On a Farther Shore Read Online Free PDF

medal by the magazine.
    News of this accomplishment arrived at a small white clapboard-sided home in Springdale, Pennsylvania, a hardscrabble town on the Allegheny River fourteen miles northeast of Pittsburgh. The house, a two-over-two design with a parlor and a dining room on the first floor and two small bedrooms on the second, stood plain and boxlike on sixty-five acres of woodland and open fields on the face of a high, steep hill that sloped to the south toward the river a mile away. There was a squat lean-to kitchen attached to the back of the house, and two outhouses, also in the back, were a short walk up the hill. Beyond the outhouses was an apple orchard sheltered beneath the hilltop. A porch overlooking the river valley ran along the length of the front of the house. In the yard there was a springhouse and, off to the side, a shed where a horse could be stabled. The house had no electricity or indoor plumbing, and was heated by small coal-grate fireplaces in each room.
    Rachel Louise Carson entered the world in one of the upstairs bedrooms at one thirty in the morning on May 27, 1907. At threeweeks, little Rachel began regularly napping in a hammock on the front porch. When she was five months old, she contracted a severe case of chicken pox. By the time she was eight months old, according to her mother, Maria, Rachel had begun to talk and, when told not to put something in her mouth, would respond with a “roguish look.” As an older child, Rachel loved reading and being outdoors, regularly wandering the family property and looking at animals and birds, usually with her mother. It was a lovely setting, though, of course, a gray coating of ash from the steel mills downriver covered everything exposed to the sky.
    The Carson house was crowded. In addition to her brother, Robert, Rachel had an older sister named Marian. Robert sometimes lived in a tent in the backyard. Neither Robert nor Marian finished high school. Robert’s air unit went to fight in France; he came home in 1919. Marian had gotten married at the age of eighteen, and for a time the couple lived with the Carsons. But Marian’s husband deserted her after a few months. She later divorced him and quickly remarried.
    The family’s financial situation was always precarious. Rachel’s father, a loving but distant man also named Robert, had bought the Springdale house and property in 1900 for $11,000. Although he at different times held jobs as an electrician, an insurance salesman, and a night watchman, Mr. Carson never earned a salary sufficient to support the family. His main hope was to develop a residential neighborhood on their land.In 1910 he advertised “large level lots” for $300 each, in cash or by installments. The lots sold poorly, and never for what the Carsons hoped they were worth. Maria supplemented their income by giving piano lessons.
    Rachel continued submitting stories to
St. Nicholas
magazine, which published several.Springdale’s school went only as far as the tenth grade, so Rachel spent her final two years of school at nearby Parnassus High, graduating in 1925. Famous with her classmates as a voracious reader and a superb writer, Rachel was an exceptional student,as evidenced by the inscription to her in the yearbook during her senior year:
    Rachel’s like the mid-day sun
,
    Always very bright
,
    Never stops her studying
,
    ’Till she gets it right
    It was also said of Rachel that her mother awakened her every day to hear the birds singing in the morning sunlight, and that Rachel spoke to them as she headed off to school.
    Rachel’s senior thesis, a sober, reproachful consideration of human potential titled “Intellectual Dissipation,” argued that a “thinking, reasoning mind” was our most valuable possession. Carson linked the cultivation of an active, educated intelligence to the conservation of natural resources. This didn’t track perfectly—Carson thought young people were overly concerned about “minerals and