Sea of Cortez

by John Steinbeck

  10

  March 18

  THE tidal series was short. We wished to cover as much ground as possible, to establish as many collecting stations as we could, for we wanted a picture as nearly whole of the Gulf as possible. The next morning we got under way to run the short distance to Pulmo Reef, around the tip and on the eastern shore of the Peninsula. It was a brilliant day, the water riffled and very blue, the sandy beaches of the shore shining with yellow intensity. Above the beaches the low hills were dark with brush. Many people had come to Cape San Lucas, and many had described it. We had read a number of the accounts, and of course agreed with none of them. To a man straight off a yacht, it is a miserable little flea-bitten place, poor and smelly. But to one who puts in hungry, in a storm-beaten boat, it must be a place of great comfort and warmth. These are extremes, but the area in between them also has its multiform conditioning, and what we saw had our conditioning. Once we read a diary, written by a man who came through Panama in 1839. He had read about the place before he got there, but the account he read was about the old city, and in his diary, written after he had gone through, he set down a description of the city he had read about. He didn’t know that the town in the book had been destroyed, and that the new one was not even in the same place, but he was not disturbed by these discrepancies. He knew what he would find there and he found it.

  There is a curious idea among unscientific men that in scientific writing there is a common plateau of perfectionism. Nothing could be more untrue. The reports of biologists are the measure, not of the science, but of the men themselves. There are as few scientific giants as any other kind. In some reports it is impossible, because of inept expression, to relate the descriptions to the living animals. In some papers collecting places are so mixed or ignored that the animals mentioned cannot be found at all. The same conditioning forces itself into specification as it does into any other kind of observation, and the same faults of carelessness will be found in scientific reports as in the witness chair of a criminal court. It has seemed sometimes that the little men in scientific work assumed the awe-fullness of a priesthood to hide their deficiencies, as the witch-doctor does with his stilts and high masks, as the priesthoods of all cults have, with secret or unfamiliar languages and symbols. It is usually found that only the little stuffy men object to what is called “popularization,” by which they mean writing with a clarity understandable to one not familiar with the tricks and codes of the cult. We have not known a single great scientist who could not discourse freely and interestingly with a child. Can it be that the haters of clarity have nothing to say, have observed nothing, have no clear picture of even their own fields? A dull man seems to be a dull man no matter what his field, and of course it is the right of a dull scientist to protect himself with feathers and robes, emblems and degrees, as do other dull men who are potentates and grand imperial rulers of lodges of dull men.

  As we neared Pulmo Reef, Tony sent a man up the mast to the crow‘s-nest to watch for concealed rocks. It is possible to see deep into the water from that high place; the rocks seem to float suddenly up from the bottom like dark shadows. The water in this shallow area was green rather than blue, and the sandy bottom was clearly visible. We pulled in as close as was safe and dropped our anchor. About a mile away we could see the proper reef with the tide beginning to go down on it. On the shore behind the white beach was one of those lonely little rancherias we came to know later. Usually a palm or two are planted near by, and by these trees sticking up out of the brush one can locate the houses. There is usually a small corral, a burro or two, a few pigs, and some scrawny chickens. The cattle range wide for food. A dugout canoe lies on the beach, for a good part of the food comes from the sea. Rarely do you see a light from the sea, for the people go to sleep at dusk and awaken with the first light. They must be very lonely people, for they appear on shore the moment a boat anchors, and paddle out in their canoes. At Pulmo Reef the little canoe put off and came alongside. In it were two men and a woman, very ragged, their old clothes patched with the tatters of older clothes. The serapes of the men were so thin and threadbare that the light shone through them, and the woman’s rebozo had long lost its color. They sat in the canoe holding to the side of the Western Flyer, and they held their greasy blankets carefully over their noses and mouths to protect themselves from us. So much evil the white man had brought to their ancestors: his breath was poisonous with the lung disease; to sleep with him was to poison the generations. Where he set down his colonies the indigenous people withered and died. He brought industry and trade but no prosperity, riches but no ease. After four hundred years of him these people have ragged clothes and the shame that forces the wearing of them; iron harpoons for their hands, syphilis and tuberculosis; a few of the white man’s less complex neuroses, and a curious devotion to a God who was sacrificed long ago in the white man’s country. They know the white man is poisonous and they cover their noses against him. They do find us fascinating. However, they sit on the rail for many hours watching us and waiting. When we feed them they eat and are courteous about it, but they did not come for food, they are not beggars. We give the men some shirts and they fold them and put them into the bow of the canoe, but they did not come for clothing. One of the men at last offers us a match-box in which are a few misshapen little pearls like small pale cancers. Five pesos he wants for the pearls, and he knows they aren’t worth it. We give him a carton of cigarettes and take his pearls, although we do not want them, for they are ugly little things. Now these three should go, but they do not. They would stay for weeks, not moving nor talking except now and then to one another in soft little voices as gentle as whispers. Their dark eyes never leave us. They ask no questions. They seem actually to be dreaming. Sometimes we asked of the Indians the local names of animals we had taken, and then they consulted together. They seemed to live on remembered things, to be so related to the seashore and the rocky hills and the loneliness that they are these things. To ask about the country is like asking about themselves. “How many toes have you?” “What, toes? Let’s see—of course, ten. I have known them all my life, I never thought to count them. Of course it will rain tonight, I don’t know why. Something in me tells me I will rain tonight. Of course, I am the whole thing, now that I think about it. I ought to know when I will rain.” The dark eyes, whites brown and stained, have curious red lights in the pupils. They seem to be a dreaming people. If finally you must escape their eyes, their timeless dreaming eyes, you have only to say, “Adiós, señor,” and they seem to start awake. “Adiós,” they say softly. “Que vaya con Dios.” And they paddle away. They bring a hush with them, and when they go away one’s own voice sounds loud and raw.

  We loaded the smaller skiff with collecting materials: the containers and bars, tubes and buckets. We put the Sea-Cow on the stern and it made one of its few mistakes. It thought we were going directly to the beach instead of to the reef a mile away. It started up with a great roar and ran for a quarter of a mile before it became aware of its mistake. It was rarely fooled again. We rowed on to the reef.

  Collecting in this region, we always wore rubber boots. There are many animals which sting, some severely, and at least one urchin which is highly poisonous. Some of the worms, such as Eurythoë, leave spines in the skin which burn unmercifully. And even a barnacle cut infects readily. It is impossible to wear gloves; one must simply be as careful as possible and look where the finger is going before it is put down. Some of the little beasts are incredibly gallant and ferocious. On one occasion, a moray eel not more than eight inches long lashed out from under a rock, bit one of us on the finger, and retired. If one is not naturally cautious, painful and bandaged hands very soon teach caution. The boots protect one’s feet from nearly everything, but there is an urchin which has spines so sharp that they pierce the rubber and break off in the flesh, and they sting badly and usually cause infection.

  Pulmo is a coral reef. It has often been remarked that reef-building corals seem
to live only on the eastern sides of large land bodies, not on the western sides. This has been noticed many times, and even here at Pulmo the reef-building coral 14 occurs only on the eastern side of the Peninsula. This can have nothing to do with wave-shock or current, but must be governed by another of those unknown factors so ever-present and so haunting to the ecologist.

  The complexity of the life-pattern on Pulmo Reef was even greater than at Cape San Lucas. Clinging to the coral, growing on it, burrowing into it, was a teeming fauna. Every piece of the soft material broken off skittered and pulsed with life—little crabs and worms and snails. One small piece of coral might conceal thirty or forty species, and the colors on the reef were electric. The sharp-spined urchins 15 gave us trouble immediately, for several of us, on putting our feet down injudiciously, drove the spines into our toes.

  The reef was gradually exposed as the tide went down, and on its flat top the tide pools were beautiful. We collected as widely and rapidly as possible, trying to take a cross-section of the animals we saw. There were purple pendent gorgonians like lacy fans; a number of small spine-covered puffer fish which bloat themselves when they are attacked, erecting the spines; and many starfish, including some purple and gold cushion stars. The club-spined sea-urchins 16were numerous in their rock niches. They seemed to move about very little, for their niches always just fit them, and have the marks of constant occupation. We took a number of the slim green and brown starfish 17and the large slim five-rayed starfish with plates bordering the ambulacral grooves.18 There were numbers of barnacles and several types of brittle-stars. We took one huge, magnificent murex snail. One large hemispherical snail was so camouflaged with little plants, corallines, and other algae that it could not be told from the reef itself until it was turned over. Rock oysters there were, and oysters; limpets and sponges; corals of two types; peanut worms; sea-cucumbers; and many crabs, particularly some disguised in dresses of growing algae which made them look like knobs on the reef until they moved. There were many worms, including our enemy Eurythoë, which stings so badly. This worm makes one timid about reaching without looking. The coral clusters were violently inhabited by snapping shrimps, red smooth crabs,19 and little fuzzy black and white spider crabs.20 Autotomy in these crabs, shrimps, and brittle-stars is very highly developed. At last, under the reef, we saw a large fleshy gorgonian, or sea-fan, waving gently in the clear water, but it was deep and we could not reach it. One of us took off his clothes and dived for it, expecting at any moment to be attacked by one of those monsters we do not believe in. It was murky under the reef, and the colors of the sponges were more brilliant than in those exposed to greater light. The diver did not stay long; he pulled the large sea-fan free and came up again. And although he went down a number of times, this was the only one of this type of gorgonian he could find. Indeed, it was the only one taken on the entire trip.

  The collecting buckets and tubes and jars were very full of specimens—so full that we had constantly to change the water to keep the animals alive. Several large pieces of coral were taken and kept submerged in buckets and later were allowed to lie in stale sea water in one of the pans. This is an interesting thing, for as the water goes stale, the thousands of little roomers which live in the tubes and caves and interstices of the coral come out of hiding and scramble for a new home. Worms and tiny crabs appear from nowhere and are then easily picked up.

  The sea bottom inside the reef was of white sand studded with purple and gold cushion stars, of which we collected many. And lying on the sandy bottom were heads and knobs of another coral,21 much harder and more regularly formed than the reef-building coral. The rush of collecting as much as possible before the tide re-covered the reef made us indiscriminate in our collecting, but in the long run this did not matter. For once on board the boat again we could re-collect, going over the pieces of coral and rubble carefully and very often finding animals we had not known were there.

  El Pulmo was the only coral reef we found on the entire expedition, and the fauna and even the algae were rather specialized to it. No very great surf could have beaten it, for extremely delicate animals lived on its exposed top where they would have been crushed or washed away had strong seas struck them. And the competition for existence was as great as it had been at San Lucas, but it seemed to us that different methods were employed for frustrating enemies. Whereas at San Lucas speed and ferocity were the attributes of most animals, at Pulmo concealment and camouflage were largely employed. The little crabs wore masks of algae and bryozoa and even hydroids, and most animals had little tunnels or some protected place to run to. The softness of the coral made this possible, where the hard smooth granite of San Lucas had forbidden it. On several occasions we wished for diving equipment, but never more than here at Pulmo, for the under-cut shoreward side of the reef concealed hazy wonders which we could not get at. It is not satisfactory to hold one’s breath and to look with unglassed eyes through the dim waters.

  The water behind the reef was very warm. We abandoned our boots and, putting on tennis shoes to protect our feet from various stingers, we dived again and again for perfect knobs of coral.

  Again we tried to start the Sea-Cow—and then rowed back to the Western Flyer. There we complained so bitterly to Tex, the engineer, that he took the evil little thing to pieces. Piece by piece he examined it, with a look of incredulity in his eyes. He admired, I think, the ingenuity which could build such a perfect little engine, and he was astonished at the concept of building a whole motor for the purpose of not running. Having put it together again, he made a discovery. The Sea-Cow would run perfectly out of water—that is, in a barrel of water with the propeller and cooling inlet submerged. Placed thus, the Sea-Cow functioned perfectly and got good mileage.

  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.