I don’t remember exactly when I first read Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring. But it must have been in high school (1972 or ’73), probably during my days as a budding young journalist and editor of my high school newspaper.
That was when I first started working on the craft of writing-to-explain. It’s really what you do as a journalist. At the time, the Vietnam war still going on, Nixon was in office, a lot of anti-big-business/big money sentiment was lurking about, and new federal legislation was bringing attention to environmental issues. My 18-year-old mind latched on to all of this, but somehow the environmental issues poked through as most engaging. Or at least, that’s how I think it all came together.
What I remember more clearly is how I was struck by Carson’s writing. By both her subject and her craft. Deep expertise in environmental science combined with a gift for putting words together in ways that enlightened, and made you think differently.
If only I could do what Carson did, with the same attention to craft of writing, and to environmental science.
So I went off to Michigan State University in East Lansing, Michigan with a half-baked idea of becoming a journalist focusing on the environment.
Then, of course, things happened.
I met a crew. Smart, creative, working-class guys who were intent on blazing new paths. I started working at the State News, the university’s daily newspaper (a large and well-respected enterprise) along with some of that crew. Also met Jamie, another aspiring journalist and the woman who would soon become my spouse and closest friend (and still is). Officially made literature my major focus of study to feed my appetite for understanding the craft of writing. Hung out with journalists, poets, and an expanding blazing-new-paths crew.
I wrote a lot and became an editor for the newspaper. Local politics, city government, university news. My literature focus gave me the opportunity to write two long interviews with the famed Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges, who was an artist-in-residence at the university at that time. I was really learning to write-to-explain by working across a lot of subjects.
Jamie and I married a week after she graduated. I had a couple of quarters of classes yet to complete, so we spent the summer back on campus where I took more literature classes.
Somehow – it’s foggy how this all came about – I got admitted to a program which sponsors Congressional internships. We were going to Washington. My internship was with a joint committee which tracked progress on all manner of environmental legislation, and my job was to report on and write about it for congressional staff.
It became the one moment my writing and reporting skills came together with my interest in the environment.
So we moved. Jamie used her journalism talent to score a job working for a national association. I spent my days in the halls of congress, attending committee hearings and writing stuff that ended up in an internal congressional newsletter.
But I also somehow convinced someone at the university to let me do an independent study for credit (because I really needed it, and had no intention of going back to campus for classes). I did a long look at the literary criticism of a set of 20th Century American writers – Faulkner, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Dos Passos, Ezra Pound. I distinctly remember sitting in the main reading room of the Library of Congress, having books delivered to me from the stacks, to read at a desk under the Library’s iconic dome.
I also wrote about my Washington experience for The Chronicle (“The Lansing magazine that never was, is.”), a venture initiated by my closest friends, housemates and peers at The State News.
This entrepreneurial crew were some of the State News’ best reporters and editors (several of whom would go on to long, successful careers in journalism) who opted to leave the paper over a pay dispute for student reporters. The crew knew how to make good trouble and stand their ground. And they were also good at negotiating exits; the university provided seed funding to start the monthly magazine.
I still have copies. The Chronicle had a short life – a few issues, before its principals all graduated and went on to start their careers – but was an incredible piece of work, looking back. A combination of long-form reporting, literature, movie and music reviews, cartoons and artful illustrations. A New Yorker Magazine for Lansing, the gritty capital of Michigan. The first issue in October, 1976, for example, included a long interview with the writer Jim Harrison – three years before the Michigan native’s release of Legends of the Fall. It also included my first report from Washington.
Under the headline “Can Congress Be Made to Disappear?” the article was an exercise in meaning-making through reporting and writing. It starts with my posing a facetious theory that if everyone simply forgot about something, it would not exist. It would disappear. I then suggest that presidential candidates Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, in the month before the 1976 election, were both engaging in this fantasy by avoiding substantive discussion about how Congress works, and explaining their approach to getting things done with Congress. Ford said “Congress won’t work with me.” Carter said “I can work with Congress.” I found both unsatisfying and suggested they felt no need for Congress, and that they alone could get things done. As if Congress could be disappeared. (It’s not lost on me how this resonates with today).
I spent most of the article explaining to readers a bit about how Congress really operates, using the last days of the 94th Congress and its efforts around amendments to the Clean Air Act as my example. It was based on my work as an intern. As (officially) Congressional staff I had access to all the committee meetings in the House, the Senate and when they met in joint settings. I distinctly remember many of these being packed meeting rooms, where I sat on the floor and members of Congress politely stepped over my outstretched legs to get to their seats. I also recall walking past gaggles of lobbyists so I could get into meeting rooms which they were prohibited from entering.
The central character in my story was then Sen. Edmund Muskie (D-Maine). Muskie led the effort to bring together both the House and Senate to agree on a path to pass more meaningful amendments to the Clean Air Act in order to better regulate the auto industry (among other things). He and his team were battling powerful auto-industry lobbyists, the not-always-collaborative working relationship between the House and Senate, the political interests of opposing, powerful Senators, and a very complex set of policy issues.
Then it was the final days of the 94th Congress. Muskie was working to address issues between the House and Senate versions of the legislation in a Joint Congressional Conference. He wanted to get the legislation to a vote on the Senate floor before the Senate adjourned to close out the 94th session of Congress. The Joint Conference staff put together compromises between House and Senate versions – some in handwriting – and delivered them to the Senate one day before planned adjournment. On the final day, two Senators staged a 7-hour filibuster in protest, saying they did not have time to consider the Joint Conference work. The House was doing the same – moving down a path toward adjournment. Everyone knew that running out the clock would kill the movement for the amendments.
Muskie then made one last pitch on the Senate floor. “He called their action to block a mere vote on the issue an abortion of the legislative process. He said the Senate was caving in to the whims of the auto industry,” I wrote. “He said it was irresponsible not to stay in Washington a few more days to finish business on a major piece of legislation with more than two years of work behind it.” He threatened to not lead efforts to amend the Clean Air Act in the next Congress.
“He then lost, by three votes, a move which would have delayed adjournment.”
At the close of the article I concluded: “I think [Ford and Carter] want to forget Congress because Congress is so frustrating…The point is – Congress IS frustrating. It reeks frustration. [Ford and Carter] should…explain to us that they understand it. Instead, they try to make us forget about it.”
I share all of this detail for two reasons. The first is my writing craft. I see in “Can Congress Be Made to Disappear?” a structure that I continue to lean on today. A premise, a narrative, and then synthesis into some meaning. And I am very much an active agent in the construction of the narrative and the meaning-making. It’s me. I’m not pretending to be invisible to the reader. It’s a tone and style much like what I do here, in this space.
The second reason is the subject matter. Until my work here this past year, the work I did in Washington (through June, 1977) was the last time my writing and environmental interests worked in concert. Life happens. Journalism led to technical writing, then an MBA, then work in technology in support of learning and knowledge sharing, consulting and finally teaching and…retirement.
Today, I kinda feel like that 20-something sitting on the floor of a conference room. It’s no longer House and Senate members, but folks with deep expertise in the community, environmental justice and the ways the city of Evanston operates. And me, observing and trying to make sense.
So I feel a need to lean back into Rachel Carson. The gifted writer. The maker-of-good-trouble. The scientist and communicator whose work changed the way people think.
The photographs which accompany these posts are taken by me, and show different settings and views of Evanston (where I live). It is a visual reminder that this is the most important setting for belonging and contributing to community: our neighborhoods, our cities.
Jeff Merrell 