Sea of Cortez

by John Steinbeck

  Having had no good tide at Marcial Reef, we arose at four o‘clock the following morning and went in the darkness to collect again. We carried big seven-cell focusing flashlights. In some ways they make collecting in the dark, in a small area at least, more interesting than daytime collecting, for they limit the range of observation so that in the narrowed field one is likely to notice more detail. There is a second reason for our preference for night collecting—a number of animals are more active at night than in the daytime and they seem to be not much disturbed or frightened by artificial light. This time we had a very fair tide. The light fell on a monster highly colored spiny lobster in a crevice of the reef. He was blue and orange and spotted with brown. The taking of him required caution, for these big lobsters are very strong and are so armed with spikes and points that in struggling with one the hands can be badly cut. We approached with care, bent slowly down, and then with two hands grabbed him about the middle of the body. And there was no struggle whatever. He was either sick or lazy or hurt by the surf, and did not fight at all.

  The cavities in Marcial Reef held a great many club-spined urchins and a number of the sharp-spined purple ones which had hurt us before. There were numbers of sea-fans, two of the usual starfish and a new species 36 which later we were to find common farther north in the Gulf. We took a good quantity of the many-rayed sun-stars, and a flat kind of cucumber which was new to us.37 This was the first time we had collected at night, and under our lights we saw the puffer fish lazily feeding near the surface in the clear water. On the bottom, the brittle-stars, which we had always found under rocks, were crawling about like thousands of little snakes. They rarely move about in the daylight. Wherever the sharp, powerful rays of the flashlight cut into the water we could see the moving beautiful fish and the bottoms alive with busy feeding invertebrates. But collecting with a flashlight is difficult unless it is arranged that two people work together—one to hold the light and the other to take the animals. Also, from constant wetting in salt water the life of a flashlight is very short.

  The one huge and beautiful lobster was the prize of this trip. We tried to photograph him on color film and as usual something went wrong but we got a very good likeness of one end of him, which was an improvement on our previous pictures. In most of our other photographs we didn’t get either end.

  We took several species of chitons and a great number of tunicates. There were several turbellarian flatworms, but these are so likely to dissolve before they preserve that we had great difficulties with them. There were in the collecting pans several species of brittle-stars, numbers of small crabs and snapping shrimps, plumularian hydroids, bivalves of a number of species, snails, and some small sea-urchins. There were worms, hermit crabs, sipunculids, and sponges. The pools too had been thick with pelagic larval shrimps, pelagic isopods—tiny crustacea similar to sow-bugs—and tiny shrimps (mysids). In this area the water seemed particularly peopled with small pelagic animals—“bugs,” so the boys said. Everywhere there were bugs, flying, crawling, and swimming. The shallow and warm waters of the area promoted a competitive life that was astonishing.

  After breakfast we pulled up the anchor and set out again northward. The pattern of the technique of the trip had by now established itself almost as a habit with us; collecting, running to a new station, collecting again. The water was intensely blue on this run, and the fish were very many. We could see the splashing of great schools of tuna in the distance where they beat the water to spray in their millions. The swordfish leaped all about us, and someone was on the bow the whole time trying to drive a light harpoon into one, but we never could get close enough. Cast after cast fell short.

  We preserved and labeled as we went, and the water was so smooth that we had no difficulty with delicate animals. If the boat rolls, retractile animals such as anemones and sipunculids are more than likely to draw into themselves and refuse to relax under the Epsom-salts treatment, but this sea was as smooth as a lawn, and our wake fanned out for miles behind us.

  The fish-lines on the stays snapped and jerked and we brought in skipjack, Sparky’s friend of the curious name, and the Mexican sierra. This golden fish with brilliant blue spots is shaped like a trout. In size it ranges from fifteen inches to two feet, is slender and a very rapid swimmer. The sierra does not seem to travel in dense, surface-beating schools as the tuna does. Although it belongs with the mackerel-like forms, its meat is white and delicate and sweet. Simply fried in big hunks, it is the most delicious fish of all.

  16

  March 25

  ABOUT noon we arrived at Puerto Escondido, the Hidden Harbor, a place of magic. If one wished to design a secret personal bay, one would probably build something very like this little harbor. A point swings about, making a small semicircular bay fringed with bright-green mangroves, and only when one has turned inside this outer bay can one see that there is a second, secret bay beyond—a long narrow bay with an entrance not more than fifty feet wide at flood. The charts gave three fathoms at the center of the entrance, but the tide run was so furious that we did not attempt to take the Western Flyer in, but anchored in back of the first point, called Piedra de la Marina. Here we had more than ten fathoms, and Tony felt better about it.

  In the distance, and from the south, a canoe came up the coast with a small sail set. The Indians move great distances in their tiny boats. As soon as the anchor was out, we dropped the fishing lines and immediately hooked several hammer-head sharks and a large red snapper. The air here was hot and filled with the smell of mangrove flowers. The little outer bay was our first collecting station, a shallow warm cove with a mud bottom and edged with small boulders, smooth and unen crusted with algae. On the bottom we could see long snake-like animals, gray with black markings, with purplish-orange floriate heads like chrysanthemums. They were about three feet long and new to us. Wading in rubber boots, we captured some of them and they proved to be giant synaptids.38 They were strange and frightening to handle, for they stuck to anything they touched, not with slime but as though they were coated with innumerable suction-cells. On being taken from the water, they collapsed to skin, for their bodily shape is maintained by the current of water which they draw through themselves. When lifted out, this water escapes and they hang as limp as unfilled sausage skins. Since they were new and fascinating to us, we took many specimens, maneuvering them gently to the surface and then sliding them into submerged wooden collecting buckets to prevent them from dropping their water. On the bottom they crawled about, their flower-heads moving gently, while the current of water passing through their bodies drew food into their stomachs. When we took them on board, we found they had to a high degree the habit of a number of holothurians: eviscerating. These Euapta were a nervous lot. We tried to relax them with Epsom salts so that we might kill them with their floriate heads extended, but the salts, no matter how carefully administered, caused the heads to retract, and soon afterwards they threw their stomachs out into the water. The word “stomach” is used here inadvisedly, for what they actually disgorge is the intestinal tract and respiratory tree.

  We intoxicated them with pure oxygen and then tried the salts, but with the same result. Finally, by administering the salts in minute quantities and very slowly, we were able to preserve some uneviscerated specimens, but none with the head extended. The color motion pictures of the living animals, while not very good, at least showed the color and shape and movement of the extended heads. Again we got photographs of only one end, but this time the more important end, the floriate head.

  In the little shallow bay there were many bright-green gars, or needle-fish, but they were too fast for our dip-nets and we were unable to take them. Botete, the poison fish, was here also in great numbers, and the boys took some of them with a light seine. We found here two new starfishes and many Cerianthus anemones.

  While we were collecting on the shore, Tiny rowed about in the little skiff in slightly deeper water. He carried a light three-pronged spear with which
he picked up an occasional cushion star from the bottom. We heard him shout, and looked up to see a giant manta ray headed for him, the tips of the wings more than ten feet apart. It was rare to see them in such shallow water. As it passed directly under his boat we yelled at him to spear it, since he wanted to so badly, but he simply sat in the bottom of the boat, gazing after the retreating ray, weakly swearing at us. For a long time he sat there quietly, not quite believing what he had seen. This great fish could have flicked Tiny and boat and all into the air with one flap of its wing. Tiny wanted to sit still and think for a long time and he did. For an hour afterward he could only repeat, “Did you see that Goddamned thing!” And from that moment it became Tiny’s ambition to catch and kill one of the giant rays.

  The canoe which had been sailing up the coast came alongside and a man and a little boy boarded us. They had with them what they called “abalon”—not true abalones, but gigantic fixed scallops, very good for food. They had also some of the hacha, the huge fan-shaped clam; pearl oysters, which are growing rare; and several huge conchs. We bought from the man what he had and asked him to get us more of the large shellfish. We might look for weeks for animals he could go to directly. Everywhere it is the same: if an animal is good to eat or poisonous or dangerous the natives of the place will know about it and where it lives. But if it have none of these qualities, no matter how highly colored or beautiful, he may never in his life have seen it.

  On the stone-bordered sandspit which is the southern block to the true inner Puerto Escondido there was a new stone building not quite finished, with no one about it. Around the point there now came a large rowboat pushed by a fast outboard motor of a species distinct from the Sea-Cow, for it seemed controlled and dominated by its master. In this boat there were several Indians and three men dressed in riding breeches and hiking boots. They came aboard and introduced themselves as Leopoldo Pérpuly, who owned a ranch on the edge of Puerto Escondido, Gilbert Baldibia, a school-teacher from Loreto, and Manuel Madinabeitia C., of the customs service, also of Loreto. These last two were on a vacation and hunting trip. They were strong, fine-looking men wearing the ever-present .45-caliber automatics of the government service. We served them canned fruit salad and discussed with them the country we had covered, and they asked us to go hunting the borrego, or big-horn sheep, with them, starting that afternoon and getting back the next day. We were to go into the tremendous and desolate stone mountains to camp and hunt. We accepted immediately, and went with them to the little ranch set back half a mile from Puerto Escondido. We didn’t want to kill a big-horn sheep, but we wanted to see the country. As it turned out, none of them—the rancher, the teacher, or the customs man—had any intention of killing a big-horn sheep.

  The little ranch was set deep in the brush. It was watered by deep wells of brackish brown water out of which endless chains of buckets emerged at the insistence of mules which turned the windlass. This rancher in the desert has dug sixty-foot wells, and he is raising tomatoes and he has planted many grapevines. But so dry is the earth that a few weeks without the rising buckets would destroy all his work. The houses of the ranch were simply roofs and low walls of woven palm, enough to keep out the wind but no obstruction to the air. The floors were of swept hard-packed earth, and there was an air of comfort about the place. The Indian workmen worked very slowly, and the babies peeked out of the woven houses at us. We were to ride to the mountains on mules and one small horse while two Indian men walked ahead. We were sorry for them until we discovered that their main irritation lay in the fact that horses and mules are so slow. Often they disappeared ahead of us, and we found them later sitting beside the trail waiting for us. The line of us started out on a clear but unfinished road that was eventually to go to Loreto. The thick and thorny brush and cactus had been grubbed, but no scraping had been done yet. It was a fantastic country; heavy xerophytic plants: cacti, mimosa, and thorned bushes and trees crackled with the heat. There were the lichens which bleed bright red when they are broken and were once a source of dye before the anilines were developed. There were poison bushes which we were warned about, for if one touches them and then rubs one’s eyes, blindness ensues. We learned some of the uses of plants of this country; maidenhair fern, we were told, is boiled to an infusion and given to women after childbirth. It is said that no hemorrhage can follow this treatment. We rode over a rolling, rocky, desolate country, then left the cleared, some-day road and turned up a trail toward the stone mountains, steep and slippery with shale. And here our Indians were even more impatient, for the mules went more slowly while the Indians did not change gait for the steep places.

  “My mule was a complainer. For a while I thought he simply didn’t like me, but I believe now that he had a sour eye for the world. With every step he groaned with pain so convincingly that once I removed the saddle to see whether he might not be saddle-burned. He did not grunt, but drew from deep in his belly great groans of an agonized soul left to molder in Purgatory. It is impossible to see why he did this, for certainly no Mexican would believe him and he had never carried one of the more sentimental northern race before. I was heart-broken for him, but not sufficiently to get off and walk. We both suffered up the trail, he with pain and I with sorrow for him.” (Extract from the personal journal of one of us.)

  The trail cut back on itself again and again, and the bare mountains towered high and brooding over us. Far below we could see the brilliant blue water of the Gulf with a fantastic mirage cast over it.

  There was in our party one horse, a spindle-legged, small buttocked little animal with eyes haunted by social inadequacy; one horse in a society of mules, and a gelding at that. We thought how often one mule is surrounded by socially dominant horses, all grace and prance, conscious of their power and loveliness. In this pattern the mule has developed his anti-social self-sufficiency. He knows he can out-think a horse and he is pretty sure he can out-think a human. In both respects he is correct. And so your socially outcast mule dwells inward in sneering intellectuality; his mental pattern, conditioned by centuries of this cynical intellectualism, is set, and he is complete, sullen, treacherous, loving no one, selfish and self-centered. But this horse, having no such background, was unable to make the change in one generation. Surrounded by mules, he sorrowed and his spirit broke and his eyes were sad. The stiffening was gone from his ears and his mouth hung open. He slunk asham edly along behind the mules. Stripped of his regalia and his titles, he was a pitiful thing. Refugee princes usually become waiters, but this poor horse was not even able to be a waiter, let alone a horse. And just as one is irritated by a grand duke if he has no robes and garters and large metal-and-enamel decorations, so we found ourselves disliking this poor horse; and he knew it and it didn’t help him.

  We came at last to a trail of broken stone and rubble so steep that the mules could not carry us any more. We dismounted and crawled on all fours, and we don’t know how the mules got up. After a short climb we emerged on a level place in a deep cleft in the granite mountains. In this cleft a tiny stream of water fell hundreds of feet from pool to pool. There were palm trees and wild grapevines and large ferns, and the water was cool and sweet. This little stream, coming from so high up in the mountains and falling so far, never had the final dignity of reaching the ocean. The desert sucked it down and the heat dried it up and on the level it disappeared in a light mist of frustration. We sat beside a pool of the waterfall and our Indians made coffee for us and unpacked a lunch, and one item of this lunch was so delicious that we have wanted it again. It is made in this way: a warm tortilla is laid down and spread with well-cooked beans, and another tortilla laid on top and spread, and another, until it is ten or twelve layers thick. Then it is wrapped in cloth. Before eating it one slices downward through the layers as with a cake. It is a fine dish and very filling. While we ate, the Indians made our beds on the ground, and we fired a few shots at a rock across the canyon. Then it was dark and we lay in our blankets and talked, and here we suffered gr
eatly. For the funny stories began. We suppose they weren’t clean stories, but we couldn’t be sure. Nearly every one began, “Once there was a school-teacher with large black eyes —very sympathetic—” “Muy simpática” has a slightly different connotation from that of “sympathetic,” for sympathy is a passive state of receptivity, but to be “simpática” is to be more active or co-operative, even sometimes a little forward. At any rate, this “simpdtica” school-teacher invariably had as one of her students “a tall strong boy, con cojones, pero cojones”—this last with a gesture easily seen in the firelight. The stories progressed until they came to the snappers; we leaned forward studiously intent, but the snappers were either so colloquial that we could not understand them or so filled with the laughter of the teller that we couldn’t make out the words. Story after story was told, and we didn’t get a single snapper, not one. Our suspicions were aroused of course. We knew something was bound to happen when a school-teacher “muy simpática” asks a large boy “con cojones” to stay after school, but whether it ever did or not we do not know.

  It grew cold in the night, and the mosquitoes were unmerciful. In this sparsely populated country human blood must be a rarity. We were a seldom-found dessert to them, and they whooped and screamed and attacked, power-diving and wheeling up and diving again. The visibility was good, and we made excellent targets. Only when it became bitterly cold did they go away.

  We have noticed many times how lightly Mexican Indians sleep. Often in the night they awaken to smoke a cigarette and talk softly together for a while, and then go to sleep again rather like restless birds, which sing a little in the dark, dreaming that it is already day. Half a dozen times a night they may awaken thus, and it is pleasant to hear them, for they talk very quietly as though they were dreaming.