The Sense of Wonder
Shades of Countdown telling it slant:
When my dad was stationed at Andrews AFB in Washington, DC and I was in the fifth grade at Camp Springs Elementary School, my teacher, Mrs. Rodriguez, taught a unit on “the explorers.” In addition to Balboa, Cortez, Drake, Magellan, and da Gama — all men, of course — she included one woman: Rachel Carson.
I don’t remember if Carson came to us via Our Weekly Reader or if my teacher was just determined to make sure we knew about her, but I do remember the impression they both made on me that year.
It was 1965. Carson had died of cancer the year before, 1964, the same year my family had made the trek to Mississippi, to find “everything closed” on the heels of the passage of the Civil Rights Act. I mention this because history happens as a weave, and not in a vacuum, which is something the Sixties Trilogy books tried to showcase by using scrapbook material filled with song lyrics, photographs, newspaper clippings, and other ephemera of time-and-place.
History is a weave or a web of many things happening at the same time, or stretched over time, related in ways that make us all human, and which touch, ultimately, every living thing, which is one element that makes history fascinating to me. It’s all connected.
Carson’s death was perhaps at least partially related to the DDT exposure of the sprayed areas near her Colesville, Maryland home, which was a stone’s throw from my home in Camp Springs. During her tenure as a marine biologist at the US Bureau of Fisheries, Carson had been advocating for the banning of DDT for years, as she investigated and wrote about bird kills and fish kills and insect decimation in concert with pesticide use across the country. It was an uphill battle to get this particular part of her work noticed until the publication of her seminal 1962 book, Silent Spring.
Carson is often credited with being at the forefront of the modern environmental movement with Silent Spring — a book that so moved President John F. Kennedy (and, in truth, so did public pressure) that he announced the establishment of a special panel of the President’s Science Advisory Committee to investigate health and environmental questions about pesticide use.
I came again to Rachel Carson when Linda Lear published Rachel Carson: Witness for Nature in 1997. It was in the pages of Linda’s stellar biography that I learned about Carson’s childhood in Pennsylvania, how she wandered the woods and hills, discovering in that passion her true calling without knowing it yet, bringing back fossils and shells to her mother, researching her geography, writing about her discoveries, even at ten years old, sending off her writing to be published. She fell in love with the sea before she had ever seen it.
And then there was the story about saving a tiny firefly with her great-nephew (and later, adopted son) Roger after a nighttime summer storm in Maine, where Rachel had a cabin to retreat to once a year or so. The firefly was flashing in a tiny puddle on the shore, desperate (so it seemed) to escape and to reach its kind out on the ocean, as the lights in the sea flashed back — luminescence from the algae stirred up by the storm.
I was fascinated by this story and started trying to write about this one adventure, for young readers. It would take me over twenty years to publish it.
Along the way I published Freedom Summer; Love, Ruby Lavender; Each Little Bird That Sings; Countdown; Revolution; Anthem; A Long Line of Cakes; and even, into the 2020 pandemic along with Rachel, Kent State.
Why did it take me so long to write Rachel?
I wanted to do too many things. I wanted to introduce readers to Rachel, for one thing (may we call her Rachel?). There was so much to her life! What an explorer. I wanted to introduce readers to bioluminescence. To the romance of the sea… the sea that Rachel loved and wrote about so eloquently. To a nighttime adventure, and to the little kid in all of us — boisterous, menacing, fearful, loving. All the things.
I dove into research and I kept coming back to that firefly. Here is a snippet of the letter Rachel wrote to her friend Dorothy Freeman that became the bedrock of the book I wrote.
After too many drafts to count, Rachel found a home with Anne Schwartz at Random House. Anne had published my first book, Freedom Summer, in 2001, when she was at Simon & Schuster, so this was a reunion for us. I had never worked with Daniel Miyares before, but I loved his work and was thrilled when he said yes to illustrating the story. I wanted to call it “Luminous Life: A Story of Rachel Carson,” but Night Walk to the Sea won out.
In July 2019 I was lucky enough to spend a week at Rachel’s cabin — the very same cabin where the story I wrote takes place — on Southport Island, Maine. Jim came with me, as did our friends Jerry and Laurie. The four of us arrived during the worst heat wave Maine had seen in years, to a cabin with no a/c, but with all the touches of a woman explorer and scientist who had made the world her laboratory.
The heat broke on the second day we were there, and we became explorers, too. I took umpteen reference photographs for Daniel as well, not that he needed them, but I did. We were in the throes of last-chance changes to both art and text, and we both wanted to get everything as right as possible. Someone had told me (or maybe I read it somewhere) that there were no frogs on Southport Island, and I had frogs in the text of the book and I think Daniel had one in the art, so I tried to verify this fact. I kept hitting dead ends until one morning I stood in line at the only little store on the island, waiting my turn to buy the newspaper and ask my frog question. When I got to the counter, and I asked, the cashier gave me an incredulous look — she was so busy, long lines, who was this stranger with an inane question? — and snapped, “Of COURSE we have frogs! Next!” and that solved that.
The town of Boothbay Harbor was across the swing bridge, and we did visit, but we spent most of our time on the island, although we did take field trips.
The most meaningful room for me was Rachel’s writing room. I took Daniel’s art (on my laptop) and “brought” it to Rachel’s desk, and sat there with my story for a long time.
Oh, to be so inspired. It was hard to leave when the week was over.
My favorite Carson book is The Sense of Wonder. It grew out of a magazine piece Carson wrote in 1956 titled “Help Your Child to Wonder” in Woman’s Home Companion. I was three years old in 1956… who knew that that article would become a book that would become important to me — almost a blueprint for me — as an adult wanting to write about Rachel Carson for young people… to pass on the story. To write for young people, period…
The way history folds in on itself, over and again, fascinates me. In this particular case, here was a fifth grader learning about Rachel Carson and remembering what her teacher taught her, reading a biography as an adult that sparked a life-long curiosity about Rachel, taking notes on index cards in a time when there was no World Wide Web, becoming a writer and learning to endure rejection after rejection, and finally publishing a book about the hero she learned about in fifth grade… it’s a full circle moment, but also a testament to the weaving way that history has with us, as it offers up ways for us to tell our stories.
I would love to hear about your long gestations and how those moments, memories, and meanings take place in your lives. The comments are open to everyone. Have a good week, y’all. Writers Lab appears later this week, see you then!
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xoxo Debbie
