The Log from the Sea of Cortez

by Steinbeck, John; Astro, Richard

  As soon as we were cleared, Sparky and Tiny and Tex went ashore and disappeared, and we did not see them until late that night, when they came back with the usual presents: shawls and carved cow-horns and colored handkerchiefs. They were so delighted with the exchange (which was then six pesos for a dollar) that we were very soon deeply laden with curios. There were five huge stuffed sea-turtles in one bunk alone, and Japanese toys, combs from New England, Spanish shawls from New Jersey, machetes from Sheffield and New York; but all of them, from having merely lived a while in La Paz, had taken on a definite Mexican flavor. Tony, who does not trust foreigners, stayed aboard, but later even he went ashore for a while.

  The tide was running out and the low shore east of the town was beginning to show through the shallow water. We gathered our paraphernalia and started for the beach, expecting and finding a fauna new to us. Here on the flats the water is warm, very warm, and there is no wave-shock. It would be strange indeed if, with few exceptions of ubiquitous animals, there should not be a definite change. The base of this flat was of rubble in which many knobs and limbs of old coral were imbedded, making an easy hiding place for burrowing animals. In rubber boots we moved over the flat uncovered by the dropping tide; a silty sand made the water obscure when a rock or a piece of coral was turned over. And as always when one is collecting, we were soon joined by a number of small boys. The very posture of search, the slow movement with the head down, seems to draw people. “What did you lose?” they ask.

  “Nothing.”

  “Then what do you search for?” And this is an embarrassing question. We search for something that will seem like truth to us; we search for understanding; we search for that principle which keys us deeply into the pattern of all life; we search for the relations of things, one to another, as this young man searches for a warm light in his wife’s eyes and that one for the hot warmth of fighting. These little boys and young men on the tide flat do not even know that they search for such things too. We say to them, “We are looking for curios, for certain small animals.”

  Then the little boys help us to search. They are ragged and dark and each one carries a small iron harpoon. It is the toy of La Paz, owned and treasured as tops or marbles are in America. They poke about the rocks with their little harpoons, and now and then a lazing fish which blunders too close feels the bite of the iron.

  There is a small ghost shrimp which lives on these flats, an efficient little fellow who lives in a burrow. He moves very rapidly, and is armed with claws which can pinch painfully. He retires backward into his hole, so that to come at him from above is to invite his weapons. The little boys solved the problem for us. We offered ten centavos for each one they took. They dug into the rubble and old coral until they got behind the ghost shrimp in his burrow, then, prodding, they drove him outraged from his hole. Then they banged him good to reduce his pinching power. We refused to buy the banged-up ones—they had to get us lively ones. Small boys are the best collectors in the world. Soon they worked out a technique for catching the shrimps with only an occasionally pinched finger, and then the ten-centavo pieces began running out, and an increasing cloud of little boys brought us specimens. Small boys have such sharp eyes, and they are quick to notice deviation. Once they know you are generally curious, they bring amazing things. Perhaps we only practice an extension of their urge. It is easy to remember when we were small and lay on our stomachs beside a tide pool and our minds and eyes went so deeply into it that size and identity were lost, and the creeping hermit crab was our size and the tiny octopus a monster. Then the waving algae covered us and we hid under a rock at the bottom and leaped out at fish. It is very possible that we, and even those who probe space with equations, simply extend this wonder.

  Among small-boy groups there is usually a stupid one who understands nothing, who brings dull things, rocks and pieces of weed, and pretends that he knows what he does. When we think of La Paz, it is always of the small boys that we think first, for we had many dealings with them on many levels.

  The profile of this flat was easy to get. The ghost shrimps, called “langusta, ” were quite common; our enemy the stinging worm was about to make us careful of our fingers; the big brittle-stars were there under the old coral, but not in such great masses as at Espíritu Santo. A number of sponges clung to the stones, and small decorated crabs skulked in the interstices. Beautiful purple polyclad worms crawled over lawns of purple tunicates; the giant oyster-like hacha27 was not often found, but we took a few specimens. There were several growth forms of the common corals28; the larger and handsomer of the two slim asteroids29; anemones of at least three types; some club urchins and snails and many hydroids.

  Some of the exposed snails were so masked with forests of algae and hydroids that they were invisible to us. We found a worm-like fixed gastropod,30 many bivalves, including the long peanut-shaped boring clam31; large brilliant-orange nudibranchs; hermit crabs; mantids ; flatworms which seemed to flow over the rocks like living gelatin; sipunculids; and many limpets. There were a few sun-stars, but not so many or so large as they had been at Cape San Lucas.

  The little boys ran to and fro with full hands, and our buckets and tubes were soon filled. The ten-centavo pieces had long run out, and ten little boys often had to join a club whose center and interest was a silver peso, to be changed and divided later. They seemed to trust one another for the division. And certainly they felt there was no chance of their being robbed. Perhaps they are not civilized and do not know how valuable money is. The poor little savages seem not to have learned the great principle of cheating one another.

  The population of small boys at La Paz is tremendous, and we had business dealings with a good part of it. Hardly had we returned to the Western Flyer and begun to lay out our specimens when we were invaded. Word had spread that there were crazy people in port who gave money for things a boy could pick up on the rocks. We were more than invaded—we were deluged with small boys bearing specimens. They came out in canoes, in flat-boats, some even swam out, and all of them carried specimens. Some of the things they brought we wanted and some we did not want. There were hurt feelings about this, but no bitterness. Battalions of boys swarmed back to the flats and returned again. The second day little boys came even from the hills, and they brought every conceivable living thing. If we had not sailed the second night they would have swamped the boat. Meanwhile, in our dealings on shore, more small boys were involved. They carried packages, ran errands, directed us (mostly wrongly), tried to anticipate our wishes; but one boy soon emerged. He was not like the others. His shoulders were not slender, but broad, and there was a hint about his face and expression that seemed Germanic or perhaps Anglo-Saxon. Whereas the other little boys lived for the job and the payment, this boy created jobs and looked ahead. He did errands that were not necessary, he made himself indispensable. Late at night he waited, and the first dawn saw him on our deck. Further, the other small boys seemed a little afraid of him, and gradually they faded into the background and left him in charge.

  Some day this boy will be very rich and La Paz will be proud of him, for he will own the things other people must buy or rent. He has the look and the method of success. Even the first day success went to his head, and he began to cheat us a little. We did not mind, for it is a good thing to be cheated a little; it causes a geniality and can be limited fairly easily. His method was simple. He performed a task, and then, getting each of us alone, he collected for the job so that he was paid several times. We decided we would not use him any more, but the other little boys decided even better than we. He disappeared, and later we saw him in the town, his nose and lips heavily bandaged. We had the story from another little boy. Our financial wizard told the others that he was our sole servant and that we had said that they weren’t to come around any more. But they discovered the lie and waylaid him and beat him very badly. He wasn’t a very brave little boy, but he will be a rich one because he wants to. The others wanted only sweets or a new handkerchief
, but the aggressive little boy wishes to be rich, and they will not be able to compete with him.

  On the evening of our sailing we had rather a sad experience with another small boy. We had come ashore for a stroll, leaving our boat tied to a log on the beach. We walked up the curiously familiar streets and ended, oddly enough, in a bar to have a glass of beer. It was a large bar with high ceilings, and nearly deserted. As we sat sipping our beer we saw a ferocious face scowling at us. It was a very small, very black Indian boy, and the look in his eyes was one of hatred. He stared at us so long and so fiercely that we finished our glasses and got up to go. But outside he fell into step with us, saying nothing. We walked back through the softly lighted streets, and he kept pace. But near the beach he began to pant deeply. Finally we got to the beach and as we were about to untie the skiff he shouted in panic, “Cinco centavos!” and stepped back as from a blow. And then it seemed that we could see almost how it was. We have been the same way trying to get a job. Perhaps the father of this little boy said, “Stupid one, there are strangers in the town and they are throwing money away. Here sits your father with a sore leg and you do nothing. Other boys are becoming rich, but you, because of your sloth, are not taking advantage of this miracle. Señor Ruiz had a cigar this afternoon and a glass of beer at the cantina because his fine son is not like you. When have you known me, your father, to have a cigar? Never. Now go and bring back some little piece of money.”

  Then that little boy, hating to do it, was burdened with it nevertheless. He hated us, just as we have hated the men we have had to ask for jobs. And he was afraid, too, for we were foreigners. He put it off as long as he could, but when we were about to go he had to ask and he made it very humble. Five centavos. It did seem that we knew how hard it had been. We gave him a peso, and then he smiled broadly and he looked about for something he could do for us. The boat was tied up, and he attacked the water-soaked knot like a terrier, even working at it with his teeth. But he was too little and he could not do it. He nearly cried then. We cast off and pushed the boat away, and he waded out to guide us as far as he could. We felt both good and bad about it; we hope his father bought a cigar and an aguardiente, and became mellow and said to a group of men in that little boy’s hearing, “Now you take Juanito. You have rarely seen such a good son. This very cigar is a gift to his father who has hurt his leg. It is a matter of pride, my friends, to have a son like Juanito.” And we hope he gave Juanito, if that was his name, five centavos to buy an ice and a paper bull with a firecracker inside.

  No doubt we were badly cheated in La Paz. Perhaps the boatmen cheated us and maybe we paid too much for supplies—it is very hard to know. And besides, we were so incredibly rich that we couldn’t tell, and we had no instinct for knowing when we were cheated. Here we were rich, but in our own country it was not so. The very rich develop an instinct which tells them when they are cheated. We knew a rich man who owned several large office buildings. Once in reading his reports he found that two electric-light bulbs had been stolen from one of the toilets in one of his office buildings. It hurt him; he brooded for weeks about it. “Civilization is dying,” he said. “Whom can you trust any more? This little theft is an indication that the whole people is morally rotten.”

  But we were so newly rich that we didn’t know, and besides we were a little flattered. The boatmen raised their price as soon as they saw the Sea-Cow wouldn’t work, but as they said, times are very hard and there is no money.

  12

  MARCH 22

  This was Good Friday, and we scrubbed ourselves and put on our best clothes and went to church, all of us. We were a kind of parade on the way to church, feeling foreign and out of place. In the dark church it was cool, and there were a great many people, old women in their black shawls and Indians kneeling motionless on the floor. It was not a very rich church, and it was old and out of repair. But a choir of small black children made the Stations of the Cross. They sang music that sounded like old Spanish madrigals, and their voices were shrill and sharp. Sometimes they faltered a little bit on the melody, but they hit the end of each line shrieking. When they had finished, a fine-looking young priest with a thin ascetic face and the hot eyes of fervency preached from over their heads. He filled the whole church with his faith, and the people were breathlessly still. The ugly bloody Christs and the simpering Virgins and the over-dressed saints were suddenly out of it. The priest was purer and cleaner and stronger than they. Out of his own purity he seemed to plead for them. After a long time we got up and went out of the dark cool church into the blinding white sunlight.

  The streets were very quiet on Good Friday, and no wind blew in the trees, the air was full of the day—a kind of hush, as though the world awaited a little breathlessly the dreadful experiment of Christ with death and Hell; the testing in a furnace of an idea. And the trees and the hills and the people seemed to wait as a man waits when his wife is having a baby, expectant and frightened and horrified and half unbelieving.

  There is no certainty that the Easter of the Resurrection will really come. We were probably literarily affected by the service and the people and their feeling about it, the crippled and the pained who were in the church, the little half-hungry children, the ancient women with eyes of patient tragedy who stared up at the plaster saints with eyes of such pleading. We liked them and we felt at peace with them. And strolling slowly through the streets we thought a long time of these people in the church. We thought of the spirits of kindness which periodically cause them to be fed, a little before they are dropped back to hunger. And we thought of the good men who labored to cure them of disease and poverty.

  And then we thought of what they are, and we are—products of disease and sorrow and hunger and alcoholism. And suppose some all-powerful mind and will should cure our species so that for a number of generations we would be healthy and happy? We are the products of our disease and suffering. These are factors as powerful as other genetic factors. To cure and feed would be to change the species, and the result would be another animal entirely. We wonder if we would be able to tolerate our own species without a history of syphilis and tuberculosis. We don’t know.

  Certain communicants of the neurological conditioning religions practiced by cowardly people who, by narrowing their emotional experience, hope to broaden their lives, lead us to think we would not like this new species. These religionists, being afraid not only of pain and sorrow but even of joy, can so protect themselves that they seem dead to us. The new animal resulting from purification of the species might be one we wouldn’t like at all. For it is through struggle and sorrow that people are able to participate in one another—the heartlessness of the healthy, well-fed, and unsorrowful person has in it an infinite smugness.

  On the water’s edge of La Paz a new hotel was going up, and it looked very expensive. Probably the airplanes will bring week-enders from Los Angeles before long, and the beautiful poor bedraggled old town will bloom with a Floridian ugliness.

  Hearing a burst of chicken voices, we looked over a mud wall and saw that there were indeed chickens in the yard behind it. We asked then of a woman if we might buy several. They could be sold, she said, but they were not what one calls “for sale.” We entered her yard. One of the proofs that they were not for sale was that we had to catch them ourselves. We picked out two which looked a little less muscular than the others, and went for them. Whatever has been said, true or not, of the indolence of the Lower Californian is entirely untrue of his chickens. They were athletes, highly trained both in speed and in methods of escape. They could run, fly, and, when cornered, disappear entirely and re-materialize in another part of the yard. If the owner did not want to catch them, that hesitancy was not shared by the rest of La Paz. People and children came from everywhere; a mob collected, first to give excited advice and then to help. A pillar of dust arose out of that yard. Small boys hurled themselves at the chickens like football-players. We were bound to catch them sooner or later, for as one group became
exhausted, another took up the chase. If we had played fair and given those chickens rest periods, we would never have caught them. But by keeping at them, we finally wore them down and they were caught, completely exhausted and almost shorn of their feathers. Everyone in the mob felt good and happy then and we paid for the chickens and left.

  On board it was Sparky’s job to kill them, and he hated it. But finally he cut their heads off and was sick. He hung them over the side to bleed and a boat came along and mashed them flat against our side. But even then they were tough. They had the most highly developed muscles we have ever seen. Their legs were like those of ballet dancers and there was no softness in their breasts. We stewed them for many hours and it did no good whatever. We were sorry to kill them, for they were gallant, fast chickens. In our country they could easily have got scholarships in one of our great universities and had collegiate careers, for they had spirit and fight and, for all we know, loyalty.

  On the afternoon tide we were to collect on El Mogote, a low sandy peninsula with a great expanse of shallows which would be exposed at low tide. The high-tide level was defined by a heavy growth of mangrove. The area was easily visible from our anchorage, and the sand was smooth and not filled with rubble or stones or coral. A tall handsome boy of about nineteen had been idling about the Western Flyer. He had his own canoe, and he offered to paddle us to the tide flats. This boy’s name was Raúl Velez; he spoke some English and was of great service to us, for his understanding was quick and he helped valuably at the collecting. He told us the local names of many of the animals we had taken; “cornuda” was the hammer-head shark; “barco,” the red snapper; “caracol,” and also “burral,” all snails in general, but particularly the large conch. Urchins were called “erizo” and sea-fans, “abanico.” “Bromas” were barnacles and “hacha” the pinna, or large clam.