Rachel Carson's summer cottage is on Southport Island, Maine. It sits above and behind a steep granite ledge, sheltered from the sun beneath a canopy of birch, maple, and pine. It reminds me of Carson's public persona - courageously on the edge but carefully exposed, partially hidden, semi-private, serene. This July I made the cottage my home for a week when my friend Colleen, a Maryland poet and writer, invited a few close friends - writers and artists - to stay with her here in Maine. She had been awarded a cottage stay through the Rachel Carson Homestead Association and surprised us all with this amazing invitation. Of course I accepted (!) and was soon standing in Rachel Carson's kitchen, looking through to family room and out the wide picture windows to Sheepscot Bay.
As I research, walk, and write about environmental pilgrimage, this place I have long had on my list to experience, though I couldn't imagine I would be sleeping in Roger's bedroom for a week! Her adopted son, Roger and his family still own and maintain the place and it is available through family contacts for summer rental. But Colleen's stay was arranged through the Rachel Carson Homestead Association near Pittsburgh and Colleen intended for it to serve as a fellowship among writers and artists. Our one task was to take in the place and its surroundings as Rachel had loved it, to discover its inspirations and memories, and to reflect upon the experience in our own mediums. I took along my sketchbook and a limited set of colored pencils, selected shades of ochre, steel gray, white, and sienna.
Southport Island is just barely connected to the mainland by a small bridge at Boothbay Harbor. There are a few very small towns on the island, just intersections really, general store, library, old cemeteries, and a school. There's a fire house and a town hall. At the southeast end of the island is one of those old grand summer resorts, Newagen Seaside Inn, where you can enjoy a stay in quaint room or in a cottage by the sea. Rachel's ashes were returned to the sea here, off a boulder strewn shore where two Adirondack chairs mark the place where she and her best friend Dorothy would come. This is where they sat for the last time together on Southport, the summer of her last year. Rachel Carson had battled cancer and the insidious side effects of chemo treatments as she was writing
Silent Spring in the early 1960s. Once completed and published on a late summer day she and Dorothy watched a river of monarch butterflies flow over their sitting spot and across the bay on their migration south. She knew she was dying and that she would not be back to enjoy her cottage the following summer. "I shall always remember the monarchs," Rachel wrote in her lovingly written goodbye letter to summer and Dorothy ...
....that unhurried westward drift of one small winged form after another, each drawn by some invisible force. We talked a little about their migration, their life history. Did they return? We thought not; for most, at least, this was the closing journey of their lives.
I visited that spot on the rocky knoll overlooking Sheepscot Bay twice during the week. The staff at the front desk showed me the path and even spent a bit of time explaining what the place would have been like in the 1950s. They pulled out post cards, a historical letters binder, and made me copies of everything. The place seemed to speak most clearly to me of her life as a creative, impassioned writer, a soul in love with the natural world, one who could see and hear - as few can - the complex symphony that is the dance of life above and beneath the sea. I read the letter aloud standing over the memorial plaque set into a granite boulder. As I walked down the path back to the inn Newagen I stopped to watch a lone monarch in a wildflower meadow.
But it occurred to me this afternoon, remembering, that it had been a happy spectacle, that we had felt no sadness when we spoke of the fact that there would be no return. And rightly — for when any living thing has come to the end of its life cycle we accept that end as natural.
For the Monarch, that cycle is measured in a known span of months. For ourselves, the measure is something else, the span of which we cannot know. But the thought is the same: when that intangible cycle has run its course it is a natural and not unhappy thing that a life comes to an end.
That is what those brightly fluttering bits of life taught me this morning. I found a deep happiness in it — so I hope, may you. Thank you for this morning.
Rachel
When my housemates had gone out to explore the shops and eateries of Boothbay Harbor I stayed behind and visited Rachel's study. Its wall length desk and built-in bookshelves opens to the deck through a screened door that overlooks the Bay. It is a private space that can only be accessed through her bedroom. The window at the desk looks out into the Lost Wood, named by she and Dorothy for the long stretch of undeveloped forest that separated their cottages. As I sat sketching at the desk, a lone monarch fluttered past the window. Just one. No river of orange wings, just one "fluttering bit of life."
And isn't really that what we all are? Each of us a small bit of life, journey-bound to the arc of our days leaving a legacy - like it or not - for our children and grandchildren. Suddenly everything seemed so fragile - I felt a lump rise in my throat and I was nearly in tears. I returned to Roger's room where my sleeping bag lay flat and soft atop the bedspread. I sat on the bed for a few minutes then looked towards the Bay through double screened windows with the wide sill and imagined a small boy arranging his tide pool treasures to dry in the breeze. A large white hawk levered out of the wind and thumped loudly above me. Did an osprey just land on the roof? I crept out the back porch door and looked up. Sure enough, there was an osprey looking down - thank you, Rachel. She fluffed up her feathers and shook water from her wet wings.
Environmental pilgrimage is a form of walking devotion on the land and sea. No indulgences required. No prerequisite faith or religion needed. It asks of the pilgrim "How do I belong to this path? Who am I following? How shall I care for you?" The week in Southport allowed me the luxury of time to wander and think about those questions in relation to my own path and how Carson's work changed the world I was born into with her writing. Because of
Silent Spring I can see hundreds of eagles and osprey every summer on the Chesapeake and Susquehanna. I show them to my grandchildren and tell them the her story, lingering in each telling a little longer about how she lived and worked in her final years. Passion, drive, through the pain and sickness. Never giving up. The work was too important to let cancer stop her.
The cottage was less a destination than deep dive into the solitary life of a writer in her best and last years. The place was full of memories and yet very much alive with us chatty women congregating in the family room at night to share our day's adventures. We wandered on our own through the rooms, down the lane, to the general store, to the Newagen Inn. We wandered alone down to her beach, a small patch of white sand surrounded by a fortress of granite cobble and stone ledge. We agreed to stay out of each other's way but loved coming together after dark to tell of how encountered Rachel on our walks - even in the closet. Colleen found her there by accident, her hand writing in pencil marking how Roger had grown each year on the back of the pine plank door. Roger's writing is there too, marking the height of his own children.
I'll fold this experience somehow into my book-in-progress on environmental pilgrimage. It will take some time, however, to distill the solitary walks and hours alone in the cottage, Rachel's as spirit, a presence, a butterfly, an osprey. That was my take away, I said during one of our sit-down-talk-it-out sessions late on a stormy night, "she's here in the pinewood of the cottage, sitting on the deck watching birds, tucked into the Adirondack chair at Newagen with tea and her notebook and her best friend at her side." How shall I care for this path?
Notes:
With the greatest of love for friends, I thank Colleen Webster, writer and poet, and Jeanne Cecil, director of the
Rachel Carson Homestead Association, for this once in a lifetime experience.
http://rachelcarsonhomestead.org/
The
Newagen Seaside Inn gave me wonderful background, a tour of the tea porch, and walked me to the path that led to her favorite sitting place. The desk staff tolerated my back-to-back afternoon visits with friendly smiles and iced tea for my water bottle.
https://newagenseasideinn.com/history/
Always Rachel: The Letters of Rachel Carson and Dorothy Freeman, 1952 - 1964, The Story of a Remarkable Friendship. Concord Library, Beacon Press (1996)
