As usual, a good serious small boy attached himself to us. It would be interesting to see whether a nation governed by the small boys of Mexico would not be a better, happier nation than those ruled by old men whose prejudices may or may not be conditioned by ulcerous stomachs and perhaps a little drying up of the stream of love.
This small boy could have been an ambassador to almost any country in the world. His straight-seeing dark eyes were courteous, yet firm. He was kind and dignified. He told us something of Loreto; of its poverty, and how its church was tumbled down now; and he walked with us to the destroyed mission. The roof had fallen in and the main body of the church was a mass of rubble. From the walls hung the shreds of old paintings. But the bell-tower was intact, and we wormed our way deviously up to look at the old bells and to strike them softly with the palms of our hands so that they glowed a little with tone. From here we could look down on the low roofs and into the enclosed gardens of the town. The white sunlight could not get into the gardens and a sleepy shade lay in them.
One small chapel was intact in the church, but the door to it was barred by a wooden grille, and we had to peer through into the small, dark, cool room. There were paintings on the walls, one of which we wanted badly to see more closely, for it looked very much like an El Greco, and probably was not painted by El Greco. Still, strange things have found their way here. The bells on the tower were the special present of the Spanish throne to this very loyal city. But it would be good to see this picture more closely. The Virgin Herself, Our Lady of Loreto, was in a glass case and surrounded by the lilies of the recently past Easter. In the dim light of the chapel she seemed very lovely. Perhaps she is gaudy; she has not the look of smug virginity so many have—the “I-am-the-Mother-of-Christ” look —but rather there was a look of terror in her face, of the Virgin Mother of the world and the prayers of so very many people heavy on her.
To the people of Loreto, and particularly to the Indians of the outland, she must be the loveliest thing in the world. It doesn’t matter that our eyes, critical and thin with good taste, should find her gaudy. And actually we did not. We too found her lovely in her dim chapel with the lilies of Easter around her. This is a very holy place, and to question it is to question a fact as established as the tide. How easily and quickly we slide into our race-pattern unless we keep intact the stiff-necked and blinded pattern of the recent intellectual training.
We threw it over, and there wasn’t much to throw over, and we felt good about it. This Lady, of plaster and wood and paint, is one of the strong ecological factors of the town of Loreto, and not to know her and her strength is to fail to know Loreto. One could not ignore a granite monolith in the path of the waves. Such a rock, breaking the rushing waters, would have an effect on animal distribution radiating in circles like a dropped stone in a pool. So has this plaster Lady a powerful effect on the deep black water of the human spirit. She may disappear and her name be lost, as the Magna Mater, as Isis, have disappeared. But something very like her will take her place, and the longings which created her will find somewhere in the world a similar altar on which to pour their force. No matter what her name is, Artemis, or Venus, or a girl behind a Woolworth counter vaguely remembered, she is as eternal as our species, and we will continue to manufacture her as long as we survive.
We came back slowly through the deserted streets of Loreto, and we walked quietly laden with submergence in a dim chapel.
A few supplies went aboard, and we pulled up the anchor and moved northward again. On the way we caught a Mexican sierra and another fish, apparently a cross between a yellowfin tuna 47 and an albacore.48 Tiny and Sparky, who have fished in tuna water a good deal, say that this cross is often found and taken, although never in numbers.
We sailed north and found anchorage on the northern end of Coronado Island, and went immediately to collect on a long, westerly-extending point. This reef of water-covered stones was not very rich. In high boots we moved slowly about, turning over the flattened algae-covered boulders. We found here many solitary corals,49 and with great difficulty took some of them. They are very hard, and shatter easily when they are removed. If one could saw out the small section of rock to which they are fastened, it would be easy to take them. The next best method is to use a thin, very sharp knife and, by treating them as delicately as jewels, to remove them from their hard anchorage. Even with care, only about one in five is unbroken. Here also we found clustered heads of hard zoanthidean anemones of two types, one much larger than the other. We found a great number of large hemispherical yellow sponges which were noted in the collecting reports as “strikingly similar to the Monterey Bay Tethya aurantia or Geodia“—a similarity partly explainable by the fact that they turned out to be Tethya aurantia and a species of Geodia! Our collecting included the usual assortment of creatures, ranging from the crabs which plant algae on their backs for protection to the bryozoa which look more like moss than animals. With all these, the region was still not rich, but ”burned,“ and again we felt the thing which had been at the strange Cayo Islet, a resentment of the shore toward animal life, an inhospitable quality in the stones that would make an animal think twice about living there.
It is so strange, this burned quality. We have seen places which seemed hostile to human life, too. There are parts of the coast of California which do not like humans. It is as though they were already inhabited by another and invisible species which resented humans. Perhaps such places are “burned” for us; perhaps a petrologist could say why. Might there not be a mild radio-activity which made one nervous in such a place so that he would say, trying to put words to his feeling, “This place is unfriendly. There is something here that will not tolerate my kind”? While some radio-activities have been shown to encourage not only life but mutation (note experimentation with fruit-flies), there might well be some other combinations which have an opposite effect.
Little fragments of seemingly unrelated information will sometimes accumulate in a process of speculation until a tenable hypothesis emerges. We had come on a riddle in our reading about the Gulf and now we were able to see this riddle in terms of the animals. There is an observable geographic differential in the fauna of the Gulf of California. The Cape San Lucas—La Paz area is strongly Panamic. Many warm-water mollusks and crustaceans are not known to occur in numbers north of La Paz, and some not even north of Cape San Lucas. But the region north of Santa Rosalia, and even of Puerto Escondido, is known to be inhabited by many colder-water animals, including Pachygrapsus crassipes, the commonest California shore crab, which ranges north as far as Oregon. These animals are apparently trapped in a blind alley with no members of their kind to the south of them.
The problem is: “How did they get there?” In 1895 Cooper 50 noticed the situation and advanced an explanation. He remarks, referring to the northern part of the Gulf: “It appears that the species found there are more largely of the temperate fauna, many of them being identical with those of the same latitude on the west [outer] coast of the Peninsula. This seems to indicate that the dividing ridge, now three thousand feet or more in altitude, was crossed by one or more channels within geologically recent times.”
This differential, which we ourselves saw, has been remarked a number of times in the literature of the region, especially by conchologists. Eric Knight Jordan, son of David Starr Jordan, an extremely promising young paleontologist who was killed some years ago, studied the geological and present distribution of mollusks along the west coast of Lower California. He says 51: “Two distinct faunas exist on the west coast of Lower California. The southern Californian now ranges southward from Point Conception to Cedros Island ... probably extends a little farther.... The fauna of the Gulf of California ranges to the north on the west coast of the Peninsula approximately to Scammon’s Lagoon, which is a little farther up than Cedros Island.” Present geographical ranges are given for 124 species, collected in lower Quaternary beds at Magdalena Bay, all of which occur living today, but farther to
the north. Two pages later he remarks: “It ... appears that when these Quaternary beds were laid down there was a southward displacement of the isotherms sufficient to carry the conditions today prevailing at Cedros down as far as the latitude of Magdalena Bay.“
Having reviewed the literature, we can confirm the significance of the Cedros Island complex as a present critical horizon (as Carpenter did eighty years ago) where the north and south fauna to some extent intermingle. Apparently this is the very condition that obtained at Magdalena Bay or southward when the lower Quaternary beds were being laid down. The present Magdalena Plain, extending to La Paz on the Gulf side, was at that time submerged. Then it was cold enough to permit a commingling of cold-water and warm-water species at that point. The hypothesis is tenable that when the isotherms retreated northward, the cold-water forms were no longer able to inhabit southern Lower California shores, which included the then Gulf entrance. In these increasingly warm waters they would have perished or would have been pushed northward, both along the outside coast, where they could retreat indefinitely, and into the Gulf. In the latter case the migrating waves of competing animals from the south, which were invading the Gulf and spilling upward, would have pocketed the northern species in the upper reaches, where they have remained to this day. These animals, hemmed in by tropical waters and fortunate competitors, have maintained themselves for thousands of years, though in the struggle they have been modified toward pau perization.
This hypothesis would seem to offset Cooper’s assumption of a channel through ridges some 350 miles to the north which show no signs of Quaternary submergence.
It is interesting that a paleontologist, working in one area, should lay the groundwork for a very reasonable hypothesis concerning the distribution of animals in another. It is, however, only one example among many of the obliqueness of investigation and the accident quotient involved in much investigation. The literature of science is filled with answers found when the question propounded had an entirely different direction and end.
There is one great difficulty with a good hypothesis. When it is completed and rounded, the corners smooth and the content cohesive and coherent, it is likely to become a thing in itself, a work of art. It is then like a finished sonnet or a painting completed. One hates to disturb it. Even if subsequent information should shoot a hole in it, one hates to tear it down because it once was beautiful and whole. One of our leading scientists, having reasoned a reef in the Pacific, was unable for a long time to reconcile the lack of a reef, indicated by soundings, with the reef his mind told him was there. A parallel occurred some years ago. A learned institution sent an expedition southward, one of whose many projects was to establish whether or not the sea-otter was extinct. In due time it returned with the information that the sea-otter was indeed extinct. One of us, some time later, talking with a woman on the coast below Monterey, was astonished to hear her describe animals living in the surf which could only be sea-otters, since she described accurately animals she couldn’t have known about except by observation. A report of this to the institution in question elicited no response. It had extincted sea-otters and that was that. It was only when a reporter on one of our more disreputable newspapers photographed the animals that the public was informed. It is not yet known whether the institution of learning has been won over.
This is not set down in criticism; it is no light matter to make up one’s mind about anything, even about sea-otters, and once made up, it is even harder to abandon the position. When a hypothesis is deeply accepted it becomes a growth which only a kind of surgery can amputate. Thus, beliefs persist long after their factual bases have been removed, and practices based on beliefs are often carried on even when the beliefs which stimulated them have been forgotten. The practice must follow the belief. It is often considered, particularly by reformers and legislators, that law is a stimulant to action or an inhibitor of action, when actually the reverse is true. Successful law is simply the publication of the practice of the majority of units of a society, and by it the inevitable variable units are either driven to conform or are eliminated. We have had many examples of law trying to be the well-spring of action; our prohibition law showed how completely fallacious that theory is.
The things of our minds have for us a greater toughness than external reality. One of us has a beard, and one night when this one was standing wheel-watch, the others sat in the galley drinking coffee. We were discussing werewolves and their almost universal occurrence in regional literature. From this beginning, we played with a macabre thought, “The moon will soon be full,” we said, “and he of the beard will begin to feel the pull of the moon. Last night,” we said, “we heard the scratch of claws on the deck. When you see him go down on all fours, when you see the red light come into his eyes, then look out, for he will slash your throat.” We were delighted with the game. We developed the bearded one’s tendencies, how his teeth, the canines at least, had been noticeably longer of late, how for the past week he had torn his dinner apart with his teeth. It was night as we talked thus, and the deck was dark and the wind was blowing. Suddenly he appeared in the doorway, his beard and hair blown, his eyes red from the wind. Climbing the two steps up from the galley, he seemed to arise from all fours, and everyone of us started, and felt the prickle of erecting hairs. We had actually talked and thought ourselves into this pattern, and it took a while for it to wear off.
These mind things are very strong; in some, so strong as to blot out the external things completely.
18
March 28
AFTER the collecting on Coronado Island, on the twenty ./jL seventh, and the preservation and labeling, we found that we were very tired. We had worked constantly. On the morning of the twenty-eighth we slept. It was a good thing, we told ourselves; the eyes grow weary with looking at new things; sleeping late, we said, has its genuine therapeutic value; we would be better for it, would be able to work more effectively. We have little doubt that all this was true, but we wish we could build as good a rationalization every time we are lazy. For in some beastly way this fine laziness has got itself a bad name. It is easy to see how it might have come into disrepute, if the result of laziness were hunger. But it rarely is. Hunger makes laziness impossible. It has even become sinful to be lazy. We wonder why. One could argue, particularly if one had a gift for laziness, that it is a relaxation pregnant of activity, a sense of rest from which directed effort may arise, whereas most busy-ness is merely a kind of nervous tic. We know a lady who is obsessed with the idea of ashes in an ashtray. She is not lazy. She spends a good half of her waking time making sure that no ashes remain in any ashtray, and to make sure of keeping busy she has a great many ashtrays. 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 personal 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 such sense, since it seems equally contented straight or crooked. Suppose I should try to straighten people,” and here he sips deeply. “Helen C., for instance, is not neat, and Helen C.”—here he goes into a reverie—“how beautiful she is with her hair messy, how lovely when she is excited and breathing through her mouth.” Again he raises his glass, and in a few minutes he picks up the telephone. He is happy; Helen C. may be happy; and the rug is not disturbed at all.
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 an
d the world against itself. A busy man cannot find time for such balancing. We do not think a lazy man can commit murders, nor great thefts, nor lead a mob. He would be more likely to think about it and laugh. And a nation of lazy contemplative men would be incapable of fighting a war unless their very laziness were attacked. Wars are the activities of busy-ness.
With such a background of reasoning, we slept until nine A.M. And then the engines started and we moved toward Concepción Bay. The sea, with the exception of one blow outside of La Paz, had been very calm. This day, a little wind blew over the ultramarine water. The swordfish in great numbers jumped and played about us. We set up our lightest harpoon on the bow with a coil of cotton line beside it, and for hours we stood watch. The helmsman changed course again and again to try to bring the bow over a resting fish, but they seemed to wait until we were barely within throwing range and then they sounded so quickly that they seemed to snap from view. We made many wild casts and once we got the iron in, near the tail of a monster. But he flicked his tail and tore it out and was gone. We could see schools of leaping tuna all about us, and whenever we crossed the path of a school, our lines jumped and snapped under the strikes, and we brought the beautiful fish in.
We had set up a salt barrel near the stern, and we cut the fish into pieces and put them into brine to take home. It developed after we got home that several of us had added salt to the brine and the whole barrel was hopelessly salty and inedible.
As we turned Aguja Point and headed southward into the deep pocket of Concepción Bay, we could see Mulege on the northern shore—a small town in a blistering country. We had no plan for stopping there, for the story is that the port charges are mischievous and ruinous. We do not know that this is so, but it is repeated about Mulege very often. Also, there may be malaria there. We had been following the trail of malaria for a long time. At the Cape they said there was no malaria there but at La Paz it was very serious. At La Paz, they said it was only at Loreto. At Loreto they declared that Mulege was full of it. And there it must remain, for we didn’t stop at Mulege; so we do not know what the Mulegeños say about it. Later, we picked up the malaria on the other side, ran it down to Topolobambo, and left it there. We would say offhand, never having been to either place, that the malaria is very bad at Mulege and Topolobambo.
Sea of Cortez Page 18