On a Farther Shore Read Online Free PDF Page A

it, Roosevelt’s program was an immediate lifeline.
    The new president packed his cabinet with reformers, including a lawyer from Chicago named Harold Ickes, who became secretary of the interior.One of Ickes’s first orders of business in spite of the troubled times was to plan and oversee the construction of a new headquarters building for the Interior Department. Ickes and Roosevelt thought the building should make a statement. The result, a monument to a great country and a vast continent, cost $12.7 million and was finished in 1937. Built of granite and limestone, it stood seven glistening stories high, contained 2,200 rooms, and covered two city blocks just south and west of the White House. Enormous murals on the walls inside its long, ornate hallways depicted the sprawling diversity of peoples and lands for which the Interior Department was responsible. It was the first federal building to have escalators and among the first to be air-conditioned. By any measureit was then, and is now, one of the most beautiful and inspiring buildings in Washington.
    In May 1942, an assistant aquatic biologist named Rachel Carson, newly assigned to the Fishery Biology section of the Interior Department’s Fish and Wildlife Service, went to work in the building. Carson had an office on the third floor, room 3127, that had a south-facing window from which she could see trees and birds and the skies that hung over Washington as economic depression retreated and the nation found itself again at war.
    At thirty-five, Carson had worked for the government for seven years, until then at field stations in Baltimore and College Park, Maryland. A pretty young woman with blue eyes and light brown hair that she wore short and tightly waved, Carson had fine features, stood five feet, four inches tall, and weighed 120 pounds.Colleagues, most of them men, recognized her approach from the familiar clack of her high heels in the hallway. If Carson socialized with anyone outside the office, it went unremarked. Each day she took her lunch in the employee cafeteria, and at night rode the streetcar home to the house she shared with her mother, Maria Carson, on Flower Avenue in Silver Spring.
    Carson’s job title was misleading. She did not work on aquatic biology or perform any other kind of investigative duty. She wrote pamphlets and press releases, and edited scientific papers generated by other Fish and Wildlife staff—most of whom thought she was the best at what she did.Like all federal employees, Carson was subject to the Hatch Act of 1939 and had to declare, in writing, that she did not belong to any political party or group whose purpose included the overthrow of the U.S. government by force or violence. She also had to periodically acknowledge that she had no right to go on strike or to organize her fellow workers in a union. Not that any of those ideas would have occurred to her. Carson had been more than glad to have a good job and a regular paycheck during the Depression.When she moved to the Interior Department headquarters in 1942, Carson was earning $2,600 a year.
    Carson’s employment file did include one unusual item. In 1941, Simon and Schuster had published a book she’d written called
Under the Sea-Wind
. Hardly anyone had ever heard of it.
    She always wanted to be a writer.In 1918, at the age of eleven, Carson published her first article in the
St. Nicholas
magazine, a publication for boys and girls that featured a special section for young contributors. “A Battle in the Clouds,” told in a single, suspenseful paragraph, recounted the story of a Canadian flyer who, through bravery and imagination, survived a harrowing dogfight in the skies over France—only to die in a training accident. The “main facts” of these faraway wartime events, young Miss Carson reported, had come to her in a letter from her older brother, Robert, who’d recently enlisted in the Army Air Service. Carson’s well-told story was awarded a silver