Sea of Cortez

by John Steinbeck

  Even our boat hurried us, and while the Sea-Cow would not run, it had nevertheless infected us with the idea of its running. Six weeks we had, and no more. Was it a wonder that we collected furiously; spent every low-tide moment on the rocks, even at night? And in the times between low tides we kept the bottom nets down and the lines and dip-nets working. When the charter was up, we would be through. How different it had been when John Xanthus was stationed in this very place, Cape San Lucas, in the sixties. Sent down by the United States Government as a tidal observer, but having lots of time, he collected animals for our National Museum. The first fine collections of Gulf forms came from Xanthus. And we do not feel that we are injuring his reputation, but rather broadening it, by repeating a story about him. Speaking to the manager of the cannery at the Cape, we remarked on what a great man Xanthus had been. Where another would have kept his tide charts and brooded and wished for the Willard Hotel, Xanthus had collected animals widely and carefully. The manager said, “Oh, he was even better than that.” Pointing to three little Indian children he said, “Those are Xanthus’s great-grandchildren,” and he continued, “In the town there is a large family of Xanthuses, and a few miles back in the hills you’ll find a whole tribe of them.” There were giants in the earth in those days.

  We wonder what modern biologist, worried about titles and preferment and the gossip of the Faculty Club, would have the warmth and breadth, or even the fecundity for that matter, to leave a “whole tribe of Xanthuses.” We honor this man for all his activities. He at least was one who literally did proliferate in all directions.

  Many people have spoken at length of the Sally Lightfoots. In fact, everyone who has seen them has been delighted with them. The very name they are called by reflects the delight of the name. These little crabs, with brilliant cloisonne carapaces, walk on their tiptoes. They have remarkable eyes and an extremely fast reaction time. In spite of the fact that they swarm on the rocks at the Cape, and to a less degree inside the Gulf, they are exceedingly hard to catch. They seem to be able to run in any one of four directions; but more than this, perhaps because of their rapid reaction time, they appear to read the mind of their hunter. They escape the long-handled net, anticipating from what direction it is coming. If you walk slowly, they move slowly ahead of you in droves. If you hurry, they hurry. When you plunge at them, they seem to disappear in little puffs of blue smoke—at any rate, they disappear. It is impossible to creep up on them. They are very beautiful, with clear brilliant colors, reds and blues and warm browns. We tried for a long time to catch them. Finally, seeing fifty or sixty in a big canyon of rock, we thought to outwit them. Surely we were more intelligent, if slower, than they. Accordingly, we pitted our obviously superior intelligence against the equally obvious physical superiority of Sally Lightfoot. Near the top of the crevice a boulder protruded. One of our party, taking a secret and circuitous route, hid himself behind this boulder, net in hand. He was completely concealed even from the stalk eyes of the crabs. Certainly they had not seen him go there. The herd of Sallys drowsed on the rocks in the lower end of the crevice. Two more of us strolled in from the seaward side, nonchalance in our postures and ingenuousness on our faces. One might have thought that we merely strolled along in a contemplation which severely excluded Sally Lightfoots. In time the herd moved ahead of us, matching our nonchalance. We did not hurry, they did not hurry. When they passed the boulder, helpless and unsuspecting, a large net was to fall over them and imprison them. But they did not know that. They moved along until they were four feet from the boulder, and then as one crab they turned to the right, climbed up over the edge of the crevice and down to the sea again.

  Man reacts peculiarly but consistently in his relationship with Sally Lightfoot. His tendency eventually is to scream curses, to hurl himself at them, and to come up foaming with rage and bruised all over his chest. Thus, Tiny, leaping forward, slipped and fell and hurt his arm. He never forgot nor forgave his enemy. From then on he attacked Lightfoots by every foul means he could contrive (and a training in Monterey street fighting had equipped him well for this kind of battle). He hurled rocks at them; he smashed at them with boards; and he even considered poisoning them. Eventually we did catch a few Sallys, but we think they were the halt and the blind, the simpletons of their species. With reasonably well-balanced and non-neurotic Lightfoots we stood no chance.

  We came back to the boat loaded with specimens, and immediately prepared to preserve them. The square, enameled pans were laid out on the hatch, the trays and bowls and watch-glasses (so called because at one time actual watch-crystals were used). The pans and glasses were filled with fresh sea water, and into them we distributed the animals by families—all the crabs in one, anemones in another, snails in another, and delicate things like flatworms and hydroids in others. From this distribution it was easier to separate them finally by species.13

  9

  WHEN the catch was sorted and labeled, we went ashore to the cannery and later drove with Chris, the manager, and Senor Luis, the port captain, to the little town of San Lucas. It was a sad little town, for a winter storm and a great surf had wrecked it in a single night. Water had driven past the houses, and the streets of the village had been a raging river. “Then there were no roofs over the heads of the people,” Señor Luis said excitedly. “Then the babies cried and there was no food. Then the people suffered.”

  The road to the little town, two wheel-ruts in the dust, tossed us about in the cannery truck. The cactus and thorny shrubs ripped at the car as we went by. At last we stopped in front of a mournful cantina where morose young men hung about waiting for something to happen. They had waited a long time—several generations—for something to happen, these good-looking young men. In their eyes there was a hopelessness. The storm of the winter had been discussed so often that it was sucked dry. And besides, they all knew the same things about it. Then we happened to them. The truck pulled up to the cantina door and we—strangers, foreigners—stepped out, as disorderly-looking a group as had ever come to their cantina. Tiny wore a Navy cap of white he had traded for, he said, in a washroom in San Diego. Tony still had his snap-brim felt. There were yachting caps and sweaters, and jeans stiff with fish blood. The young men stirred to life for a little while, but we were not enough. The flood had been much better. They relapsed again into their gloom.

  There is nothing more doleful than a little cantina. In the first place it is inhabited by people who haven’t any money to buy a drink. They stand about waiting for a miracle that never happens: the angel with golden wings who settles on the bar and orders drinks for everyone. This never happens, but how are the sad handsome young men to know it never will happen? And suppose it did happen and they were somewhere else? And so they lean against the wall; and when the sun is high they sit down against the wall. Now and then they go away into the brush for a while, and they go to their little homes for meals. But that is an impatient time, for the golden angel might arrive. Their faith is not strong, but it is permanent.

  We could see that we did not greatly arouse them. The cantina owner promptly put his loudest records on the phonograph to force a gaiety into this sad place. But he had Carta Blanca beer and (at the risk of a charge that we have sold our souls to this brewery) we love Carta Blanca beer. There was no ice, no electric lights, and the gasoline lanterns hissed and drew the bugs from miles away. The cockroaches in their hordes rushed in to see what was up. Big, handsome cockroaches, with almost human faces. The loud music only made us sadder, and the young men watched us. When we lifted a split of beer to our lips the eyes of the young men rose with our hands, and even the cockroaches lifted their heads. We couldn’t stand it. We ordered beer all around, but it was too late. The young men were too far gone in sorrow. They drank their warm beer sadly. Then we bought straw hats, for the sun is deadly here. There should be a kind of ridiculous joy in buying a floppy hat, but those young men, so near to tears, drained even that joy. Their golden angel had come, and they did n
ot find him good. We felt rather as God would feel when, after all the preparation of Paradise, all the plannings for eternities of joy, all the making and tuning of harps, the street-paving with gold, and the writing of hosannas, at last He let in the bleacher customers and they looked at the heavenly city and wished to be again in Brooklyn. We told funny stories, knowing they wouldn’t be enjoyed, tiring of them ourselves before the point was reached. Nothing was fun in that little cantina. We started back for the boat. I think those young men were glad to see us go; because once we were gone, they could begin to build us up, but present, we inhibited their imaginations.

  At the bar Chris told us of a native liquor called damiana, made from an infusion of a native herb, and not much known outside of Baja California. Chris said it was an aphrodisiac, and told some interesting stories to prove it. We felt a scientific interest in his stories, and bought a bottle of damiana, intending to subject it to certain tests under laboratory conditions. But the customs officials of San Diego took it away from us, not because of its romantic aspect, but because it had alcohol in it. Thus we were never able to give it a truly scientific testing. We think we were going to use it on a white rat. Tiny said he didn’t want any such stuff getting in his way when he felt lustful.

  There doesn’t seem to be a true aphrodisiac; there are ex citants like cantharides, and physical aids to the difficulties of psychic traumas, like yohimbine sulphate; there are strong protein foods like bêche-de-mer and the gonads of sea-urchins, and the much over-rated oyster; even chiles, with their irritating qualities, have some effect, but there seems to be no true aphrodisiac, no sweet essence of that goddess to be taken in a capsule. A certain young person said once that she found sexual intercourse an aphrodisiac; certainly it is the only good one.

  So many people are interested in this subject but most of them are forced to pretend they are not. A man, for his own ego’s sake, must, publicly at least, be over-supplied with libido. But every doctor knows so well the “friend of the client” who needs help. He is the same “friend” who has gonorrhea, the same “friend” who needs the address of an abortionist. This elusive friend—what will we not do to help him out of his difficulties; the nights we spend sleepless, worrying about him! He is interested in an aphrodisiac; we must try to find him one. But the damiana we brought back for our “friend” possibly just now is in the hands of the customs officials in San Diego. Perhaps they too have a friend. Since we suggested the qualities of damiana to them, it is barely possible that this fascinating liquor has already been either devoted to a friend or even perhaps subjected to a stern course of investigation under laboratory conditions.

  We have wondered about the bawdiness this book must have if it is to be true. Bawdiness, vulgarity—call it what you will—is such a relative matter, so much a matter of attitude. A man we know once long ago worked for a wealthy family in a country place. One morning one of the cows had a calf. The children of the house went down with him to watch her. It was a good normal birth, a perfect presentation, and the cow needed no help. The children asked questions and he answered them. And when the emerged head cleared through the sac, the little black muzzle appeared, and the first breath was drawn, the children were fascinated and awed. And this was the time for their mother to come screaming down on the vulgarity of letting the children see the birth. This “vulgarity” had given them a sense of wonder at the structure of life, while the mother’s propriety and gentility supplanted that feeling with dirtiness. If the reader of this book is “genteel,” then this is a very vulgar book, because the animals in a tide pool have two major preoccupations: first, survival, and second, reproduction. They reproduce all over the place. We could retire into obscure phrases or into Greek or Latin. This, for some reason, protects the delicate. In an earlier time biologists made their little jokes that way, as in the naming of the animals. But some later men found their methods vulgar. Verrill, in The Actinaria of the Canadian Arctic Expeditions, broke out in protest. He cries, “Prof. McMurrich has en deavored to restore for this species a name (senilis) used by Linnaeus for a small indeterminable species very imperfectly described in 1761.... The description does not in the least apply to this species. He described the thing as the size of the last joint of a finger, sordid, rough, with a sub-coriaceous tunic. Such a description could not possibly apply to this soft and smooth species... but it would be mere guesswork to say what species he had in view.... Moreover, aside from this uncertainty, most modern writers have rejected most of the Linnaean names of actinians on account of their obscenity or indecency. All this confusion shows the impossibility of fixing the name, even if it were not otherwise objectionable. It should be forgotten or ignored, like the generic names used by Linnaeus in 1761, and by some others of that period, for species of Actinia. Their indecent names were usually the Latinized forms of vulgar names used by fishermen, some of which are still in use among the fishermen of our own coasts, for similar things.”

  This strange attempt to “clean up” biology will have, we hope, no effect whatever. We at least have kept our vulgar sense of wonder. We are no better than the animals; in fact in a lot of ways we aren’t as good. And so we’ll let the book fall as it may.

  We left the truck and walked through the sandy hills in the night, and in this latitude the sky seemed very black and the stars very white. Already the smell of the land was gone from our noses, for we were used to the smell of vegetation again. The beer was warm in us and pleasant, and the air had a liquid warmth that was really there without the beer, for we tested it later. In the brush beside the track there was a little heap of light, and as we came closer to it we saw a rough wooden cross lighted indirectly. The cross-arm was bound to the staff with a thong, and the whole cross seemed to glow, alone in the darkness. When we came close we saw that a kerosene can stood on the ground and that in it was a candle which threw its feeble light upward on the cross. And our companion told us how a man had come from a fishing boat, sick and weak and tired. He tried to get home, but at this spot he fell down and died. And his family put the little cross and the candle there to mark the place. And eventually they would put up a stronger cross. It seems good to mark and to remember for a little while the place where a man died. This is his one whole lonely act in all his life. In every other thing, even in his birth, he is bound close to others, but the moment of his dying is his own. And in nearly all of Mexico such places are marked. A grave is quite a different thing. Here one’s family boasts, or lies, or excuses, in material of elegance and extravagance. But that is a family or a social matter, not the dead man’s own at all. The unmarked cross and the secret light are his; almost a reflection of the last piercing loneliness that comes into a dying man’s eyes.

  From a few feet away the cross seemed to flicker unsubstan tially with a small yellow light, seemed to be almost a memory while we saw it. And the man who tried to get home and crawled this far—we never knew his name but he stays in our memory too, for some reason—a supra-personal being, a slow, painful symbol and a pattern of his whole species which tries always from generation to generation, man and woman, which struggles always to get home but never quite makes it.

  We came back to the pier and got into our little boat. The Sea-Cow of course would not start, it being night time, so we rowed out to the Western Flyer. Before we started, by some magic, there on the end of the pier stood the sad beautiful young men watching us. They had not moved; some jinni had picked them up and transported them and set them down. They watched us put out into the darkness toward our riding lights, and then we suppose they were whisked back again to the cantina, where the proprietor was putting the records away and feeling with delicate thumbs the dollar bills we had left. On the pier no light burned, for the engine had stopped at sundown. We went to bed; there was a tide to be got to in the morning.

  On the beach at San Lucas there is a war between the pigs and the vultures. Sometimes one side dominates and sometimes the other. On occasion the swine feel a dynamism and demand
Lebensraum, and in the pride of their species drive the vultures from the decaying offal. And again, when their thousand years of history is over, the vultures spring to arms, tear up treaties, and flap the pigs from the garbage. And on the beach there are certain skinny dogs, without any dynamisms whatever and without racial pride, who nevertheless manage to get the best snacks. They don’t thrive on it—always they are meager and skinny and cowardly—but when the Gauleiter swine has just captured a fish belly, and before he can shout his second “Sieg Heil!” the dog has it.