Sea of Cortez

by John Steinbeck

  3

  IN THE time before our departure for the Gulf we sat on the pier and watched the sardine purse-seiners riding among the floating grapefruit rinds. A breakwater is usually a dirty place, as though the tampering with the shore line is obscene and impractical to the cleansing action of the sea. And we talked to our prospective crew. Tex, our engineer, was caught in the ways of the harbor. He was born in the Panhandle of Texas and early he grew to love Diesel engines. They are so simple and powerful, blocks of pure logic in shining metal. They appealed to some sense of neat thinking in Tex. He might be sentimental and illogical in some things, but he liked his engines to be true and logical. By an accident, possibly alcoholic, he came to the Coast in an old Ford and sat down beside the Bay, and there he discovered a wonderful thing. Here, combined in one, were the best Diesels to be found anywhere, and boats. He never recovered from his shocked pleasure. He could never leave the sea again, for nowhere else could he find these two perfect things in one. He is a sure man with an engine. When he goes below he is identified with his engine. He moves about, not seeing, not looking, but knowing. No matter how tired or how deeply asleep he may be, one miss of the engine jerks him to his feet and into the engine-room before he is awake, and we truly believe that a burned bearing or a cracked shaft gives him sharp pains in his stomach.

  We talked to Tony, the master and part owner of the Western Flyer, and our satisfaction with him as master increased constantly. He had the brooding, dark, Slavic eyes and the hawk nose of the Dalmatian. He rarely talked or laughed. He was tall and lean and very strong. He had a great contempt for forms. Under way, he liked to wear a tweed coat and an old felt hat, as though to say, “I keep the sea in my head, not on my back like a Goddamn yachtsman.” Tony has one great passion; he loves rightness and he hates wrongness. He thinks speculation a complete waste of time. To our sorrow, and some financial loss, we discovered that Tony never spoke unless he was right. It was useless to bet with him and impossible to argue with him. If he had not been right, he would never have opened his mouth. But once knowing and saying a truth, he became infuriated at the untruth which naturally enough was set against it. Inaccuracy was like an outrageous injustice to him, and when confronted with it, he was likely to shout and to lose his temper. But he did not personally triumph when his point was proven. An ideal judge, hating larceny, feels no triumph when he sentences a thief, and Tony, when he has nailed a true thing down and routed a wrong thing, feels good, but not righteous. He retires grumbling a little sadly at the stupidity of a world which can conceive a wrongness or for one moment defend one. He loves the leadline because it tells a truth on its markers; he loves the Navy charts; and until he went into the Gulf he admired the Coast Pilot. The Coast Pilot was not wrong, but things had changed since its correction, and Tony is uneasy in the face of variables. The whole relational thinking of modern physics was an obscenity to him and he refused to have anything to do with it. Parallels and compasses and the good Navy maps were things you could trust. A circle is true and a direction is set forever, a shining golden line across the mind. Later, in the mirage of the Gulf where visual distance is a highly variable matter, we wondered whether Tony’s certainties were ever tipped. It did not seem so. His qualities made him a good master. He took no chances he could avoid, for his boat and his life and ours were no light things for him to tamper with.

  We come now to a piece of equipment which still brings anger to our hearts and, we hope, some venom to our pen. Perhaps in self-defense against suit, we should say, “The outboard motor mentioned in this book is purely fictitious and any resemblance to outboard motors living or dead is coincidental.” We shall call this contraption, for the sake of secrecy, a Hansen Sea-Cow—a dazzling little piece of machinery, all aluminum paint and touched here and there with spots of red. The Sea-Cow was built to sell, to dazzle the eyes, to splutter its way into the unwary heart. We took it along for the skiff. It was intended that it should push us ashore and back, should drive our boat into estuaries and along the borders of little coves. But we had not reckoned with one thing. Recently, industrial civilization has reached its peak of reality and has lunged forward into something that approaches mysticism. In the Sea-Cow factory where steel fingers tighten screws, bend and mold, measure and divide, some curious mathematick has occurred. And that secret so long sought has accidentally been found. Life has been created. The machine is at last stirred. A soul and a malignant mind have been born. Our Hansen Sea-Cow was not only a living thing but a mean, irritable, contemptible, vengeful, mischievous, hateful living thing. In the six weeks of our association we observed it, at first mechanically and then, as its living reactions became more and more apparent, psychologically. And we determined one thing to our satisfaction. When and if these ghoulish little motors learn to reproduce themselves the human species is doomed. For their hatred of us is so great that they will wait and plan and organize and one night, in a roar of little exhausts, they will wipe us out. We do not think that Mr. Hansen, inventor of the Sea-Cow, father of the outboard motor, knew what he was doing. We think the monster he created was as accidental and arbitrary as the beginning of any other life. Only one thing differentiates the Sea-Cow from the life that we know. Whereas the forms that are familiar to us are the results of billions of years of mutation and complication, life and intelligence emerged simultaneously in the Sea-Cow. It is more than a species. It is a whole new re-definition of life. We observed the following traits in it and we were able to check them again and again:1. Incredibly lazy, the Sea-Cow loved to ride on the back of a boat, trailing its propeller daintily in the water while we rowed.

  2. It required the same amount of gasoline whether it ran or not, apparently being able to absorb this fluid through its body walls without recourse to explosion. It had always to be filled at the beginning of every trip.

  3. It had apparently some clairvoyant powers, and was able to read our minds, particularly when they were inflamed with emotion. Thus, on every occasion when we were driven to the point of destroying it, it started and ran with a great noise and excitement. This served the double purpose of saving its life and of resurrecting in our minds a false confidence in it.

  4. It had many cleavage points, and when attacked with a screwdriver, fell apart in simulated death, a trait it had in common with opossums, armadillos, and several members of the sloth family, which also fall apart in simulated death when attacked with a screwdriver.

  5. It hated Tex, sensing perhaps that his knowledge of mechanics was capable of diagnosing its shortcomings.

  6. It completely refused to run: (a) when the waves were high, (b) when the wind blew, (c) at night, early morning, and evening, (d) in rain, dew, or fog, (e) when the distance to be covered was more than two hundred yards. But on warm, sunny days when the weather was calm and the white beach close by—in a word, on days when it would have been a pleasure to row—the Sea-Cow started at a touch and would not stop.

  7. It loved no one, trusted no one. It had no friends.

  Perhaps toward the end, our observations were a little warped by emotion. Time and again as it sat on the stern with its pretty little propeller lying idly in the water, it was very close to death. And in the end, even we were infected with its malignancy and its dishonesty. We should have destroyed it, but we did not. Arriving home, we gave it a new coat of aluminum paint, spotted it at points with new red enamel, and sold it. And we might have rid the world of this mechanical cancer!

  4

  IT WOULD be ridiculous to suggest that ours was anything but a makeshift expedition. The owner of a boat on short charter does not look happily on any re-designing of his ship. In a month or two we could have changed the Western Flyer about and made her a collector’s dream, but we had neither the time nor the money to do it. The low-tide period was approaching. We had on board no permanent laboratory. There was plenty of room for one in the fish-hold, but the dampness there would have rusted the instruments overnight. We had no dark-room, no permanent aquar
ia, no tanks for keeping animals alive, no pumps for delivering sea water. We had not even a desk except the galley table. Microscopes and cameras were put away in an empty bunk. The enameled pans for laying out animals were in a large crate lashed to the net-table aft, where it shared the space with the two skiffs. The hatch cover of the fish-hold became laboratory and aquarium, and we carried sea water in buckets to fill the pans. Another empty bunk was filled with flashlights, medicines, and the more precious chemicals. Dip-nets, wooden collecting buckets, and vials and jars in their cases were stowed in the fish-hold. The barrels of alcohol and formaldehyde were lashed firmly to the rail on deck, for all of us had, I think, a horror-thought of fifteen gallons of US.P. formaldehyde broken loose and burst. One achieves a respect and a distaste for formaldehyde from working with it. Fortunately, none of us had a developed formalin allergy. Our small refrigerating chamber, powered by a two-cycle gasoline engine and designed to cool sea water for circulation to living animals, began the trip on top of the deckhouse and ended back on the net-table. This unit, by the way, was not very effective, the motor being jerky and not of sufficient power. But on certain days in the Gulf it did manage to cool a little beer or perhaps more than a little, for the crew fell in joyfully with our theory that it is unwise to drink unboiled water, and boiled water isn’t any good. In addition, the weather was too hot to boil water, and besides the crew wished to test this perfectly sound scientific observation thoroughly. We tested it by reducing the drinking of water to an absolute minimum.

  A big pressure tube of oxygen was lashed to a deck rail, its gauges and valves wrapped in canvas. Gradually, the boat was loaded and the materials put away, some never to be taken out again. It was agreed that we should all stand wheel-watch when we were running night and day; but once in the Gulf, and working at collecting stations, the hired crew should work the boat, since we would anchor at night and run only during the daytime.

  Toward the end of the preparation, a small hysteria began to build in ourselves and our friends. There were hundreds of unnecessary trips back and forth. Some materials were stowed on board with such cleverness that we never found them again. Now the whole town of Monterey was becoming fevered and festive—but not because of our going. At the end of the sardine season, canneries and boat owners provide a celebration. There is a huge barbecue on the end of the pier with free beef and beer and salad for all comers. The sardine fleet is decorated with streamers and bunting and serpentine, and the boat with the biggest season catch is queen of a strange nautical parade of boats; and every boat is an open house, receiving friends of owners and of crew. Wine flows beautifully, and the parade of boats that starts with dignity and precision sometimes ends in a turmoil. This fiesta took place on Sunday, and we were to sail on Monday morning. The Western Flyer was decorated like the rest with red and blue bunting and serpentine. Master and crew refused to sail before the fiesta was over. We rode in the parade of boats, some of us in the crow‘s-nest and some on the house. With five thousand other people we crowded on the pier and ate great hunks of meat and drank beer and heard speeches. It was the biggest barbecue the sardine men had ever given, and the potato salad was served out of washtubs. The speeches rose to a crescendo of patriotism and good feeling beyond anything Monterey had ever heard.

  There should be here some mention of the permits obtained from the Mexican government. At the time of our preparation, Mexico was getting ready for a presidential election, and the apparent issues were so complex as to cause apprehension that there might be violence. The nation was a little nervous, and it seemed to us that we should be armed with permits which clearly established us as men without politics or business interests. The work we intended to do might well have seemed suspicious to some patriotic customs official or soldier—a small boat that crept to uninhabited points on a barren coast, and a party which spent its time turning over rocks. It was not likely that we could explain our job to the satisfaction of a soldier. It would seem ridiculous to the military mind to travel fifteen hundred miles for the purpose of turning over rocks on the seashore and picking up small animals, very few of which were edible; and doing all this without shooting at anyone. Besides, our equipment might have looked subversive to one who had seen the war sections of Life and Pic and Look. We carried no firearms except a .22-caliber pistol and a very rusty ten-gauge shotgun. But an oxygen cylinder might look too much like a torpedo to an excitable rural soldier, and some of the laboratory equipment could have had a lethal look about it. We were not afraid for ourselves, but we imagined being held in some mud cuartel while the good low tides went on and we missed them. In our naivete, we considered that our State Department, having much business with the Mexican government, might include a paragraph about us in one of its letters, which would convince Mexico of our decent intentions. To this end, we wrote to the State Department explaining our project and giving a list of people who would confirm the purity of our motives. Then we waited with a childlike faith that when a thing is stated simply and evidence of its truth is included there need be no mix-up. Besides, we told ourselves, we were American citizens and the government was our servant. Alas, we did not know diplomatic procedure. In due course, we had an answer from the State Department. In language so diplomatic as to be barely intelligible it gently disabused us. In the first place, the State Department was not our servant, however other departments might feel about it. The State Department had little or no interest in the collection of marine invertebrates unless carried on by an institution of learning, preferably with Dr. Butler as its president. The government never made such representations for private citizens. Lastly, the State Department hoped to God we would not get into trouble and appeal to it for aid. All this was concealed in language so beautiful and incomprehensible that we began to understand why diplomats say they are “studying” a message from Japan or England or Italy. We studied this letter for the better part of one night, reduced its sentences to words, built it up again, and came out with the above-mentioned gist. “Gist” is, we imagine, a word which makes the State Department shudder with its vulgarity.

  There we were, with no permits and the imaginary soldier still upset by our oxygen tube. In Mexico, certain good friends worked to get us the permits; the consul-general in San Francisco wrote letters about us, and then finally, through a friend, we got in touch with Mr. Castillo Najera, the Mexican ambassador to Washington. To our wonder there came an immediate reply from the ambassador which said there was no reason why we should not go and that he would see the permits were issued immediately. His letter said just that. There was a little sadness in us when we read it. The ambassador seemed such a good man we felt it a pity that he had no diplomatic future, that he could never get anywhere in the world of international politics. We understood his letter the first time we read it. Clearly, Mr. Castillo Najera is a misfit and a rebel. He not only wrote clearly, but he kept his word. The permits came through quickly and in order. And we wish here and now to assure this gentleman that whenever the inevitable punishment for his logic and clarity falls upon him we will gladly help him to get a new start in some other profession.

  When the permits arrived, they were beautifully sealed so that even a soldier who could not read would know that if we were not what we said we were, we were at least influential enough spies and saboteurs to be out of his jurisdiction.

  And so our boat was loaded, except for the fuel tanks, which we planned to fill at San Diego. Our crew entered the contests at the sardine fiesta—the skiff race, the greased-pole walk, the water-barrel tilt—and they did not win anything, but no one cared. And late in the night when the feast had died out we slept ashore for the last time, and our dreams were cluttered with things we might have forgotten. And the beer cans from the fiesta washed up and down the shore on the little brushing waves behind the breakwater.

  We had planned to sail about ten o‘clock on March 11, but so many people came to see us off and the leave-taking was so pleasant that it was afternoon before we cou
ld think of going. The moment or hour of leave-taking is one of the pleasantest times in human experience, for it has in it a warm sadness without loss. People who don’t ordinarily like you very well are overcome with affection at leave-taking. We said good-by again and again and still could not bring ourselves to cast off the lines and start the engines. It would be good to live in a perpetual state of leave-taking, never to go nor to stay, but to remain suspended in that golden emotion of love and longing; to be missed without being gone; to be loved without satiety. How beautiful one is and how desirable; for in a few moments one will have ceased to exist. Wives and fiancées were there, melting and open. How beautiful they were too; and against the hull of the boat the beer cans from the fiesta of yesterday tapped lightly like little bells, and the sea-gulls flew around and around but did not land. There was no room for them—too many people were seeing us off. Even a few strangers were caught in the magic and came aboard and wrung our hands and went into the galley. If our medicine chest had held out we might truly never have sailed. But about twelve-thirty the last dose was prescribed and poured and taken. Only then did we realize that not only were we fortified against illness, but that fifty or sixty inhabitants of Monterey could look forward to a long period of good health.

  The day of charter had arrived. That instrument said we would leave on the eleventh, and the master was an honest man. We ejected our guests, some forcibly. The lines were cast off. We backed and turned and wove our way out among the boats of the fishing fleet. In our rigging the streamers, the bunting, the serpentine still fluttered, and as the breakwater was cleared and the wind struck us, we seemed, to ourselves at least, a very brave and beautiful sight. The little bell buoy on the reef at Cabrillo Point was excited about it too, for the wind had freshened and the float rolled heavily and the four clappers struck the bell with a quick tempo. We stood on top of the deckhouse and watched the town of Pacific Grove slip by and dark pine-covered hills roll back on themselves as though they moved, not we.