The Log from the Sea of Cortez

by Steinbeck, John; Astro, Richard

  Immediately on arriving back at the Western Flyer we pulled up the anchor and got under way again. It was efficient that we preserve and label while we sailed as long as the sea was calm, and now it was very calm. The great collection from the reef required every enameled pan and glass dish we had. The killing and relaxing and preserving took us until dark, and even after dark we sat and made the labels to go into the tubes. As the jars filled and were labeled, we put them back in their corrugated-paper cartons and stowed them in the hold. The corked tubes were tested for leaks, then wrapped in paper toweling and stacked in boxes. Thus there was very small loss from breakage or leakage, and by labeling the same day as collecting, there had thus far been virtually no confusion in the tabulation of animals. But we knew already that we had made one error in planning: we had not brought nearly enough small containers. It is best to place an animal alone in a jar or a tube which accommodates him, but not too freely. The enormous numbers of animals we took strained our resources and containers long before we were through.

  As we moved up the Gulf, the mirage we had heard about began to distort the land. While it is worse on the Sonora coast, it is sufficiently interesting on the Peninsula to produce a heady, crazy feeling in the observer. As you pass a headland it suddenly splits off and becomes an island and then the water seems to stretch inward and pinch it to a mushroom-shaped cliff, and finally to liberate it from the earth entirely so that it hangs in the air over the water. Even a short distance offshore one cannot tell what the land really looks like. Islands too far off, according to the map, are visible; while others which should be near by cannot be seen at all until suddenly they come bursting out of the mirage. The whole surrounding land is unsubstantial and changing. One remembers the old stories of invisible kingdoms where princes lived with ladies and dragons for company; and the more modern fairy-tales in which heroes drift in and out of dimensions more complex than the original three. We are open enough to miracles of course, but what must have been the feeling of the discovering Spaniards? Miracles were daily happenings to them. Perhaps to that extent their feet were more firmly planted on the ground. Subject as they were to the constant apparitions of saints, to the trooping of holy virgins into their dreams and reveries, perhaps mirages were commonplaces. We have seen many miraculous figures in Mexico. They are usually Christs which have supernaturally appeared on mountains or in caves and usually at times of crisis. But it does seem odd that the heavenly authorities, when they wished a miraculous image to appear, invariably chose bad Spanish wood-carving of the seventeenth century. But perhaps art criticism in heaven was very closely related to the sensibilities of the time. Certainly it would have been a little shocking to find an Epstein Christ under a tree on a mountain in Mexico, or a Brancusi bird, or a Dali Descent from the Cross.

  It must have been a difficult task for those first sturdy Jesuit fathers to impress the Indians of the Gulf. The very air here is miraculous, and outlines of reality change with the moment. The sky sucks up the land and disgorges it. A dream hangs over the whole region, a brooding kind of hallucination. Perhaps only the shock of seventeenth-century wood-carving could do the trick; surely the miracle must have been very virile to be effective.

  Tony grew restive when the mirage was working, for here right and wrong fought before his very eyes, and how could one tell which was error? It is very well to say, “The land is here and what blots it out is a curious illusion caused by light and air and moisture,” but if one is steering a boat, he must sail by what he sees, and if air and light and moisture—three realities—plot together and perpetrate a lie, what is a realistic man to believe? Tony did not like the mirage at all.

  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 inundat
ed 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 simple 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 Gislen, 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 neverthel
ess 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 the. From 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.