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In 1946, the writer Rachel Carson took time off work to go visit the coast of Maine.
It was her first time there, and she immediately loved it.
She spent time walking along the shores of Maine's South Port Island.
There's woods, there's bayberry, there's mosses, there's just this kind of conflagration of lush green right next to rocky outcroppings and this beautiful ocean.
Lita Maxwell is a professor of political science at Boston University.
And so Southport was this kind of gorgeous, magical fairyland that Carson stepped into.
Rachel Carson and her mother stayed in a secluded cottage near Southport, right on the water.
She wrote that it was completely quiet except for quote gulls, herons and ospreys, sometimes the tolling of a bell buoy and, when the wind is right, the very distant sound of surf.
All kinds of birds lived near the cottage, like phoebes and song sparrows.
Rachel Carson loved birds.
Sometimes she would lie on her back on a small dock for hours, watching them.
She wrote to a friend, On warm sunny days, the gulls go so high, they look about the size of stars.
Sometimes a dark star comes into sight, and that is an osprey.
Rachel's mother fed the seagulls, and they watched seals sunbathe on the rocks.
At low tide, Rachel liked to explore tidepools. where she found small ocean creatures.
She decided she would somehow make enough money to come back one day and buy a place there.
She returned home to Maryland and went back to her job at the Bureau of Fisheries and Wildlife Services, where she had worked for many years writing pamphlets and responding to questions from the public.
And she had taken that job after she left the PhD program at Johns Hopkins.
She'd gone there, gotten her master's, and left because she was needed to take care of her family.
For her whole life.
Carson really was kind of the breadwinner for her big extended family, for her mother, for her siblings, for later her niece and her great-nephew.
So she left school and started working for the Department of the Interior.
At one point, Rachel Carson was assigned to write a pamphlet about fish and the ocean.
She loved the ocean.
As a child growing up in rural Pennsylvania, she'd been fascinated by it.
But she never saw it until she was out of college.
When she'd finished the assignment, her supervisor told her it didn't work for a government pamphlet.
But he said it was beautifully written.
So her supervisor said, this is great.
You should submit this to The Atlantic.
And so she did.
And it was published in The Atlantic.
And out of that, she got a book deal.
The book was titled Under the Sea Wind.
It kind of anthropomorphized three different creatures.
An eel and a sanderling are, I think, the most interesting and shows their kind of passage between different areas of the ocean and And so the sanderling, like migrates right to the Arctic.
The eel traverses, you know, migrates along its path to lay eggs.
And it's just beautifully written and really brings you into the world of these creatures.
But it was published right on the cusp of World War II and really went nowhere.
So she wrote this gorgeous book and no one really bought it or read it.
So it got a couple of good reviews and then kind of died.
Throughout the war, Rachel Carson kept working at the Bureau of Fisheries and Wildlife Services.
And she wrote all of these pamphlets about fish.
She wrote pamphlets about.
I think one of them was called The Fishes of the Midwest, which is about educating the public on these fish that they might be less familiar with and what they're like.
At the end of the war, she had learned so much about the ocean that she decided to try to write another book about it.
It would be titled, The Sea Around Us.
And much to everyone's surprise, it was a giant bestseller.
It was like, you know, a huge book.
This book that, you know, taught people about the ocean and how science understands the ocean.
But in gorgeous writing she really had a knack for being able to show people not just like you know what nature is and why it's pretty, but like why it matters to them.
You know, why it matters for human life and pleasure and enjoying the world.
The sea around us was so popular that the publisher had a hard time printing enough books.
And finally, Rachel Carson bought a piece of land on the coast of Maine, on Southport Island, right on the water.
She built a cottage and planned to spend every summer there with her family.
Near Rachel's property, there was another cottage.
It belonged to a woman named Dorothy Freeman.
Dorothy and her husband Stanley lived in Massachusetts, but spent every summer on Southport.
They loved to sail and spend time on the water.
Their son, Stanley Jr, gave them Rachel Carson's book The Sea Around Us as a gift shortly after it came out.
Dorothy and Stanley both read it.
And loved it.
So it very much connected with some interests that they already had. in nature and in the outdoors.
So that when Rachel Carson bought a piece of land near them, they were very excited.
In 1952, Dorothy Freeman wrote to Rachel Carson to welcome her to the island.
And Rachel Carson wrote back.
Dear Mrs Freeman, what a charming and thoughtful greeting from our Southport neighbors to be.
Do come to see us.
We look forward to knowing you.
Dorothy and Stanley Freeman visited Rachel Carson at her new cottage.
They went for the day and had a tide pool outing and apparently Carson showed them things and perhaps looked at things under the microscope.
And apparently they had a pretty magical day.
Dorothy, who was 55, and Rachel, who was nine years younger, immediately connected.
They realized they had a lot in common.
They were both taking care of their mothers.
They both loved animals and the ocean.
And they both loved Southport Island.
In between Freeman's cottage and the place where Carson was building hers.
There was undeveloped land.
So it was just forest.
And there was a lot of that kind of land on the island at that point.
It was much less developed.
So it was kind of a magical place.
And that is definitely how both Carson and Freeman experienced it.
When the summer was over, they each prepared to return to their winter homes.
Rachel was about to start work on a new book, and Dorothy sent Rachel a goodbye note.
Rachel responded.
I too feel a strong bond of common interests and that we have the same feeling about many things.
I think that they understood that there was something special between them.
They kept writing to each other.
What were those first letters like between them?
They had just gotten to know each other.
There's definitely this great interest and they want to know each other.
Carson says something like you know.
I could just finish my book if I wrote Dear Dorothy on every page.
You know, she's interested in her.
She feels like she's this ideal reader of her work.
They talked about music and literature.
Dorothy told Rachel that she had reread her books after meeting her and that she still loved them.
She asked Rachel about the books and Rachel responded I had no formal training in biology until my second year of college.
Yet I had felt at home with wild creatures all my life, and I loved the ocean with a purely vicarious love, long before I had seen it.
They wrote about Southport, and Rachel described tide pool outings she had been on right after Dorothy left the island.
She felt like Dorothy was would understand her excitement about the plants and small creatures she'd found when the water pulled back.
She described it as almost like a different world and wrote, I wished you were there too.
You would have enjoyed it so.
She also wrote, May I tell you that every one of your letters has given me a great deal of pleasure.
It seems as though I had known you for years instead of weeks.
For time doesn't matter when two people think and feel in the same way about so many things.
They often wrote to each other about birds, especially one bird, the veery, which Rachel wrote had an unearthly quality.
So the viri has this really interesting two-toned call where it sounds like it's two voices happening at the same time.
You can't really wrap your head around that, how that happens.
But part of its beauty lies in the fact that you cannot understand it.
And they had this experience of the viri is wondrous.
Whenever one of them heard the viri, she would describe it in her letters.
And they talked about wanting to hear it together.
Rachel wrote When finally, I became the sea's biographer, the sea brought me recognition and what the world calls success.
It brought me to Southport.
It gave me you.
So now the sea means something to me that it never meant before.
And even the title of the book has a new and personal significance.
The Sea Around Us.
I'm Phoebe Judge, and this is love.
We'll be right back.
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Dorothy Freeman and Rachel Carson wrote to each other several times a week.
And one thing that they talk about in the letters is how they don't really understand this love that they feel for each other.
So they talk about how crazy and intense their love is, but that they just don't get it.
Like, what is this thing?
How is this happening?
And so, for example, they say this is Carson.
Again she says I feel such a joyous surge of wonder every time.
I stop to think how, in such a dark time and when I least expected it, Something so lovely and richly satisfying came into my life.
And they talk about their love as this, like, experience of wonder a whole bunch.
And they often use the same language of wonder to talk about nature and to talk about their love.
Tell me a little bit about your grandmother, Dorothy Freeman.
Who was she?
Well, she was just always so curious and wanting to learn and get to know people better from their own point of view.
From their own perspective.
Martha Freeman, Dorothy Freeman's granddaughter.
She was the best friend I've ever had.
She was just very interested in my life out in the world in the 1970s, my college years.
She and I bonded around the natural world, and we both love reading and music.
Though probably in the 70s, my music was different than her music.
Martha says her grandmother Dorothy was more comfortable in her own skin than anyone Martha has ever met.
And that she was someone who, quote, had a real talent for friendship.
And she loved to write.
But she didn't have professional outlets for that.
Her primary writing outlet was in correspondents.
She was valedictorian of her class.
She went on to a teaching college and taught home economics for a while.
In 1924, Dorothy married Stanley Freeman and stopped working.
She had a son, Stanley Jr.
The family spent the winters in Massachusetts and the summers on Southport.
Dorothy's grandparents bought the cottage in the 1880s and she'd spent every summer of her life there.
Rachel Carson was impressed by how much Dorothy knew about Southport and the natural world around them.
Rachel and Dorothy came up with their own names for things like the woods that separated their cottages.
They call this area the Lost Woods and it's this a space of woods and moss and berries and green, and this place where they feel the wonder of nature and they feel the wonder of their love altogether.
Part of what I find so compelling about their story Is this way that they feel this love that you know they can't quite understand.
That doesn't seem to fit into social scripts right of either heterosexual, straight love or just like a friendship right.
It doesn't seem to fit into either of those things for them.
And they're able to see it as beautiful because of how they feel that same wonder at nature.
And then they go on to just create this kind of language that helps them keep affirming this love, keep living it terms like starry and stardust.
And that's a way of describing these moments of beauty and wonder that they don't really know how to explain.
So like when one of them hears Vires in a special place, you know they will say it was very starry right.
It was another moment of stardust.
In one exchange of letters, Dorothy and Rachel had told each other about birdsong they'd each heard near their winter homes.
Rachel wrote...
I thought the whole episode pretty starry, beginning with the fact that while I was in Rock Creek Park listening to Veres and wishing for you, you were walking along your road listening to wood thrushes and wishing for me.
About a year after they'd first met, Rachel Carson, who'd always written about the natural world, began to write a long essay about wonder.
Where she talks about why it's so important to our lives.
Because it helps you be attuned to beauty and pleasure and meaning that is outside or maybe in tension with our social ideas of what makes us happy.
A social world that's telling us you find happiness through buying things, through getting married and buying a house, this world of consumption.
And so she thinks, wonder is this really important thing for us to be able to feel throughout our lives, so that we can remain attuned to what actually makes us happy, what actually gives us meaning, in contrast to what society tells us gives meaning?
For the first year, Rachel and Dorothy only saw each other in person a couple of times.
And there's something about Carson and Freeman writing these long letters where they pour out their thoughts, which create a different kind of relationship, I think.
Writing the letters was a way of writing their own story.
Rachel wrote to Dorothy.
It may well be that the enforced separation and the necessity of writing instead of speaking have contributed to the depth of love and understanding.
I mean, in some ways, it's a much more private relationship.
The act of the relationship is being played out. in a solo environment.
You're reading the letter alone.
You're writing the letter alone.
It is.
Yeah, so Carson is at home reading this letter from Freeman on her own in her room, maybe with her cat, probably with her cat Jeffy.
And Freeman also would sit there.
She would describe it sometimes like sitting there with the letter from Carson, maybe looking at Carson's photo.
Their letters could be several pages long.
In one letter, Rachel wrote...
I thought if I'd use this paper, I could trap myself into being brief.
But here I go spilling over to another sheet.
They also used this term apple to describe a letter.
So when they would write letters to each other, one letter would be one suitable for reading out loud to everyone, right?
So Rachel could read it to her mother.
Dorothy could read it to Stanley, right?
And then they'd tuck in another letter, a second letter, and that was the apple, the special letter that was just for the other person.
Sometimes Dorothy read Rachel's letters to her husband.
Rachel told her.
It means so very much to me to know that you have such an understanding, loving and wonderful husband.
She wrote, I want him to know what you mean to me.
Dorothy and Rachel also destroyed some of their letters, especially in the beginning.
We don't have any of the letters Dorothy wrote in the first year after they met.
Rachel burned them.
When they wanted the other one to destroy a letter, they would say it was meant for the strongbox.
They never quite say it in the letters what they're worried about.
But I assume you know that they didn't want to show these intimate feelings to other people and that they experienced them as private and intimate feelings.
And both wanted to shield them from an intrusive or maybe shaming gaze.
And also, you know, like any intimate relationship, you want to keep it.
You know there's something important about keeping it intimate.
But there's a letter from Carson telling Freeman, like, you know...
I want to call you.
I really want to talk to you.
And essentially referring to the fact that they've been in communication so much and saying like I'll call this night and you can make up some excuse about what it's about, so that it doesn't seem like they're talking to each other all the time, you know.
So I think you see in their letters a sense that they knew that they had this intensely crazy love and they knew that in some sense the outside world couldn't see it, that if they showed it they would be seen as inappropriate and some of the magic, i think, would have been lost for them.
Um, and so they kept it magical and mysterious and enjoyed the mystery of it.
In february 1958 rachel told dorothy about a new project she was working on.
They often talked about rachel's work.
Rachel told Dorothy she thought this new book project was important.
But Dorothy didn't like it.
And this is really the moment when they have the most tension in their relationship.
We'll be right back.
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We don't know exactly what Dorothy told Rachel about her new book.
Many of her letters are missing.
But we do know that in the summer of 1958 Rachel Carson was trying to convince her that the work she was doing was worthwhile.
She wrote, Rachel Carson was working on a book that would be titled Silent Spring.
She referred to it in one letter as the poison book.
She had started investigating an insect spraying program by the federal government that was meant to eradicate insects like the fire ant.
Plants and wildlife, including birds, were dying from the sprays and it could be dangerous for people.
So what Carson saw was that the chemical industry was promoting the quote unquote insect problem so that they framed things like the fire ant as being this devastating threat that needed to be eradicated.
And what she believed was that none of this was actually necessary, that the chemical industry was selling this idea to the American people, and especially to the government, that the insect problem was so vast and terrible that they needed these chemicals to control it so they could like be happy and comfortable.
And she realized that no one was really writing about this who had any kind of real platform to.
At first, Rachel Carson didn't want to write about the spraying programs.
She didn't think of herself as an investigative journalist.
So she tried to convince other journalists to take on the story.
Lita Maxwell says Silent Spring was very different from Rachel Carson's previous books.
She is mounting a large-scale critique of an industry, the chemical industry, that And really she's mounting a large-scale critique of capitalism.
She's saying that the way we are living is dangerous to our lives of happiness, right?
That it's killing us.
She'd never written anything combative in that way, nor had she written anything that was like a call to action to the public, which this was as well.
Rachel told Dorothy that she wanted the book to be Simple and clean and strong and sharp as a sword, for it has work to do.
She called it Silent Spring in reference to the idea of a future spring when no birds were singing.
So she opened the book by telling what she called a fable for tomorrow.
And it's this pretty arresting description of a springtime when you don't hear any animals and when there's no birds singing in the sky and inviting us to imagine what that would be like.
Maybe we think that ordinarily birds don't really matter to our life.
But what if there were no birds?
And what was Dorothy Freeman's concern about the book?
The beauty of the natural world was very connected for them to the beauty of their love.
And as Carson starts writing about kind of the devastation of the natural world by insecticides and pesticides.
I think that Freeman saw that as kind of a turn away from their love, as a turn away from the beauty of the natural world and into this kind of dark terrain.
So I think that was her main worry about it.
I think she also worried about the reception, like how Carson would be treated upon publishing it, like the attacks that might come on her.
Rachel wrote to Dorothy if I kept silent, I could never again listen to a very song without overwhelming self-reproach.
But she also understood what Dorothy was saying.
And Carson says a little bit later that summer something like you know.
Now I understand that.
You know I will just try to work on this and be done as quickly as I can so I can move on to more beautiful terrain, something along those lines.
So they have this kind of tension, and it's not resolved that summer.
But later, Dorothy changed her mind about the book.
I'm not totally sure why, but I think we see Freeman come around to the idea that writing about the devastation caused by insecticides and pesticides and calling for political action is actually an outgrowth of their love.
In 1962—
Excerpts of Silent Spring were published in three installments in The New Yorker before the book's publication.
And those excerpts on their own started to create kind of a controversy, a firestorm.
The chemical industry was activated.
They wrote some letters to Carson's publisher threatening lawsuits to The New Yorker, threatening a lawsuit if they published the last installment online.
And the response of the New Yorker was like, whatever.
You can, you know, sure, sue us.
This is all factually correct.
Because Carson had really done her homework and gotten all of her facts checked.
Not only you know she herself had been very careful, but also asked other scientists to check her work essentially and make sure she had it exactly right.
The chemical industry tried hard to discredit her.
The New York Times later wrote that their response was quote more aggressive than anyone anticipated.
One man called Rachel Carson a, quote, fanatic defender of the cult of the balance of nature.
And another asked, quote, why a spinster with no children was so concerned about genetics.
She was accused of being a communist and of working for the Soviet Union.
But when Silent Spring was published in 1962, it became an immediate bestseller.
People were very interested in how they could make change, right?
This was actually something where people could take action right away on the local level, and they did.
While she had been working on Silent Spring, Rachel Carson was diagnosed with breast cancer.
And through this Freeman has turned into a huge supporter of Carson in the book and really supports her as she is dealing with breast cancer and defending the book at the same time.
After Silent Spring came out, then-President John F Kennedy put together a presidential committee to investigate pesticides.
And in 1963, Rachel Carson testified before a Senate subcommittee.
At this point, she'd had surgery and radiation treatment.
She had trouble walking to her seat in front of the committee.
She called for the creation of a bureau that would regulate chemicals.
And we saw the fulfillment of that later in 1970 with the creation of the EPA.
And people were very responsive to her.
The American public at large listened closely.
And acted, which is you know.
This doesn't happen very often with a book that gets published.
You know where you call for action, as Carson did, and the American public responded.
After her testimony, Rachel Carson went to Southport for the summer, where she spent time with Dorothy.
And at the end of that summer they go to watch The Monarchs together again.
That, you know, flew en masse as part of their migration.
And they saw them while they were sitting on these rocks on Southport.
And then Rachel left Southport.
But she wrote a letter to Dorothy about that morning.
And she says Dear one.
For me, it was one of the loveliest of the summer's hours, and all the details will remain in my memory.
That blue September sky, the sounds of wind in the spruces and surf on the rocks, the gulls busy with their foraging, alighting with deliberate grace, the distant views of Griffith's Head and Todd Point, today so clearly etched, though once half seen in swirling fog.
But most of all I shall remember the monarchs, 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.
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 its 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.
About four months later, In January 1964, Stanley Freeman, Dorothy's husband, had just put out seeds for the birds in their garden and was sitting by the kitchen window watching them when he died of a heart attack.
Over the next couple of weeks, Dorothy and Rachel wrote to each other and talked on the phone a lot.
Dorothy told Rachel that when she woke up in the middle of the night she still thought Stan was lying next to her.
She said it was a lonely life.
They planned to take a trip to California together, and they discussed whether Dorothy should move.
Rachel told her, My home is yours at any time.
But then Rachel wrote Now with the uncertainties as to my own future.
I know you should not build any long-range or permanent plans around me.
But darling...
Let's resolve that we're going to make use of every possible bit of time to be together.
In February, Dorothy visited Rachel, but afterwards she wrote to Rachel You needed to be lifted, and about all I could offer was depression and periods of sadness.
At this point there's not a lot of letters from Rachel, but we know they spoke on the phone And Dorothy still sent her letters, sometimes every day.
And then they talked again about what to do with all of their letters.
Dorothy wrote That the letters were quote constantly on her mind because of how they might portray their relationship.
And she says, I really am uneasy about them.
She told Rachel about a famous journalist, Dorothy Thompson, whose personal letters and diaries had been published after her death.
Dorothy had read an article about it and wrote in a letter, And there was one statement that really frightened me.
I don't want to put it in writing, but I'll just say that the same implication could be implied about our correspondence.
The article had described how Dorothy Thompson, who was married, had written about having feelings for another woman.
Dorothy wrote to Rachel that So, dear, please, please use the strong box quickly.
We know even such volume could have its meanings to people who are looking for ideas.
Then Dorothy went to see Rachel.
When she got back, Dorothy wrote to Rachel.
This morning I went to the drawer where I have letters from you to find the one about the monarch butterflies.
Dear, it is one of the loveliest bits you ever wrote.
And the day after, on April 14th, Dorothy wrote another letter.
My waking thought is always, how did Rachel sleep?
I can be sure you wake up to birdsong.
The letter ends, all my love, always, Dorothy.
And Carson never got that because she died that same day on April 14th.
She was 56. she left behind an envelope marked Dorothy Freeman.
In it were three notes written over several months.
The first note read Darling, I have been coming to the realization that suddenly there might be no chance to speak to you again, and it seems I must leave a word of goodbye.
What do I most want to say?
I think that you must have no regrets in my behalf.
I can feel that I have achieved most of what I wish to do.
Her second note read, My sadness for you increases, darling.
One by one, those you love are being taken from you.
May there be new sources of strength, dear one.
And her final note read Not long ago, I sat late in my study and played Beethoven and achieved a feeling of real peace and even happiness.
Never forget, dear one, how deeply I have loved you all these years.
Rachel.
Later that summer, Dorothy scattered Rachel's ashes at Southport Island at the spot where they had seen the monarchs.
Even though Dorothy had asked Rachel to destroy all of their letters, Rachel had kept them.
She made sure they went to Dorothy after she died.
Dorothy died 14 years later, at 80, on Southport Island.
When she died, she left her granddaughter Martha a suitcase.
So it was sort of a 1950s vintage suitcase, kind of brown plaid.
It was full of Dorothy and Rachel's letters.
How many letters were in it?
I think the total collection that she had was about 750 letters, both hers and Rachel's, and they were just all in their envelopes in order by year.
And inside they both used quite lovely stationery.
They were pale green or pale blue or cream, and sometimes note cards that always had some kind of flowers or animals or trees or buds or some little vision of nature on the front of the note cards.
Before Dorothy died she told Martha that maybe someday she would like to do something with the letters, but Martha says she didn't really know where to start.
So for the next 12 years or so she just held on to the suitcase.
Every time she moved she brought the suitcase with her and then she took time off work and started going through the letters.
In 1994, she published a book of Rachel and Dorothy's letters titled Always Rachel.
Today, Martha still goes to Dorothy's cottage on Southport.
She's been there every summer of her life, just like Dorothy.
She says she loves to sit on the porch in a rocking chair.
Rocking and watching and listening.
Instead of human beings being in the forefront of everything, you are the background.
It is the ocean, the ospreys, the gulls, the seals, the trees, the storms.
That is in the forefront.
And it's just, it's a wonder.
This Is Love is created by Lauren Spohr and me.
Nadia Wilson is our senior producer.
Katie Bishop is our supervising producer.
Our producers are Susanna Robertson, Jackie Sajico, Lily Clark, Lena Sillison, and Megan Kinane.
Our show is mixed and engineered by Veronica Simonetti.
You can learn more about the show on our website, thisislovepodcast.com, And you can sign up for our newsletter at thisislovepodcast.com slash newsletter.
Lita Maxwell's book is Rachel Carson and the Power of Queer Love.
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I'm Phoebe Judge, and this is love.
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Well, if you're anything like the average American, you probably spend about seven hours staring at a screen.
Nature Sunshine knows that contact with blue light is unavoidable.
That's why they've combined the skin-enhancing power of marine collagen and blue light, fighting lutein, to support your eyes and skin in a blue, light-filled world.
Experience more radiant skin and proven eye protection with Nature Sunshine New Marine Glow, the only collagen product clinically proven to support eye and skin health and defend against blue light.
Try Nature Sunshine New Marine Glow now at naturesunshine.com.
