On Space

vii On Space From the Editor About six years ago I became friends with the great nature writer John Hay and that friendship has been a source of deep pleasure for me. One day, while I was visiting him in Maine, we found ourselves talking about his near-contemporary, Rachel Carson. “She had a place just down the road in Boothbay,” he said. “That house was her salvation when the world attacked her.” He shook his head. “The things they did to that woman were criminal. After she wrote that wonderful book she got so attacked and insulted by the goddamn money people, by the chemical companies and all. They called her a communist and pervert. The poor woman was dying of cancer at the time. They killed her before she died.” In a time when our government sneers at the science of global warming and evolution, it’s worth remembering the bravery of the dying Carson in the face of that ugly slander. But this morning as I walked the beach near my house I thought about John’s comments in a different light, with an emphasis not on the political savagery that Carson endured, but on the solace she found in her coastal home, her place away from the world, where she could focus on tidal pools and hermit crabs, on art and science. With the centennial of Carson’s birth upon us we will likely be hearing a lot about the changes that Silent Spring wrought, namely the banning of DDT and other chemicals, and the return of many threatened species as a result. But what interests me just as much as those changes is where they came from, how the most public of effects began in the most private of places. It was within her retreat on those Maine beaches, deep in her own thoughts and in her own place, that Carson began to develop the insights and thoughts that would so impact the world. And it seems to me that in this way Rachel Carson epitomizes the way so many writers, and scientists, find their viii Ecotone: reimagining place lives pulsing between retreat from and engagement with the world. In fact, because of the way that Carson moved between an intensely private life—full of contemplation and quiet observation—and a political life with worldly consequences, she seems an almost archetypal example of a central contradiction of the writing life. To some extent, we are all worldly hermits. Before he retired to Maine, John Hay lived in a modest house atop a hill on Cape Cod, the house surrounded by many acres of scrub oak. “It’s like a fortress up there with the winding road and the hill,” a friend of John’s said to me before I visited. “He’s got a buffer from all the busyness . I’m surprised he hasn’t built a moat.” During my first visit with John, he addressed his need for that buffer. “Why did I come here to the middle of nowhere?” he said. “What was I looking for? I suppose I came here following some vague urge for space. You have to understand that when I was a boy the population of this country was only about ninety million—now there are three hundred and twenty million of us! This town had only eight hundred people, a small village. I suppose I had a hunch that it was space that I was after in coming here.” Space was one of the key words in John’s vocabulary, a hieroglyph that held the key to many of the choices he had made in his life. It took me a while to begin to understand what he meant by the word. During our early meetings it seemed somewhat vague and nondescript. It was only later that I would begin to see that it was synonymous with freedom. And I would begin to see that it was also connected, in ways I wasn’t quite sure of yet, to creativity and wildness. Another writer who retreated in New England had a different way of putting the same thing. Melville spoke of the need for writers to be at...