John Steinbeck became a favorite of mine after I read East of Eden, so it’s about time I finally got around to reading The Log of the Sea of Cortez. The non-fiction tale of exploration and adventure chronicles a 6 week journey that Steinbeck made with his good friend and marine biologist, Ed Ricketts around the Baja Peninsula and into what is now known as the Gulf of California to collect and identify marine specimens from tidal areas (the process of indiscriminately collecting as many marine animals as possible from given locales is certainly destructive by today’s standards but was the way science was done 100 years ago). Ricketts, who also appears in caricature in Steinbeck’s Cannery Row (remarkably, his old lab actually still stands in Monterey) was an equal co-author in writing the book according to Steinbeck himself.

One of the things I appreciate most about Steinbeck is his ability to describe a place. That is one of the thigns that drew me into East of Eden, here Steinbeck Salinas Valley comes alive and becomes a place you can just about reach out and touch. Much the same can be said of Steinbeck’s Baja. It is a place with characters, desolate bet alive, that is worth exploring.

The story is fun and at times informative, but the most interesting, and often entertaining parts of the book, of which I’ve copied a number of here, are regular tangents the authors take on topics like philosophy, culture, capitalism, and environmentalism. Although the book rarely depicts conversations between the two, I get the feeling that these are the sorts of discussions they might have while resting on a smelly fishing boat after a long day of work. Similar to how campfires bring out reflection and oftentimes interesting conversation, so too does this book bring out how Steinbeck and Ricketts approach the world.

A tide pool has been called a world under a rock, and so it might be said of navigation, “It is the world within the horizon.”

page 34

Some of the discussions about place names resonated with other authors like Robert Macfarlane and Barry Lopez

More likely, a name emerges almost automatically from a place as well as from a man and the relationship between name and thing is very close… To name a thing has always been to make it familiar and therefore a little less dangerous to us… Among primitives sometimes evil is escaped by never mentioning the name, as in Malaysia, where one never mentions a tiger by name for fear of calling him. Among others, or even among ourselves, the giving of a name establishes a familiarity which renders the thing impotent.

page 46

The benefits of having slack in the system is something I’ve been meaning to write about. Steinbeck and Ricketts use Darwin here as a prime example

We came to envy this Darwin on his sailing ship. He had so much room and so much time. He could capture his animals and keep them alive and watch them. He had years instead of weeks, and he saw so many things. Often we envied the inadequate transportation of his time – the beagle couldn’t get about rapidly. She moved slowly along under sail… When he went inland, he rode a horse or walked. This is the proper pace for a naturalist. Faced with all things he cannot hurry. We must have time to think and look and consider. And the modern process – that of looking quickly at the whole field and then diving down to a particular- was reversed by Darwin. Out of long consideration of the parts he emerged with an understanding of the whole. Where we wished for a month at a collecting station and took 2 days, Darwin stayed three months. Of course he could see and tabulate. It was the pace that made the difference… We can look with longing back to Charles Darwin, staring into the water over the side of the sailing ship, but for us to attempt to imitate that procedure would be romantic and silly… For we first, before our work, are products of our time. We might produce a philosophical costume piece, but it would be completely artificial. However, we can and do look on the measured, slow paced accumulation of sight and thought of the Darwins with a nostalgic longing.

page 51

On losing passion in your career.

At first the rocks are bright and every moving animal makes his mark on the attention. The picture is wide and colored and beautiful. But after an hour and a half the attention centers weary, the colors fade, and the field is likely to narrow to a single animal. Here one may see his own world narrowed down until interest and, with it, observation, flicker and go out. And what if with age this weariness become permanent and observation dim out and not recover? Can this be what happens with so many men of science? Enthusiasm, interest, sharpness, dulled with a weariness until finally they retire into easy didactism? With this weariness, this stultification of the attention centers, perhaps there comes a pained and sad memory of what the old excitement was like, and regret might turn to envy of the men who still have it… but it is a sad thing to see the interest in interested men thin out and weaken and die. We have known so many professors who once carried their listeners high on their single enthusiasm, and have seen these same men finally settle back comfortably into lectures prepared years before and never vary again.

page 71

A wonderful justification for scientific exploration of all types

“Then what do you search for?” And this is an embarrassing question. We search for something that will seem like truth to us; we search for understanding; we search for that principle which keys us deeply into the pattern of all life; we search for the relations of things, one to another, as this young man searches for a warm light in his wife’s eyes and that one for the hot warmth of fighting.

page 92

People sometimes have trouble reconciling the fact that we are both living breathing individuals with deep thoughts and emotions, as well as machines following the laws of physics at the smallest scale. I like to think of it more like this next excerpt.

So a man of individualistic season, if he must ask,” Which is the animal, the colony or the individual?” must abandon his particular kind of reason and say, “Why its two animals and they aren’t alike any more than the cells of my body are like me. I am much more than the sum of my cells and, for all I know, they are much more than the division of me.” There is no quietism in such acceptance but rather the basis for a far deeper understanding of us and the world.

page 137

On perseverence and industry.

We had not the time for the long and careful collecting which is necessary before the true picture of the background of life can be established. We rushed through it because it was all we could afford, but our results seem to indicate that energy and enthusiasm can offset lack of equipment and personnel.

page 139

I really enjoyed the author’s defense of occasionally being lazy!

Another acquaintance, a man, straightens rugs and pictures and arranges books and magazines in neat piles. He is not lazy, either; he is very busy. To what end? If he should relax, perhaps with his feet up on a chair and a glass of cool beer beside him – not cold, but cool – if he should examine from this position a rumpled rug or a crooked picture, saying to himself between sips of beer (preferably Carta Blanca beer),” This rug irritates me for some reason. If it were straight I should be comfortable; but there is only one straight position (and this is of course, only my own discipline of straightness) among all possible positions. I am, in effect, trying to impose my will, my insular sense of rightness, on a rug, which of itself can have no sense, since it seems equally contented straight or crooked…

How can such a process have become a shame and a sin? Only in laziness can one achieve a state of contemplation which is a balancing of values, a weighing of oneself against the world and the world against itself. A busy man does not have time for such balancing.

page 150

There is little change here in the Gulf. We think it would be very difficult to astonish these people… Food is hard to get, and a man lives inward, closely related to time; a cousin of the sun, at feud with storm and sickness. Our products, the mechanical toys which take up so much of our time, preoccupy and astonish us so, would be considered what they are, rather clever toys but not related to very real things. It would be interesting to try and explain to one of these Indians our tremendous  projects, our great drives, the fantastic production of goods which can’t be sold, the clutter of possessions that enslaves whole populations with debt, the worry and neuroses that goes into the searing and educating of neurotic children who find no place for themselves in this complicated world; the defense of the country against a frantic nation of conquerors, and necessity for becoming frantic to do it; the spoilage and wastage of death necessary for the retention of the crazy things; the science which labors to acquire knowledge, and the movement of people and goods contrary to the knowledge obtained. How could one make an Indian understand the medicine which labors to save a syphilitic, and the gas and bomb used to kill him as well, the armies that build health so death will be more active and violent. It is quite possible that to an ignorant Indian these might not be evidences of a great civilization but rather of inconceivable nonsense.

page 171

A few passages on the state of our cultures, some observations about it, and how we are probably viewed by the “uncivilized” natives of the Baja Peninsula.

“Adults, in their dealing with children, are insane,” he said. “And children know it too. Adults lay down rules they would not think of following, speak truths they do not believe. And yet they expect children to obey the rules, believe the truths, and admire and respect their parents for this nonsense. Children must be very wise and secret to tolerate adults at all. And the greatest nonsense of all that adults expect children to believe is that people learn by experience. No greater lie was ever served. And its falseness is immediately discerned by children since their parents obviously have not learned anything from experience Far from learning, adults simply become set in a maze of prejudices and dreams and sets of rules who origins they do not know and would not dare inspect for fear the whole structure might topple cores on them. I think children instinctively know this,” Ed said.” Intelligent children learn to conceal their knowledge and keep free of this howling mania.”

page 258

We in the United have done so much to destroy our own resources, our timber, our hand, our fishes, that we should be taken as a horrible example and our methods avoided by any government and people enlightened enough to envision a continuing economy. With our own resources we have been prodigal, and our country will not soon lose the scars of our grasping stupidity.

page 207

… he [the native peoples of the Baja Peninsula] had never thought of time as a medium of exchange. At first we tried to explain the feeling we all had that time is a salable article, but we had to give up. Time, these Indians said, went on. If one could stop time, as take it away, or hoard it, then one might sell it. One might as well sell air as heat or cold as health or beauty. And we thought of the great businesses in our country-the sale of clean air, of heat and cold, the scrabbling bargains in health offered over the radio, the bored and bottled beauty, all for a price. This was not bad or good, it was only different. Time and beauty, they thought, could not be captured and sold, and we knew they not only could be, but that time could be warped and beauty made ugly. And again it was not good or bad. Our people would pay more for pills in a yellow box than in a white box-even the refraction of light had its price. They would buy books because they should rather than because they wanted to. They bought immunity from fear in salves to go under their arms. They bought romantic adventure in bars of tomato covered scrap. They bought education by the foot and hefted the volumes to make sure they were not short weighted. They purchased pain, and then analgesics to put down the pain. They bought courage and rest and had neither. And they are vastly amused by the Indian who, with his silver, bought Heaven and ransomed his father from hell. These Indians were far to ignorant to understand the absurdities merchandising can really achieve when it has an enlightened people to work on.

page 211