While we worked at the specimens, the trolling lines were out and we caught another skipjack, large and fat and fast. As it came in on the line, one of us ran for the moving-picture camera, for we wanted to record on color film the changing tints and patterns of the fish’s dying. But the exposure was wrong as usual, and we did not get it.
Near the moving boat swordfishes played about. They seemed to play in pure joy or exhibitionism. It is thought that they leap to clear themselves of parasites; they jump clear of the water and come crashing down, and sometimes they turn over in the air and flash in the sunshine. This afternoon, too, we saw the first specimens of the great manta ray (a giant skate), and we rigged the harpoons and coiled the line ready. One light harpoon just pierced a swordfish’s tail, but he swished away, for the barb had not penetrated. And we did not turn and pursue the great rays, for we wished to anchor that night near Point Lobos on Espiritu Santo Island.
In the evening we came near to it, but as we prepared to anchor, the wind sprang up full on us, and Tony decided to run for the shelter of Pescadero Point on the mainland. The wind seemed to grow instantly out of the evening, and the sea with it. The jars and collecting pans were in danger of flying overboard. For half an hour we were very busy tying the equipment down and removing the flapping canvas we had stretched to keep the sun off our specimen pans. Under the powerful wind we crossed the channel which leads to La Paz, and saw the channel light—the first one we had seen since the big one on the false cape. This one seemed very strange in the Gulf. The waves were not high, but the wind blew with great intensity, making whitecaps rather than rollers, and only when we ran in under Pescadero Point did we drop the wind. We eased in slowly, sounding as we went. When the anchor was finally down we cooked and ate the skipjack, a most delicious fish. And after dinner a group action took place.
We carried no cook and dishwasher; it had been understood that we would all help. But for some time Tex had been secretly mutinous about washing dishes. At the proper times he had things to do in the engine-room. He might have succeeded in this crime, if he had ever varied his routine, but gradually a suspicion grew on us that Tex did not like to wash dishes. He denied this vigorously. He said he liked very much to wash dishes. He appealed to our reason. How would we like it, he argued, if we were forever in the engine-room, getting our hands dirty? There was danger down there too, he said. Men had been killed by engines. He was not willing to see us take the risk. We met his arguments with a silence that made him nervous. He protested then that he had once washed dishes from west Texas to San Diego without stopping, and that he had learned to love it so much that he didn’t want to be selfish about it now. A circle of cold eyes surrounded him. He began to sweat. He said that later (he didn’t say how much later) he was going to ask us for the privilege of washing all the dishes, but right now he had a little job to do in the engine-room. It was for the safety of the ship, he said. No one answered him. Then he cried, “My God, are you going to hang me?” At last Sparky spoke up, not unkindly, but inexorably. “Tex,” he said, “you’re going to wash ‘em or you’re going to sleep with ’em.” Tex said, “Now just as soon as I do one little job there’s nothing I’d rather do than wash four or five thousand dishes.” Each of us picked up a load of dishes, carried them in, and laid them gently in Tex’s bunk. He got up resignedly then and carried them back and washed them. He didn’t grumble, but he was broken. Some joyous light had gone out of him, and he never did get the catsup out of his blankets.
That night Sparky worked at the radio and made contact with the fishing fleet that was operating in the region from Cedros Island and around the tip into the Gulf, fishing for tuna. Fishermen are no happier than farmers. It is difficult to see why anyone becomes a farmer or a fisherman. Dreadful things happen to them constantly: they lose their nets; the fish are wild; sea-lions get into the nets and tear their way out; snags are caught; there are no fish, and the price high; there are too many fish, and the price is low; and if some means could be devised so that the fish swam up to a boat, wriggled up a trough, squirmed their way into the fish-hold, and pulled ice over themselves with their own fins, the imprecations would be terrible because they had not removed their own entrails and brought their own ice. There is no happiness for fishermen anywhere. Cries of anguish at the injustice of the elements inundated the short-wave receiver as we lay at anchor.
The pattern of a book, or a day, of a trip, becomes a characteristic design. The factors in a trip by boat, the many-formed personality phases all shuffled together, changing a little to fit into the box and yet bringing their own lumps and corners, make the trip. And from all these factors your expedition has a character of its own, so that one may say of it, “That was a good, kind trip.” Or, “That was a mean one.” The character of the whole becomes defined and definite. We ran from collecting station to new collecting station, and when the night came and the anchor was dropped, a quiet came over the boat and the trip slept. And then we talked and speculated, talked and drank beer. And our discussions ranged from the loveliness of remembered women to the complexities of relationships in every other field. It is very easy to grow tired at collecting; the period of a low tide is about all men can endure. 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 an individual animal. Here one may observe 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 to so many men of science? Enthusiasm, interest, sharpness, dulled with a weariness until finally they retire into easy didacticism? With this weariness, this stultification of the attention centers, perhaps there comes the pained and sad memory of what the old excitement was like, and regret might turn to envy of the men who still have it. Then out of the shell of didacticism, such a used-up man might attack the unwearied, and he would have in his hands proper weapons of attack. It does seem certain that to a wearied man an error in a mass of correct data wipes out all the correctness and is a focus for attack; whereas the unwearied man, in his energy and receptivity, might consider the little dross of error a by-product of his effort. These two may balance and produce a purer thing than either in the end. These two may be the stresses which hold up the structure, 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 them again. Perhaps this is the same narrowing we observe in relation to ourselves and the tide pool—a man looking at reality brings his own limitations to the world. If he has strength and energy of mind the tide pool stretches both ways, digs back to electrons and leaps space into the universe and fights out of the moment into non-conceptual time. Then ecology has a synonym which is ALL.
It is strange how the time sense changes with different peoples. The Indians who sat on the rail of the Western Flyer had a different time sense—“time-world” would be the better term —from ours. And we think we can never get into them unless we can invade that time-world, for this expanding time seems to trail an expanding universe, or perhaps to lead it. One considers the durations indicated in geology, in paleontology, and, thinking out of our time-world with its duration between time-stone and time-stone, says, “what an incredible interval!” Then, when one struggles to build some picture of astro-physical time, he is faced with a light-year, a thought-deranging duration unless the relativity of all things intervenes and time expands and contracts, matching itself relatively to the pulsings of a relative universe.
It is amazing how the strictures of the old teleologies infect our observation, causal thinking warped by hope. It was said earlier that hope is a diagnostic human trait, and this simp
le cortex symptom seems to be a prime factor in our inspection of our universe. For hope implies a change from a present bad condition to a future better one. The slave hopes for freedom, the weary man for rest, the hungry for food. And the feeders of hope, economic and religious, have from these simple strivings of dissatisfaction managed to create a world picture which is very hard to escape. Man grows toward perfection; animals grow toward man; bad grows toward good; and down toward up, until our little mechanism, hope, achieved in ourselves probably to cushion the shock of thought, manages to warp our whole world. Probably when our species developed the trick of memory and with it the counterbalancing projection called “the future,” this shock-absorber, hope, had to be included in the series, else the species would have destroyed itself in despair. For if ever any man were deeply and unconsciously sure that his future would be no better than his past, he might deeply wish to cease to live. And out of this therapeutic poultice we build our iron teleologies and twist the tide pools and the stars into the pattern. To most men the most hateful statement possible is, “A thing is because it is.” Even those who have managed to drop the leading-strings of a Sunday-school deity are still led by the unconscious teleology of their developed trick. And in saying that hope cushions the shock of experience, that one trait balances the directionalism of another, a teleology is implied, unless one know or feel or think that we are here, and that without this balance, hope, our species in its blind mutation might have joined many, many others in extinction. Dr. Torsten Gislén, in his fine paper on fossil echinoderms called “Evolutional Series toward Death and Renewal,” 22 has shown that as often as not, in his studied group at least, mutations have had destructive, rather than survival value. Extending this thesis, it is interesting to think of the mutations of our own species. It is said and thought there has been none in historical times. We wonder, though, where in man a mutation might take place. Man is the only animal whose interest and whose drive are outside himself. Other animals may dig holes to live in; may weave nests or take possession of hollow trees. Some species, like bees or spiders, even create complicated homes, but they do it with the fluids and processes of their own bodies. They make little impression on the world. But the world is furrowed and cut, torn and blasted by man. Its flora has been swept away and changed; its mountains torn down by man; its flat lands littered by the debris of his living. And these changes have been wrought, not because any inherent technical ability has demanded them, but because his desire has created that technical ability. Physiological man does not require this paraphernalia to exist, but the whole man does. He is the only animal who lives outside of himself, whose drive is in external things—property, houses, money, concepts of power. He lives in his cities and his factories, in his business and job and art. But having projected himself into these external complexities, he is them. His house, his automobile are a part of him and a large part of him. This is beautifully demonstrated by a thing doctors know—that when a man loses his possessions a very common result is sexual impotence. If then the projection, the preoccupation of man, lies in external things so that even his subjectivity is a mirror of houses and cars and grain elevators, the place to look for his mutation would be in the direction of his drive, or in other words in the external things he deals with. And here we can indeed readily find evidence of mutation. The industrial revolution would then be indeed a true mutation, and the present tendency toward collectivism, whether attributed to Marx or Hitler or Henry Ford, might be as definite a mutation of the species as the lengthening neck of the evolving giraffe. For it must be that mutations take place in the direction of a species drive or preoccupation. If then this tendency toward collectivization is mutation there is no reason to suppose it is for the better. It is a rule in paleontology that ornamentation and complication precede extinction. And our mutation, of which the assembly line, the collective farm, the mechanized army, and the mass production of food are evidences or even symptoms, might well correspond to the thickening armor of the great reptiles—a tendency that can end only in extinction. If this should happen to be true, nothing stemming from thought can interfere with it or bend it. Conscious thought seems to have little effect on the action or direction of our species. There is a war now which no one wants to fight, in which no one can see a gain—a zombie war of sleep-walkers which nevertheless goes on out of all control of intelligence. Some time ago a Congress of honest men refused an appropriation of several hundreds of millions of dollars to feed our people. They said, and meant it, that the economic structure of the country would collapse under the pressure of such expenditure. And now the same men, just as honestly, are devoting many billions to the manufacture, transportation, and detonation of explosives to protect the people they would not feed. And it must go on. Perhaps it is all a part of the process of mutation and perhaps the mutation will see us done for. We have made our mark on the world, but we have really done nothing that the trees and creeping plants, ice and erosion, cannot remove in a fairly short time. And it is strange and sad and again symptomatic that most people, reading this speculation which is only speculation, will feel that it is a treason to our species so to speculate. For in spite of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, the trait of hope still controls the future, and man, not a species, but a triumphant race, will approach perfection, and, finally, tearing himself free, will march up the stars and take his place where, because of his power and virtue, he belongs: on the right hand of theFrom which majestic seat he will direct with pure intelligence the ordering of the universe. And perhaps when that occurs—when our species progresses toward extinction or marches into the forehead of God—there will be certain degenerate groups left behind, say, the Indians of Lower California, in the shadows of the rocks or sitting motionless in the dugout canoes. They may remain to sun themselves, to eat and starve and sleep and reproduce. Now they have many legends as hazy and magical as the mirage. Perhaps then they will have another concerning a great and godlike race that flew away in four-motored bombers to the accompaniment of exploding bombs, the voice of God calling them home.
Nights at anchor in the Gulf are quiet and strange. The water is smooth, almost solid, and the dew is so heavy that the decks are soaked. The little waves rasp on the shell beaches with a hissing sound, and all about in the darkness the fishes jump and splash. Sometimes a great ray leaps clear and falls back on the water with a sharp report. And again, a school of tiny fishes whisper along the surface, each one, as it breaks clear, making the tiniest whisking sound. And there is no feeling, no smell, no vibration of people in the Gulf. Whatever it is that makes one aware that men are about is not there. Thus, in spite of the noises of waves and fishes, one has a feeling of deadness and of quietness. At anchor, with the motor stopped, it is not easy to sleep, and every little sound starts one awake. The crew is restless and a little nervous. If a dog barks on shore or a cow bellows, we are reassured. But in many places of anchorage there were utterly no sounds associated with man. The crew read books they have not known about—Tony reads Studs Lonigan and says he does not like to see such words in print. And we are reminded that we once did not like to hear them spoken because we were not used to them. When we became used to hearing them, they took their place with the simple speech-sounds of the race of man. Tony read on in Studs Lonigan, and the shock of the new words he had not seen printed left him and he grew into the experience of Studs. Tiny read the book too. He said, “It’s like something that happened to me.”
Sometimes in the night a little breeze springs up and the boat tugs experimentally at the anchor and swings slowly around. There is nothing so quiet as a boat when the motor has stopped; it seems to lie with held breath. One gets to longing for the deep beat of the cylinders.
11
March 20
WE HAD marked the southern end of Espiritu Santo Island as our next collecting stop. This is a long narrow island which makes the northern side of the San Lorenzo Channel. It is mountainous and stands high and sheer from the blue wa
ter. We wanted particularly to collect there so that we could contrast the fauna of the eastern tip of this island with that of the secluded and protected bay of La Paz. Throughout we attempted to work in stations in the same area which nevertheless contrasted conditions for living, such as wave-shock, bottom, rock formation, exposure, depth, and so forth. The most radical differences in life forms are discovered in this way.
Early in the morning we sailed from our shelter under Pescadero Point and crossed the channel again. It was a very short run. There were many manta rays cruising slowly near the surface, with only the tips of their “wings” protruding above the water. They seemed to hover, and when we approached too near, they disappeared into the blue depths. Their effortless speed is astonishing. On the lines we caught two yellowfin tunas,23 speedy and efficient fish. They struck the line so hard that it is impossible to see why they did not tear their heads off.
We anchored near a bouldery shore. This would be the first station in the Gulf where we would be able to turn over rocks, and a new ecological set-up was indicated by the fact that the small boulders rested in sand.
This time everyone but Tony went ashore. Sparky and Tiny were already developing into good collectors, and now Tex joined us and quickly became excited in the collecting. We welcomed this help, for in general work, what with the shortness of the time and the large areas to be covered, the more hands and eyes involved, the better. Besides, these men who lived by the sea had a great respect for the sea and all its inhabitants. Association with the sea does not breed contempt.
The boulders on this beach were almost a perfect turning-over size—heavy enough to protect the animals under them from grinding by the waves, and light enough to be lifted. They were well coated with short algae and bedded in very coarse sand. The dominant species on this beach was a sulphury cucumber,24 a dark, almost black-green holothurian which looks as though it were dusted with sulphur. As the tide dropped on the shallow beach we saw literally millions of these cucumbers. They lay in clusters and piles between the rocks and under the rocks, and as the tide went down and the tropical sun beat on the beach, many of them became quite dry without apparent injury. Most of these holothurians were from five to eight inches long, but there were great numbers of babies, some not more than an inch in length. We took a great many of them.
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