), and then returned to the West.
When I got back, I looked up Carson's bibliography. Turns out she had an earlier book, her first, released in 1941, Under the Sea Wind. Off I go to my local independent bookstore and, redemption time, I find an old water-stained paperback copy, marked down to a dollar, still life with a seagull, driftwood, sea shell, sand and a cork float on the cover. Only 157 pages, including a glossary of sea life in the back pages, illustrated with simple sketches.
"Nereis: An active and graceful creature to watch, Nereis is a marine worm that may be from two or three to twelve inches long, depending on the species. It is found under stones and among seaweed in shallow water, and at times swims at the surface. The usual color is bronze, with a beautiful iridescent sheen. Its strong, horny jaws equip it for its life as an active predator."
Ah, now we're talking. A woman who can find beauty in a foot long worm with horny jaws (sounds like that old high school boyfriend). I'm hooked.
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