Sea of Cortez

by John Steinbeck

  Ideas are not dangerous unless they find seeding place in some earth more profound than the mind. Leaders and would-be leaders are so afraid that the idea “communism” or the idea “Fascism” may lead to revolt, when actually they are ineffective without the black earth of discontent to grow in. The strike-raddled businessman may lean toward strikeless Fascism, forgetting that it also eliminates him. The rebel may yearn violently for the freedom from capitalist domination expected in a workers’ state, and ignore the fact that such a state is free from rebels. In each case the idea is dangerous only when planted in unease and disquietude. But being so planted, growing in such earth, it ceases to be idea and becomes emotion and then religion. Then, as in most things teleologically approached, the wrong end of the animal is attacked. Lucretius, striking at the teleology of his time, was not so far from us. “I shall untangle by what power the steersman nature guides the sun’s courses, and the meanderings of the moon, lest we, percase, should fancy that of own free will they circle their perennial courses round, timing their motions for increase of crops and living creatures, or lest we should think they roll along by any plan of gods. For even those men who have learned full well that godheads lead a long life free of care, if yet meanwhile they wonder by what plans things can go on (and chiefly yon high things observed o‘erhead on the ethereal coasts), again are hurried back unto the fears of old religion and adopt again harsh masters, deemed almighty,—wretched men, unwitting what can be and what cannot, and by what law to each its scope prescribed, its boundary stone that clings so deep in Time.” 81

  In the afternoon we sailed down the coast carefully, for the sand-bars were many and some of them uncharted. It was a shallow sea again, and the blueness of deep water had changed to the gray-green of sand and shallows. Again we saw manta rays, but not on the surface this day, and the hunt had gone out of us. Tex did not even get out his new harpoon. Perhaps the crew were homesick now. They had seen Guaymas, they were bloated with stories, and they wanted to get back to Monterey to tell them. We would stop at no more towns, see no more people. The inland water of Agiabampo was our last stop, and then quickly home. The shore was low and hot and humid, covered with brush and mangroves. The sea was sterile, or populated with sharks and rays. No algae adhered to the sand bot-tom, and we were sad in this place after the booming life of the other side. We sailed all afternoon and it was evening when we came to anchorage five miles offshore in the safety of deeper water. We would edge in with the leadline in the morning.

  28

  April 11

  AT TEN O‘CLOCK we moved toward the northern side of the entrance of Agiabampo estuary. The sand-bars were already beginning to show with the lowering tide. Tiny used the leadline on the bow while Sparky was again on the crow’s-nest where he could watch for the shallow water. Tony would not approach closer than a mile from the entrance, leaving as always a margin of safety.

  When we anchored, five of us got into the little skiff, filling it completely. Any rough water would have swamped us. Sparky and Tiny rowed us in, competing violently with each other, which gave a curious twisting course to the boat.

  Agiabampo is a great lagoon with a narrow seaward entrance. There is a little town ten miles in on the northern shore which we did not even try to reach. The entrance is intricate and obstructed with many shoals and sand-bars. It would be difficult without local knowledge to bring in a boat of any draft. We moved in around the northern shore; there were dense thickets of mangrove with little river-like entrances winding away into them. We saw great expanses of sand flat and the first extensive growth of eel-grass we had found.82 But the eel-grass, which ordinarily shelters a great variety of animal life, was here not very rich at all. We saw the depressions where botete, the poison fish, lay. And there were great numbers of sting-rays, which made us walk very carefully, even in rubber boots, for a slash with the tail-thorn of a sting-ray can easily pierce a boot.

  The sand banks near the entrance were deeply cut by currents. High in the intertidal many grapsoid crabs 83 lived in slanting burrows about eighteen inches deep. There were a great many of the huge stalk-eyed conchs and the inevitable big hermit crabs living in the cast-off conch shells. Farther in, there were numbers of Chione and the blue-clawed swimming crabs. They seemed even cleverer and fiercer here than at other places. Some of the eel-grass was sexually mature, and we took it for identification. On this grass there were clusters of snail eggs, but we saw none of the snails that had laid them. We found one scale-worm,84 a magnificent specimen in a Cerianthus-like tube. There were great numbers of tube-worms in the sand. The wind was light or absent while we collected, and we could see the bottom everywhere. On the exposed sand-bars birds were feeding in multitudes, possibly on the tube-worms. Along the shore, oyster-catchers hunted the burrowing crabs, diving at them as they sat at the entrances of their houses. It was not a difficult collecting station; the pattern, except for the eel-grass, was by now familiar to us although undoubtedly there were many things we did not see. Perhaps our eyes were tired with too much looking.

  As soon as the tide began its strong ebb we got into the skiff and started back to the Western Flyer. Collecting in narrow-mouthed estuaries, we are always wrong with the currents, for we come in against an ebbing tide and we go out against the flow. It was heavy work to defeat this current. The Sea-Cow gave us a hand and we rowed strenuously to get outside.

  That night we intended to run across the Gulf and start for home. It was good to be running at night again, easier to sleep with the engine beating. Tiny at the wheel inveighed against the waste of fish by the Japanese. To him it was a waste complete, a loss of something. We discussed the widening and narrowing picture. To Tiny the fisherman, having as his function not only the catching of fish but the presumption that they would be eaten by humans, the Japanese were wasteful. And in that picture he was very correct. But all the fish actually were eaten; if any small parts were missed by the birds they were taken by the detritus-eaters, the worms and cucumbers. And what they missed was reduced by the bacteria. What was the fisherman’s loss was a gain to another group. We tried to say that in the macrocosm nothing is wasted, the equation always balances. The elements which the fish elaborated into an individuated physical organism, a microcosm, go back again into the undifferentiated macrocosm which is the great reservoir. There is not, nor can there be, any actual waste, but simply varying forms of energy. To each group, of course, there must be waste—the dead fish to man, the broken pieces to gulls, the bones to some and the scales to others—but to the whole, there is no waste. The great organism, Life, takes it all and uses it all. The large picture is always clear and the smaller can be clear—the picture of eater and eaten. And the large equilibrium of the life of a given animal is postulated on the presence of abundant larvae of just such forms as itself for food. Nothing is wasted; “no star is lost.”

  And in a sense there is no over-production, since every living thing has its niche, a posteriori, and God, in a real, non-mystical sense, sees every sparrow fall and every cell utilized. What is called “over-production” even among us in our manufacture of articles is only over-production in terms of a status quo, but in the history of the organism, it may well be a factor or a function in some great pattern of change or repetition. Perhaps some cells, even intellectual ones, must be sickened before others can be well. And perhaps with us these production climaxes are the therapeutic fevers which cause a rush of curative blood to the sickened part. Our history is as much a product of torsion and stress as it is of unilinear drive. It is amusing that at any given point of time we haven’t the slightest idea of what is happening to us. The present wars and ideological changes of nervousness and fighting seem to have direction, but in a hundred years it is more than possible it will be seen that the direction was quite different from the one we supposed. The limitation of the seeing point in time, as well as in space, is a warping lens.

  Among men, it seems, historically at any rate, that processes of co-ordination
and disintegration follow each other with great regularity, and the index of the co-ordination is the measure of the disintegration which follows. There is no mob like a group of well-drilled soldiers when they have thrown off their discipline. And there is no lostness like that which comes to a man when a perfect and certain pattern has dissolved about him. There is no hater like one who has greatly loved.

  We think these historical waves may be plotted and the harmonic curves of human group conduct observed. Perhaps out of such observation a knowledge of the function of war and destruction might emerge. Little enough is known about the function of individual pain and suffering, although from its profound organization it is suspected of being necessary as a survival mechanism. And nothing whatever is known of the group pains of the species, although it is not unreasonable to suppose that they too are somehow functions of the surviving species. It is too bad that against even such investigation we build up a hysterical and sentimental barrier. Why do we so dread to think of our species as a species? Can it be that we are afraid of what we may find? That human self-love would suffer too much and that the image of God might prove to be a mask? This could be only partly true, for if we could cease to wear the image of a kindly, bearded, interstellar dictator, we might find ourselves true images of his kingdom, our eyes the nebulae, and universes in our cells.

  The safety-valve of all speculation is: It might be so. And as long as that might remains, a variable deeply understood, then speculation does not easily become dogma, but remains the fluid creative thing it might be. Thus, a valid painter, letting color and line, observed, sift into his eyes, up the nerve trunks, and mix well with his experience before it flows down his hand to the canvas, has made his painting say, “It might be so.” Perhaps his critic, being not so honest and not so wise, will say, “It is not so. The picture is damned.” If this critic could say, “It is not so with me, but that might be because my mind and experience are not identical with those of the painter,” that critic would be the better critic for it, just as that painter is a better painter for knowing he himself is in the pigment.

  We tried always to understand that the reality we observed was partly us; the speculation, our product. And yet if somehow, “The laws of thought must be the laws of things,” one can find an index of reality even in insanity.

  We sailed a compass course in the night and before daylight a deep fog settled on us. Tony stopped the engine and let us drift, and the dawn came with the thick fog still about us. Tiny and Sparky had the watch, and as the dawn broke, they heard surf and reported it. We came out of our bunks and went up on the deckhouse just as the fog lifted. There was an island half a mile away. Then Tony said, “Did you keep the course I gave you?” Tiny insisted that they had, and Tony said, “If that is so, you have discovered an island, and a big one, because the chart shows no island here.” He went on delicately, “I want to congratulate you. We’ll call it ‘Colletto and Enea Island.’ ” Tony continued silkily, “But you know Goddamn well you didn’t keep the course. You know you forgot, and are a good many miles off course.” Sparky and Tiny did not argue. They never claimed the island, nor mentioned it again. It developed that it was Espiritu Santo Island, and would have been a prize if they had discovered it, but some Spaniards had done that several hundred years before.

  San Gabriel Bay was near us, its coral sand dazzlingly white, and a good reef projecting and a mangrove swamp along part of the coast. We went ashore for this last collecting station. The sand was so white and the water so clear that we took off our clothes and plunged about. The animals here had been affected by the white sand. The crabs were pale and nearly white, and all the animals, even the starfish, were strangely colored. There were stretches of this blinding sand alternating with bouldery reef and mangrove. In the center of the little bay, a fine big patch of green coral almost emerged from the water. It was green and brown coral in great heads, and there were Phataria and many club-spined urchins on the heads. There were multitudes of the clam Chione just under the surface of the sand, very hard to find until we discovered that every clam had a tiny veil of pale-green algae growing on the front of each valve and sticking up above the sand. Then we took a great number of them.

  Near the beds of clams lived heart-urchins with vicious spines.85 These too were buried in the sand, and to dig for the clams was to be stabbed by the heart urchins, and to be stung badly. There were many hachas here with their clustered colonies of associated fauna. We found solitary and clustered zoanthidean anemones, possibly the same we had been seeing in many variations. We found light-colored Callinectes crabs and one of the long snake-like sea-cucumbers 86 such as the ones we had taken at Puerto Escondido. On the rocky reef there were anemones, limpets, and many barnacles. The most common animal on the reef was a membranous tube-worm 87 with tentacles like a serpulid’s. These tentacles were purple and brown, but when approached they were withdrawn and the animal became sand-colored. The mangrove region here was rich. The roots of the trees, impacted with rocks, maintained a fine group of crabs and cucumbers. Two large, hairy grapsoid crabs 88 lived highest in the littoral. They were very fast and active and difficult to catch, and when caught, battled fiercely and ended up by auto tomizing.

  There was also a Panopeus-like crab, Xanthodius hebes, but dopey and slow. We found great numbers of porcelain crabs and snapping shrimps. There were barnacles on the reef and on the roots of the mangroves; two new ophiurans and a large sea-hare, besides a miscellany of snails and clams. It was a rich haul, this last day. The sun was hot and the sand pleasant and we were comfortable except for mosquito bites. We played in the water a long time when we were tired of collecting.

  When once the engine started now, it would not stop until we reached San Diego. We were reluctant to go back. This balance in time is one of the very few occasions when we have the right of “yes” and “no,” and even now the cards were stacked against “yes.”

  At last we picked up the collecting buckets and the little crowbars and all the tubes, and we rowed slowly back to the Western Flyer. Even then, we had difficulty in starting. Someone was overboard swimming in the beautiful water all the time. Tony and Tex, who had been eager to get home, were reluctant now that it was upon them. We had all felt the pattern of the Gulf, and we and the Gulf had established another pattern which was a new thing composed of it and us. At last, and with sorrow, Tex started the engine and the anchor came up for the last time.

  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.