The Log From the Sea of Cortez (Penguin Classics) (29 page)

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Authors: John Steinbeck

BOOK: The Log From the Sea of Cortez (Penguin Classics)
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Now that we were engaged in headland navigating, Tiny’s and Sparky’s work at the wheel had improved, and except when they chased a swordfish (which was fairly often) we were not off course more than two or three times during their watch. They had abandoned the compass with relief and blue water was no longer thrust upon them.
 
At about this time it was discovered that Tex was getting fat, and inasmuch as he was to be married soon after his return, we decided to diet him and put him in a marrying condition. He protested feebly when we cut off his food, and for three days he sneaked food and stole food and cozened us out of food. During the three days of his diet, he probably ate twice as much as he did before, but the idea that he was starving made him so hungry that at the end of the third day he said he couldn’t stand it any longer, and he ate a dinner that nearly killed him. Actually, with his thefts of food he had picked up a few pounds during his diet, but always afterwards he shuddered at the memory of those three days. He said, “A man doesn’t feel his best when he is starving” and he asked what good it would do him to be married if he were weak and sick.
 
At five P.M. on March 29 we arrived at San Lucas Cove and anchored outside. The cove, a deep salt-water lagoon, guarded by a large sandspit, has an entrance that might mave been deep enough for us to enter, but the current is strong and there were no previous soundings available. Besides, Tony was nervous about taking his boat into such places. There was another reason for anchoring outside; in the open Gulf where the breeze moves there are no bugs, while if one anchors in still water near the mangroves little visitors come and spend the night. There is one small, beetle-like black fly which crawls down into bed with you and has a liking for very tender places. We had suffered from this fellow when the wind blew over the mangroves to us. This bug hates light, but finds security and happiness under the bedding, nestling over one’s kidneys, munching contentedly. His bite leaves a fiery itch; his collective soul is roasting in Hell, if we have any influence in the court of Heaven. After one experience with him, we anchored always a little farther out.
 
When we came to San Lucas, the tide was flowing and the little channel was a mill-race. It would be necessary to wait for the morning tide. We were eager to see whether on this sandbar, so perfectly situated, we could not find amphioxus, that most primitive of vertebrates. As we dropped anchor a large shark cruised about us, his fin high above the water. We shot at him with a pistol and one shot went through his fin. He cut away like a razor blade and we could hear the hiss of the water. What incredible speed sharks can make when they hurry! We wonder how their greatest speed compares with that of a porpoise. The variations in speed among individuals of these fast-swimming species must be very great too. There must be incredible sharks, like Man o’ War or Charlie Paddock, which make other sharks seem slow.
 
That night we hung the light over the side again and captured some small squid, the usual
heteronereis,
a number of free-swimming crustacea, quantities of crab larvae and the transparent ribbon-fish again. The boys developed a technique for catching flying fish: one jabbed at it with a net, making it fly into the net of another. But even in the nets they were not caught, for they struggled and fluttered away with ease. That night we had a mild celebration of some minor event which did not seem important enough to remember. The pans of animals were still lying on the deck and one of our members, confusing Epsom salts with cracker-crumbs, tried to anesthetize a large pan of holothurians with cracker-meal. The resulting thick paste seemed to have no narcotic qualities whatever.
 
Late, late in the night we recalled that Horace says fried shrimps and African snails will cure a hangover. Neither was available. And we wonder whether this classical remedy for a time-bridging ailment has been prescribed and tried since classical times. We do not know what snail he refers to, or whether it is a marine snail or an escargot. It is too bad that such imaginative remedies have been abandoned for the banalities of antiacids, heart stimulants, and analgesics. The Bacchic mystery qualified and nullified by a biochemistry which is almost but not quite yet a mystic science. Horace suggests that wine of Cos taken with these shrimps and snails guarantees the remedy. Perhaps it would. In that case, his remedy is in one respect like those unguents used in witchcraft which combine such items as dried babies’ brains, frog-eyes, lizards’ tongues, and mold from a hanged man’s skull with a quantity of good raw opium, and thus serve to stimulate the imagination and the central nervous system at the same time. In our pained discussion at San Lucas Cove we found we had no snails nor shrimps nor wine of Cos. We tore the remedy down to its fundamentals, and decided that it was a good strong dose of proteins and alcohol, so we substituted a new compound—fried fish and a dash of medicinal whisky—and it did the job.
 
The use of euphemism in national advertising is giving the hangover a bad name. “Over-indulgence” it is called. There is a curious nastiness about over-indulgence. We would not consider overindulging. The name is unpleasant, and the word “over” indicates that one shouldn’t have done it. Our celebration had no such implication. We did
not
drink too much. We drank just enough, and we refuse to profane a good little time of mild inebriety with that slurring phrase “over-indulgence.”
 
There was a reference immediately above to the medicine chest. On leaving Monterey, it may be remembered, we had exhausted the medicine, but no sooner had we put to sea when it was discovered that each one of us, with the health of the whole party in mind, had laid in auxiliary medicine for emergencies. We had indeed, when the good-will of all was assembled, a medicine chest which would not have profaned a fair-sized bar. And the emergencies did occur. Who is to say that an emergency of the soul is not worse than a bad cold? What was good enough for Li-Po was good enough for us. There have been few enough immortals who did not love wine; offhand we cannot think of any and we do not intend to try very hard. The American Indians and the Australian Bushmen are about the only great and intellectual peoples who have not developed an alcoholic liquor and a cult to take care of it. There are, indeed, groups among our own people who have abandoned the use of alcohol, due no doubt to Indian or Bushman blood, but we do not wish to claim affiliation with them. One can imagine such a specimen of Bushman reading this journal and saying, “Why, it was all drinking—beer—and at San Lucas Cove, whisky.” So might a night-watchman cry out, “People sleep all the time!” So might a blind man complain, “Among some people there is a pernicious and wicked practice called ‘seeing.’ This eventually causes death and should be avoided.” Actually, with few tribal exceptions, our race has a triumphant alcoholic history and no definite symptoms of degeneracy can be attributed to it. The theory that alcohol is a poison was too easily and too blindly accepted. So it is to some individuals; sugar is poison to others and meat to others. But to the race in general, alcohol has been an anodyne, a warmer of the soul, a strengthener of muscle and spirit. It has given courage to cowards and has made very ugly people attractive. There is a story told of a Swedish tramp, sitting in a ditch on Midsummer Night. He was ragged and dirty and drunk, and he said to himself softly and in wonder, “I am rich and happy and perhaps a little beautiful.”
 
20
 
MARCH 30
 
At eight-thirty in the morning the tide was ebbing, uncovering the sand-bar and a great expanse of tidal sand-flat. This flat was made up to a large extent of the broken shells of mollusks. In digging, we found many small clams and a few smooth
Venus
-like clams. We took one very large male fiddler crab. “Sloppy-guts,” the
Cerianthus,
was very common here. There were numbers of hermit crabs and many of the swimming crabs with bright-blue claws. These crabs
65
are eaten by Mexicans and are delicious. They swim very rapidly through the water. When we pursued them to the shallows they tried to escape for a time, but soon settled to the bottom and raised their claws to a position not unlike that of a defensive boxer. Their pinch was very painful. When captured and put into a collecting bucket they vented their fury on one another; pinched-off legs and claws littered the buckets on our return. These crabs do not seem to come out of the water as the grapsoids do. Removed from the water, they very soon weaken and lose their fight. Moreover, they do not die as rapidly in fresh water as do most other crabs. Perhaps, living in the lagoons which sometimes must be almost brackish, they have achieved a tolerance for fresh water greater than that of other crabs; greater indeed, although it is not much of a trick, than that of a certain biologist who shall be nameless.
 
This varying threshold of tolerance is always an astonishing thing.
 
Amphioxus ordinarily lives on the seaward side of a sand-bar and in sub-tidal water; or, at least, in sand bared by only the lowest of tides. We dug for them here and took only a few weak ones. It was not a very low tide and these were very possibly stragglers. It is probable that an extremely low tide would expose a level in which a great many of them live. The capture of these animals is exciting and requires speed. They are perfectly streamlined and partly transparent. Also, they are extremely nervous. Sometimes if the sand is struck with a shovel they will jump out and then frantically wriggle to get under the sand again—which they readily do. They are able to move through sand and even under it with great rapidity. We turned over the sand and leaped at them before they could escape. There used to be very many of them at Balboa Beach in Southern California, but channel dredging and perhaps the great number of motor boats have made them rare. And they are very interesting animals, being almost the dividing point between vertebrates and invertebrates. Usually one to three inches long and shuttle-shaped, they are perfectly built to slip through the sand without resistance.
 
The bar was rich with clams, many small
Chione,
and some small razor clams. We extracted the
Cerianthus
from their sloppy casings and found a great many tiny commensal sipunculid worms
66
in the smooth inner linings of the cases. These were able to extend themselves so far that they seemed like hairs, or to retract until they were like tiny peanuts. We did not find commensal pea crabs in the linings, as we had thought we would.
 
San Lucas Cove is nearly slough-like. The water gets very warm and probably very stale. It is exposed to a deadly sun and is so shallow that the water is soupy. This very quality of probable high salinity and warmth made it very difficult to preserve the Cerianthus in an expanded state. The small bunodids are easily anesthetized in Epsom salts, but
Cerianthus,
after six to eight hours of concentrated Epsom-salts solution, and even standing in pans under the hot sun, were able to retract rapidly and violently by expelling water from the aboral pore when the preserving liquid touched them. Sooner or later we will find the perfect method for anesthetizing anemones, but it has not yet been found. There is hope that cold may work as the anesthetic, if we can force absorption of formalin while the animals are relaxed with dry ice. But a great deal of experimenting is necessary, for if too cold they do not receive the formalin, and if too warm they retract on contact with it.
 
Back on board at about eleven-thirty we sailed for San Carlos Bay. We did not plan to stop at Santa Rosalia. It is a fairly large town which has long been supported by copper mines in the neighborhood, under the control of a French company. A little feeling of hurry was creeping upon us, for by now we had begun to see the magnitude of the job we had undertaken, and to realize that with the limited time and the more than limited equipment and personnel, we could not make much of a job of it. Our time was going fast. Much as Sparky and Tiny wished to continue their research and shore collecting at Santa Rosalia, we sailed on past it. And it looked, from the sea at least, to be less Mexican than other towns. Perhaps that was because we knew it was run by a French company. A Mexican town grows out of the ground. You cannot conceive its never having been there. But Santa Rosalia looked “built.” There were industrial works of large size visible, loading trestles, and piles of broken rock. The mountains rose behind the town, burned almost white, and the green about the houses and the red roofs were in startling contrast. Sparky had the wheel as we went by, and his left hand was heavy. It required a definite effort of will for him to keep the course off shore.
 
At about six P.M. we came to San Carlos Bay, a curious land-locked curve with an inner shallow bay. There is good anchorage for small craft in the outer bay, with five to seven fathoms of water. The inner bay, or lagoon, has a sand beach on all sides. We intended to collect on the heavy boulders on the inner, or eastern, shore. There might be, we thought, a contrasting fauna to that of the tide flats of morning. This beach was piled high with rotting seaweed, left by some fairly recent storm perhaps. Or possibly this beach is at the end of some current-cycle, so that a high tide deposits great amounts of torn weed. There is such a beach at San Antonio del Mar on the western shore of Lower California, about sixty miles south of Ensenada. The debris from ships from hundreds of miles around is piled on this beach—mountains of sea-washed boxes and crates, logs and lumber, great whitened piles of it, mixed in with bottles and cans and pieces of clothing. It is the termination of some great sweeping in the Pacific.

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