The Log from the Sea of Cortez (46 page)

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Authors: John Steinbeck,Richard Astro

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This was not said in self-love in its bad connotation but in self-knowledge. He meant literally that he had learned to accept and like the person “Ed” as he liked other people. It gave him a great advantage. Most people do not like themselves at all. They distrust themselves, put on masks and pomposities. They quarrel and boast and pretend and are jealous because they do not like themselves. But mostly they do not even know themselves well enough to form a true liking. They cannot see themselves well enough to form a true liking, and since we automatically fear and dislike strangers, we fear and dislike our stranger-selves.

Once Ed was able to like himself he was released from the secret prison of self-contempt. Then he did not have to prove superiority any more by any of the ordinary methods, including giving. He could receive and understand and be truly glad, not competitively glad.

Ed’s gift for receiving made him a great teacher. Children brought shells to him and gave him information about the shells. And they had to learn before they could tell him.

In conversation you found yourself telling him things—thoughts, conjectures, hypotheses—and you found a pleased surprise at yourself for having arrived at something you were not aware that you could think or know. It gave you such a good sense of participation with him that you could present him with this wonder.

Then Ed would say, “Yes, that’s so. That’s the way it might be and besides—” and he would illuminate it but not so that he took it away from you. He simply accepted it.

Although his creativeness lay in receiving, that does not mean that he kept things as property. When you had something from him it was not something that was his that he tore away from himself. When you had a thought from him or a piece of music or twenty dollars or a steak dinner, it was not his—it was yours already, and his was only the head and hand that steadied it in position toward you. For this reason no one was ever cut off from him. Association with him was deep participation with him, never competition.

I wish we could all be so. If we could learn even a little to like ourselves, maybe our cruelties and angers might melt away. Maybe we would not have to hurt one another just to keep our ego-chins above water.

There it is. That’s all I can set down about Ed Ricketts. I don’t know whether any clear picture has emerged. Thinking back and remembering has not done what I hoped it might. It has not laid the ghost.

The picture that remains is a haunting one. It is the time just before dusk. I can see Ed finishing his work in the laboratory. He covers his instruments and puts his papers away. He rolls down the sleeves of his wool shirt and puts on his old brown coat. I see him go out and get in his beat-up old car and slowly drive away in the evening.

I guess I’ll have that with me all my life.

GLOSSARY

OF TERMS AS USED IN THIS WORK

ABORAL. The upper surface of a starfish, brittle-star, or sea-urchin, as opposed to the under or oral surface whereon the mouth is situated.

ALGAE. Simple plants, often unicellular; the higher forms include the seaweeds.

AMBULACRAL GROOVE. A furrow bisecting the underside of the rays of starfish through which the tube feet are protruded.

AMPHIPOD. Literally, “paired-legs.” Minute shrimp-like crustaceans, laterally compressed; the beach hoppers, sand fleas, skeleton shrimps, etc.

ANASTOMOSING. Dictionary definition: “Union or intercommunication of any system or network of lines, branches, streams, or the like.”

ASSOCIATION. An assemblage of animals having ecologically similar requirements.

ATOKOUS. The sexually immature stage of certain polychaet worms.

AUTONOMY. Reflex, or seemingly voluntary, separation of a part or a limb from the body, followed by regeneration.

BUNODID ANEMONE. One of a family of sea-anemones characterized by a bumpy or warty body wall.

CALCAREOUS. Containing deposits of calcium carbonate; calcification.

CERATA. Dorsal projections which take the place of gills.

COMMENSAL. An organism living in, with, or on another, generally partaking of the same food.

COSINE WAVE. A wave graphically represented by a curving line, the peaks and troughs of which are equal and complementary.

CTENOPHORE. A type of jellyfish characterized by the possession of meridional rows of vibrating plates which propel and orient the animal.

DACTYL. Term applied to the last joint of a crustacean leg.

DEHISCENCE. A bursting discharge, usually of eggs or sperm.

DROWNED CORAL FLAT. A flat containing coral, some heads of which have been suffocated by sand.

ECHIUROID. A worm-like animal related to the sipunculids, in which the body is variably sac-like, usually with thin skin, and having often a spoon-shaped proboscis.

ECOLOGY. The study of the mutual relations between an organism and its physical and sociological environment.

ELYTRA. Shield-like scales of certain worms.

ENDEMIC. Dictionary example: “An
endemic disease
is one which is constantly present to a greater or less degree in any place, as distinguished from an
epidemic disease,
which prevails widely at some time, or periodically....”

EPITOKOUS. Sexually mature stage in polychaet worms, characterized by changes of the posterior end which enable normally crawling worms to be free-swimming.

ETIOLOGY. Dictionary definition: “1. The science, doctrine, or demonstration of causes, especially the investigation of the causes of any disease. 2. The assignment of a cause or reason; as, the
etiology
of a historical custom.”

FLORIATE. Flower-like.

GASTROPOD. Literally, “stomach-foot.” Belonging to a group of animals comprising the snails, slugs, sea-hares, etc.

GYMNOBLAST. Belonging to a group (of hydroids) in which the polyps lack the skeletal cups of other hydroids into which the soft parts can be withdrawn.

HOLOTHURIAN. Sea-cucumber. One of a group of echinoderms, or spiny-skinned animals, some varieties of which, under the commercial name
bêche-de-mer
or
trepang,
are used by the Chinese for food.

HYDROID. A small, plant-like, usually colonial animal.

INTERTIDAL. See
Littoral.

INTROVERT. A closed tubular pocket capable of being unrolled and extended inside out.

ISOPOD. Literally, “same legs.” Usually small crustaceans in which all the legs are similar, comprising the pill-bugs, sow-bugs, and many marine forms.

ISOTHERM. A line joining or marking equal temperatures.

LITTORAL. Region of the shore bounded by its highest normal submergence at high tide and most extreme emergence at low tide. Intertidal.

MUTATION. In the life history of a species, the sudden appearance of a new trait that breeds true and becomes eventually one of the characters of the species or of the new species thus formed.

MYSIDS. Usually minute crustacea, called “opossum shrimps” because of their possession of marsupial plates within which the young develop.

NUDIBRANCH. Literally, “naked gill.” One of a group of shell-less gastropods, often brilliantly colored and of delicately beautiful form.

OPHIURAN. Brittle-star or serpent-star. Members of one of the five classes of echinoderms or spiny-skinned animals.

PAPILLA. Small elevation; in holothurians, modified tube feet not used for locomotion.

PELAGIC. Free-floating at or near the surface of the sea.

PLANKTON. Generally microscopic plant and animal life floating or weakly swimming in the upper layer of a body of water.

POLYCHAETS. Usually elongate worms characterized by the possession of abundant chaetae or bristles.

POLYCLADS. Flatworms in which the intestinal tract has extensive ramifications.

POLYP. An invertebrate having a hollow cylindrical body, closed and attached at one end and opening at the other by a central mouth surrounded by tentacles. May be an individual (as an anemone) or a member of a colony (as a coral polyp).

PORCELLANIDS. Crabs of the family Porcellanidae, often called porcelain crabs because of the carapace texture of typical examples.

QUATERNARY, OR RECENT. The latest of the epochs into which geologists divide the history of the earth. Late Quaternary includes the present time.

RESPIRATORY TREE. The respiratory organ of holothurians; so named because it resembles a tree inside out. Fresh water is taken in at what corresponds to the trunk and penetrates to the delicate branches, which provide great absorption area in proportion to the volume.

SCALAR. Mathematical term. An abstract quantity having magnitude but not direction, such as volume, mass, weight, time, electrical charge, and always indicated by a real number.

SERPULID. A polychaet worm which builds a calcareous tube, usually coiled.

SESSILE. Attached, therefore not moving.

SIPHONOPHORE. A type of jellyfish. The Portuguese man-o’-war and other spectacular forms belong to this group.

SIPUNCULIDS. Worm-like animals characterized (among other things) by the possession of an introvert, and of rough, cuticle-like skin. Capable of great expansion; contracted, some of them merit the name peanut worm.

SYNDROME. A group of signs and symptoms occurring together and characterizing a disease.

SYNONYMY. The various names used to designate a given species or group.

TAXONOMY. A sub-science of biology concerned with the classification of animals according to natural relationships and with the rules governing the system of nomenclature.

TECTIBRANCHS. A group of sometimes shell-less gastropods to which belong the sea-hares and bubble-shells.

TELEOLOGY. The assumption of predetermined design, purpose, or ends in Nature by which an explanation of phenomena is postulated.

TENSOR. A mathematical term for the stretching factor which is necessary to change one vector, or force, into another vector having a different amount of force and direction. (Thus, if one imagines a given force
A
traveling south at 40 miles an hour, and another force
B
traveling southeast at 60 miles an hour, mathematically to translate force A into force B, the factor which changes one into the other must have not only force and direction, but stretching power, to pull
A
equal to
B,
and that factor is called the
tensor
.) Tensor is the quantity necessary in Einsteinian physics to translate vectors from one set of co-ordinates (frame of reference) to another.

TEREBELLID WORM. A polychaet worm which builds a sandy or pebbly tube, cemented usually to the underside of rocks by its own mucus.

THIGMOTROPISM. An innate tendency to seek enclosing contact with a solid or rigid surface, as in a burrow.

TROPISM. Innate involuntary movement of an organism or any of its parts toward (positive) or away from (negative) a stimulus.

TURBELLARIAN WORMS. The large group of flatworms to which the polyclads belong.

UBIQUITOUS. Occurring everywhere (though not necessarily abundantly) in the total area under consideration.

VECTOR. A mathematical term for an abstract quantity such as velocity, acceleration, or force, having
both
magnitude and direction. It may also have position in space, but this is not necessary. A vector is symbolized or represented by an arrow.

XEROPHYTIC. Plants structurally adapted to withstand drought.

ZOOID. Individual member of a colony or compound organism, having more or less independent life of its own.

INDEX

Abalone

“Abanico,”.
See also
Sea-fans

Abyssinia

Acanthochitona exquisitus

Actinaria of the Canadian Arctic Expeditions, The
(Verrill)

Actinians

“Actinians of Porto Rico” (Duerden) n.

Agassiz

Agiabampo; estuary