The Log from the Sea of Cortez (45 page)
Read The Log from the Sea of Cortez Online
Authors: John Steinbeck,Richard Astro
When the book
Studs Lonigan
came out, Ed read it twice very quickly. “This is a true book,” he said. “I was born and grew up in this part of Chicago. I played in these streets. I know them all. I know the people. This is a true book.” And, of course, to Ed a thing that was true was beautiful. He followed the whole series of Farrell’s books after that and only after the locale moved to New York did he lose interest. He did not know true things about New York.
Studs Lonigan
came out, Ed read it twice very quickly. “This is a true book,” he said. “I was born and grew up in this part of Chicago. I played in these streets. I know them all. I know the people. This is a true book.” And, of course, to Ed a thing that was true was beautiful. He followed the whole series of Farrell’s books after that and only after the locale moved to New York did he lose interest. He did not know true things about New York.
One of the most amusing things that ever happened in Pacific Biological Laboratories was our attempt to help with the war effort against Japan and the complete fiasco that resulted.
When we came back from the collecting trip which is recorded in the latter part of this book, we went to work on the thousands of animals we had gathered. Our project had been to lay the basis for a new faunal geography rather than a search for new species. We needed a great amount of supplementary information regarding the distribution of species on both sides of the Pacific Ocean and among the Pacific Islands, since many species are widely placed.
By this time Pearl Harbor had been attacked and we were at war with Japan. But even if we had not been, there were difficulties. Soon after the First World War a great number of the islands of the Pacific were mandated to Japan by the League of Nations. And Japan’s first act had been to draw a bamboo curtain over these islands and over the whole area. No foreigner had been permitted to land on them in twenty years for any purpose whatever.
These islands had not been well known in a zoologic sense before the mandate and nothing had been heard from them since—so we thought.
We sent out the usual letters to universities, requesting information that might be available concerning these curtained islands. The replies delighted us. There was a great deal of information available.
What had happened is this. Japan had certainly cut off the islands from the world, but, perhaps with the future war in view, Japan had wanted to make a survey of her new possessions in the matter of food supply from the ocean. The Japanese eat many more sea products than we do. Who better to send to make this survey than certain eminent Japanese zoologists who were internationally known?
What followed is truly comic opera. The zoologists did make the survey—very secretly. Then afterwards, since they were good scientists and specialists, what was more natural than that they should study their specialties together with the ecological theater? And then, being thoroughly good men, they completed their zoologic survey.
Now a careful zoologic survey notes not only the animals but their neighbor animals—friends and enemies and the conditions under which they live. Such conditions would include weather, wave shock, tidal range, currents, salinity, reefs, headlands, winds, nature of coast and nature of bottom, and any interesting phenomena which might interfere with or promote the occurrence, normal growth, and happiness of the animals in question. Such matters might be mentioned as the discharge into tide pools of by-products of new chemical plants which would change the ecological balance.
Having finished their sea-food reports to the Japanese government, the zoologists with even more loving care wrote their papers on the specialties. And then, what was more natural than that they should send these papers to their colleagues around the world? Japan was not at war. They knew their brother zoologists would be interested and many of the Japanese had studied at Harvard, at Hopkins, at California Institute of Technology—in fact at all of the American universities. They had friends all over the world who would appreciate and applaud their work in pure science.
When these surveys began to arrive Ed and I suddenly lost our interest in the animals. Here under our hands were detailed studies of the physical make-up of one of the least-known areas of the world and one which was in the hands of our enemy. With excitement we realized that if we were ever going to go island-hopping toward Japan, which seemed reasonable, here was all the information needed if we were to make beach landings—depth, tide, currents, reefs, nature of coast, etc. We did not know whether we were alone in our discovery. We wondered whether our naval or military intelligence knew of the existence of these reports. Often a very obvious thing may lie unnoticed. It seemed to us that if our intelligence services did not know, they should, and we were quite willing to take the chance of duplication.
We drafted a letter to the Navy Department in Washington, explaining the material, its possible use, and how we had come upon it.
Six weeks later we received a form letter thanking us for our patriotism. I seem to remember that the letter was mimeographed. Ed was philosophical about it, but I, who did not have his military experience and cynicism, got mad. I wrote to the Secretary of the Navy, at that time the Honorable Frank Knox, again telling the story of the island material. And then after the letter was sealed, in a moment of angry impudence, I wrote “Personal” on the envelope.
Nothing happened for two months. I was away when it did happen. Ed told me about it later. One afternoon a tight-lipped man in civilian clothes came into the laboratory and identified himself as a lieutenant commander of Naval Intelligence.
“We have had a communication from you,” he said sternly.
“Oh, yes,” Ed said. “We’re glad you are here.”
The officer interrupted him. “Do you speak or read Japanese?” he asked suspiciously.
“No, I don’t,” Ed said.
“Does your partner speak or read Japanese?”
“No—why do you ask?”
“Then what is this information you claim to have about the Pacific islands?”
Only then did Ed understand him. “But they’re in English—the papers are all in English!” he cried.
“How in English?”
“The men, the Japanese zoologists, wrote them in English. They had studied here. English is becoming the scientific language of the world.”
This thought, Ed said, really made quite a struggle to get in, but it failed.
“Why don’t they write in Japanese?” the commander demanded.
“I don’t know.” Ed was getting tired. “The fact remains that they write English—sometimes quaint English but English.”
That word tore it, just as my “Personal” on the envelope probably tore it in Washington.
The lieutenant commander looked grim. “Quaint!” he said. “You will hear from us.”
But we never did. And I have always wondered whether they had the information or got it. I wonder whether some of the soldiers whose landing craft grounded a quarter of a mile from the beach and who had to wade ashore under fire had the feeling that bottom and tidal range either were not known or were ignored. I don’t know.
Ed shook his head after he told me about the visit of the officer. “I never learn,” he said. “I really fell into that one. And I should know better. And I used to be a company clerk.” Then he told me about the Navy tests at Bremerton.
The tests were designed to develop some bottom material or paint which would repel barnacles. The outlay of money was considerable—big concrete tanks were built and samples of paints, metal salts, poisons, tars, were immersed to see what material barnacles would be most likely to stay away from.
“Now,” Ed said, “a friend of mine who teaches at the University of Washington is one of the world’s specialists in barnacles. My friend happens to be a woman. She heard of the tests and offered her services to the Navy. A very patriotic woman as well as a damn good scientist.
“There were two strikes against her,” Ed said. “One, she was a woman, and two, she was a professor. The Navy was gallant but adamant. She was thanked and informed that the Navy was not interested in theory. This was hard-boiled realism, and practical men—not theoreticians—would see it through.”
Ed grinned at me. “You know,” he said, “at the end of three months there wasn’t a single barnacle on any of the test materials, not even on the guide materials, the untouched wood and steel. My friend heard of this and visited the station again. She was shy about imposing theory. But she saw what was wrong very quickly.
“The Navy is hard-boiled but it is clean,” Ed said. “Bremerton water, on the other hand, is very dirty—you know, harbor stuff, oil and algae, decayed fish and even some human residue. The Navy didn’t like that filth so the water was filtered before it went to the tanks. The filters got the water clean,” said Ed, “but it also removed all of the barnacle larvae.” He laughed. “I wonder whether she ever told them,” he said.
Thus was our impertinent attempt to change the techniques of warfare put in its place. But we won.
I became associated in the business of the laboratory in the simplest of ways. A number of years ago Ed had gradually got into debt until the interest on his loan from the bank was bleeding the laboratory like a cat in the basement. Rather sadly he prepared to liquidate the little business and give up his independence—the right to sleep late and work late, the right to make his own decisions. While the lab was not run efficiently, it could make enough to support him, but it could not also pay the bank interest.
At that time I had some money put away and I took up the bank loans and lowered the interest to a vanishing point. I knew the money would vanish anyway. To secure the loan I received stock in the corporation—the most beautiful stock, and the mortgage on the property. I didn’t understand much of the transaction but it allowed the laboratory to operate for another ten years. Thus I became a partner in the improbable business. I must say I brought no efficiency to bear on it. The fact that the institution survived at all is a matter that must be put down to magic. I can find no other reasonable explanation. It had no right to survive. A board of directors’ meeting differed from any other party only in that there was more beer. A stern business discussion had a way of slipping into a consideration of a unified field hypothesis.
Our trip to the Gulf of Lower California was a marvel of bumbling efficiency. We went where we intended, got what we wanted, and did the work on it. It had been our intention to continue the work with a survey of the Aleutian chain of islands when the war closed that area to us.
At the time of Ed’s death our plans were completed, tickets bought, containers and collecting equipment ready for a long collecting trip to the Queen Charlotte Islands, which reach so deep into the Pacific Ocean. There was one deep bay with a long and narrow opening where we thought we might observe some changes in animal forms due to a specialized life and a long period of isolation. Ed was to have started within a month and I was to have joined him there. Maybe someone else will study that little island sea. The light has gone out of it for me.
Now I am coming near to the close of this account. I have not put down Ed’s relations with his wives or with his three children. There isn’t time, and besides I did not know much about these things.
As I have said, no one who knew Ed will be satisfied with this account. They will have known innumerable other Eds. I imagine that there were as many Eds as there were friends of Ed. And I wonder whether there can be any parallel thinking on his nature and the reason for his impact on the people who knew him. I wonder whether I can make any kind of generalization that would be satisfactory.
I have tried to isolate and inspect the great talent that was in Ed Ricketts, that made him so loved and needed and makes him so missed now that he is dead. Certainly he was an interesting and charming man, but there was some other quality which far exceeded these. I have thought that it might be his ability to receive, to receive anything from anyone, to receive gracefully and thankfully and to make the gift seem very fine. Because of this everyone felt good in giving to Ed—a present, a thought, anything.
Perhaps the most overrated virtue in our list of shoddy virtues is that of giving. Giving builds up the ego of the giver, makes him superior and higher and larger than the receiver. Nearly always, giving is a selfish pleasure, and in many cases it is a downright destructive and evil thing. One has only to remember some of our wolfish financiers who spend two-thirds of their lives clawing fortunes out of the guts of society and the latter third pushing it back. It is not enough to suppose that their philanthropy is a kind of frightened restitution, or that their natures change when they have enough. Such a nature never has enough and natures do not change that readily. I think that the impulse is the same in both cases. For giving can bring the same sense of superiority as getting does, and philanthropy may be another kind of spiritual avarice.
It is so easy to give, so exquisitely rewarding. Receiving, on the other hand, if it be well done, requires a fine balance of self-knowledge and kindness. It requires humility and tact and great understanding of relationships. In receiving you cannot appear, even to yourself, better or stronger or wiser than the giver, although you must be wiser to do it well.
It requires a self-esteem to receive—not self-love but just a pleasant acquaintance and liking for oneself.
Once Ed said to me, “For a very long time I didn’t like myself.” It was not said in self-pity but simply as an unfortunate fact. “It was a very difficult time,” he said, “and very painful. I did not like myself for a number of reasons, some of them valid and some of them pure fancy. I would hate to have to go back to that. Then gradually,” he said, “I discovered with surprise and pleasure that a number of people did like me. And I thought, if they can like me, why cannot I like myself? Just thinking it did not do it, but slowly I learned to like myself and then it was all right.”
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