The Log From the Sea of Cortez (Penguin Classics) (38 page)

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Authors: John Steinbeck

BOOK: The Log From the Sea of Cortez (Penguin Classics)
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All afternoon we stowed and lashed equipment, set the corks in hundreds of glass tubes and wrapped them in paper toweling, screwed tight the caps of jars, tied down the skiffs, and finally dropped the hatch cover in place. We covered the bookcase with triple tarpaulin, and one last time overcame the impulse to throw the Sea-Cow overboard. Then we were under way, sailing southward toward the Cape. The swordfish jumped in the afternoon light, flashing like heliographs in the distance. We took back our old watches that night, and the engine drummed happily and drove us through a calm sea. In the morning the tip of the Peninsula was on our right. Behind us the Gulf was sunny and calm, but out in the Pacific a heavy threatening line of clouds hung.
 
Then a crazy literary thing happened. As we came opposite the Point there was one great clap of thunder, and immediately we hit the great swells of the Pacific and the wind freshened against us. The water took on a gray tone.
 
29
 
APRIL 13
 
At three A.M. Pacific time we passed the light on the false cape and made our new course northward, and the sky was gray and threatening and the wind increased. The Gulf was blotted out for us—the Gulf that was thought and work and sunshine and play. This new world of the Pacific took hold of us and we thought again of an unseen person on the deckhouse, some kind of symbol person —to a sailor, a ghost, a premonition, a feeling in human form.
 
We could not yet relate the microcosm of the Gulf with the macrocosm of the sea. As we went northward the gray waves rolled up and the
Western Flyer
stubbed her nose into them and the white spray flew over us. The day passed and a new night came and the sea grew more stern. Now we plunged like a nervous horse, and no step could be taken without a steadying hand. The galley was in confusion, for a can of olive oil had leaped from its stand and flooded the floor. On the stove, the coffee pot slipped back and forth between its bars.
 
Over the surface of the heaving sea the birds flew landward, zigzagging to cover themselves in the wave troughs from the wind. The man at the wheel was the lucky one, for he had a grip against the pitching. He was closest to the boat and to the rising storm. He was the receiver, but also he was the giver and his hand was on the course.
 
What was the shape and size and color and tone of this little expedition? We slipped into a new frame and grew to be a part of it, related in some subtle way to the reefs and beaches, related to the little animals, to the stirring waters and the warm brackish lagoons. This trip had dimension and tone. It was a thing whose boundaries seeped through itself and beyond into some time and space that was more than all the Gulf and more than all our lives. Our fingers turned over the stones and we saw life that was like our life.
 
On the deckhouse we held the rails for support, and the blunt nose of the boat fought into the waves and the gray-green water struck us in the face. Some creative thing had happened, a real tempest in our small teapot minds. But boiling water still produces steam, whether in a watch-glass or in a turbine. It is the same stuff—weak and dissipating or explosive, depending on its use. The shape of the trip was an integrated nucleus from which weak strings of thought stretched into every reachable reality, and a reality which reached into us through our perceptive nerve trunks. The laws of thought seemed really one with the laws of things. There was some quality of music here, perhaps not to be communicated, but sounding clear and huge in our minds. The boat plunged and shook herself, and rivers of swirling water ran down the scuppers. Below in the hold, packed in jars, were thousands of little dead animals, but we did not think of them as trophies, as things cut off from the tide pools of the Gulf, but rather as drawings, incomplete and imperfect, of how it had been there. The real picture of how it had been there and how we had been there was in our minds, bright with sun and wet with sea water and blue or burned, and the whole crusted over with exploring thought. Here was no service to science, no naming of unknown animals, but rather—we simply liked it. We liked it very much. The brown Indians and the gardens of the sea, and the beer and the work, they were all one thing and we were that one thing too.
 
The
Western Flyer
hunched into the great waves toward Cedros Island, the wind blew off the tops of the whitecaps, and the big guy wire, from bow to mast, took up its vibration like the low pipe on a tremendous organ. It sang its deep note into the wind.
 
APPENDIX: ABOUT ED RICKETTS
 
Just about dusk one day in April 1948 Ed Ricketts stopped work in the laboratory in Cannery Row. He covered his instruments and put away his papers and filing cards. He rolled down the sleeves of his wool shirt and put on the brown coat which was slightly small for him and frayed at the elbows.
He wanted a steak for dinner and he knew just the market in New Monterey where he could get a fine one, well hung and tender.
He went out into the street that is officially named Ocean View Avenue and is known as Cannery Row. His old car stood at the gutter, a beat-up sedan. The car was tricky and hard to start. He needed a new one but could not afford it at the expense of other things.
Ed tinkered away at the primer until the ancient rusty motor coughed and broke into a bronchial chatter which indicated that it was running. Ed meshed the jagged gears and moved away up the street.
He turned up the hill where the road crosses the Southern Pacific Railways track. It was almost dark, or rather that kind of mixed light and dark which makes it very difficult to see. Just before the crossing the road takes a sharp climb. Ed shifted to second gear, the noisiest gear, to get up the hill. The sound of his motor and gears blotted out every other sound. A corrugated iron warehouse was on his left, obscuring any sight of the right of way.
The Del Monte Express, the evening train from San Francisco, slipped around from behind the warehouse and crashed into the old car. The cow-catcher buckled in the side of the automobile and pushed and ground and mangled it a hundred yards up the track before the train stopped.
Ed was conscious when they got him out of the car and laid him on the grass. A crowd had collected of course—people from the train and more from the little houses that hug the track.
In almost no time a doctor was there. Ed’s skull had a crooked look and his eyes were crossed. There was blood around his mouth, and his body was twisted, distorted—wrong, as though seen under an untrue lens.
The doctor got down on one knee and leaned over. The ring of people was silent.
Ed asked, “How bad is it?”
“I don’t know,” the doctor said. “How do you feel?”
“I don’t feel much of anything,” Ed said.
Because the doctor knew him and knew what kind of a man he was, he said, “That’s shock, of course.”
“Of course!” Ed said, and his eyes began to glaze.
They edged him onto a stretcher and took him to the hospital. Section hands pried his old car off the cow-catcher and pushed it aside, and the Del Monte Express moved slowly into the station at Pacific Grove, which is the end of the line.
Several doctors had come in and more were phoning, wanting to help because they all loved him. The doctors knew it was very serious, so they gave him ether and opened him up to see how bad it was. When they finished they knew it was hopeless. Ed was all messed up—spleen broken, ribs shattered, lungs punctured, concussion of the skull. It might have been better to let him go out under the ether, but the doctors could not give up, any more than could the people gathered in the waiting room of the hospital. Men who knew better began talking about miracles and how anything could happen. They reminded each other of cases of people who had got well when there was no reason to suppose they could. The surgeons cleaned Ed’s insides as well as possible and closed him up. Every now and then one of the doctors would go out to the waiting room, and it was like facing a jury. There were lots of people out there, sitting waiting, and their eyes all held a stone question.
The doctors said things like, “Doing as well as can be expected” and “We won’t be able to tell for some time but he seems to be making progress.” They talked more than was necessary, and the people sitting there didn’t talk at all. They just stared, trying to get adjusted.
The switchboard was loaded with calls from people who wanted to give blood.
The next morning Ed was conscious but very tired and groggy from ether and morphine. His eyes were washed out and he spoke with great difficulty. But he did repeat his first question.
“How bad is it?”
The doctor who was in the room caught himself just as he was going to say some soothing nonsense, remembering that Ed was his friend and that Ed loved true things and knew a lot of true things too, so the doctor said, “Very bad.”
Ed didn’t ask again. He hung on for a couple of days because his vitality was very great. In fact he hung on so long that some of the doctors began to believe the things they had said about miracles when they knew such a chance to be nonsense. They noted a stronger heartbeat. They saw improved color in his cheeks below the bandages. Ed hung on so long that some people from the waiting room dared to go home to get some sleep.
And then, as happens so often with men of large vitality, the energy and the color and the pulse and the breathing went away silently and quickly, and he died.
By that time the shock in Monterey had turned to dullness. He was dead and had to be got rid of. People wanted to get rid of him quickly and with dignity so they could think about him and restore him again.
On a small rise not far from the Great Tide Pool near Lighthouse Point there is a small chapel and crematory. Ed’s closed coffin was put in that chapel for part of an afternoon.
Naturally no one wanted flowers, but the greatest fear was that someone might say a speech or make a remark about him—good or bad. Luckily it was all over so quickly that the people who ordinarily make speeches were caught unprepared.
A large number of people drifted into the chapel, looked for a few moments at the coffin, and then walked away. No one wanted company. Everyone wanted to be alone. Some went to the beach by the Great Tide Pool and sat in the coarse sand and blindly watched the incoming tide creeping around the rocks and tumbling in over the seaweed.
A kind of anesthesia settled on the people who knew Ed Ricketts. There was not sorrow really but rather puzzled questions—what are we going to do? how can we rearrange our lives now? Everyone who knew him turned inward. It was a strange thing—quiet and strange. We were lost and could not find ourselves.
It is going to be difficult to write down the things about Ed Ricketts that must be written, hard to separate entities. And anyone who knew him would find it difficult. Maybe some of the events are imagined. And perhaps some very small happenings may have grown out of all proportion in the mind. And then there is the personal impact. I am sure that many people, seeing this account, will be sure to say, “Why, that’s not true. That’s not the way he was at all. He was this way and this.” And the speaker may go on to describe a person this writer did not know at all. But no one who knew him will deny the force and influence of Ed Ricketts. Everyone near him was influenced by him, deeply and permanently. Some he taught how to think, others how to see or hear. Children on the beach he taught how to look for and find beautiful animals in worlds they had not suspected were there at all. He taught everyone without seeming to.
Nearly everyone who knew him has tried to define him. Such things were said of him as, “He was half-Christ and half-goat.” He was a great teacher and a great lecher—an immortal who loved women. Surely he was an original and his character was unique, but in such a way that everyone was related to him, one in this way and another in some different way. He was gentle but capable of ferocity, small and slight but strong as an ox, loyal and yet untrustworthy, generous but gave little and received much. His thinking was as paradoxical as his life. He thought in mystical terms and hated and distrusted mysticism. He was an individualist who studied colonial animals with satisfaction.
We have all tried to define Ed Ricketts with little success. Perhaps it would be better to put down the mass of material from our memories, anecdotes, quotations, events. Of course some of the things will cancel others, but that is the way he was. The essence lies somewhere. There must be some way of finding it.
Finally there is another reason to put Ed Ricketts down on paper. He will not die. He haunts the people who knew him. He is always present even in the moments when we feel his loss the most.
One night soon after his death a number of us were drinking beer in the laboratory. We laughed and told stories about Ed, and suddenly one of us said in pain, “We’ll have to let him go! We’ll have to release him and let him go.” And that was true not for Ed but for ourselves. We can’t keep him, and still he will not go away.
Maybe if I write down everything I can remember about him, that will lay the ghost. It is worth trying anyway. It will have to be true or it can’t work. It must be no celebration of his virtues, because, as was said of another man, he had the faults of his virtues. There can be no formula. The simplest and best way will be just to remember—as much as I can.

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