www.montereycountyweekly.com november 2-8, 2023 MONTEREY COUNTY WEEKLY 19 Ed Ricketts and John Steinbeck were, in Steinbeck’s own words, “obviously ridiculous” with their 1940 idea of a six-week-long expedition to the Gulf of California. No wonder that when they spread the word, in early 1940, that they wanted to charter a purse-seiner—sardine season was nearly over and roughly a hundred purse-seiners were anchored in Monterey—“no boat was offered,” Steinbeck wrote. Nobody knows what would have happened if captain Tony Berry didn’t sail into Monterey Bay on the Western Flyer, a 77-foot purse-seiner that Ricketts and Steinbeck eventually chartered. This tolerant man of Croatian origins agreed to go, and his decision secured the Western Flyer a place in history; the boat is the main character in this story. It was one of two times that Berry changed the fate of a humble sardine purse-seiner that was sold, lost, sunken, found and bought back and is now, after 70 years, coming home to Monterey. While planning the trip, Steinbeck and Ricketts considered themselves broke without feeling poor, but both already had certain achievements. In 1939, Ricketts published Between Pacific Tides (along with Jack Calvin) that became one of the most popular Stanford University textbooks for marine biology courses, while Steinbeck, the same year, released one of his best novels, The Grapes of Wrath, which won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize. By then, the Western Flyer was already built, in 1937 in Tacoma, Washington, along with three other sister boats designed specifically for the Monterey sardine fishery. Ricketts arrived in Monterey in 1923, from Chicago. Steinbeck arrived in 1929 and before they met—at the dentist’s office (according to Steinbeck) or at a friend’s place (according to everybody else)—they’d already heard about one another and were mutually intrigued. In Steinbeck’s account—one that is colorful and unreliable—they immediately went for a drink, one of many they were to have, typically at Ricketts’ quirky marine biology lab at 800 Cannery Row, where parties could last for days, if the spirit was right. The plan for their voyage was to “collect marine animals on certain days and at certain hours indicated on the tide charts,” as reported by Steinbeck in The Log from the Sea of Cortez (1951). The book was his second take on the trip after 1941’s less famous Sea of Cortez: A Leisurely Journal of Travel and Research, by Steinbeck and Ricketts. Their mission was “to observe the distribution of invertebrates, to see and record their kinds and numbers, how they lived together, what they ate, and how they reproduced.” And Steinbeck and Ricketts executed the plan. They traveled over 4,000 miles, around the southern tip of Baja California, Mexico, and into the sea that separates Baja from mainland Mexico. They captured 560 species of marine invertebrates, among other specimens in the Gulf of California, “a long, narrow, highly dangerous body of water,” and “subject to sudden and vicious storms of great intensity,” as Steinbeck wrote. They preferred to call it the Sea of Cortez. While such commitment seems about right in the case of Ricketts, a marine biologist, it strikes as unusual in Steinbeck, a rising literary sensation. The bridge between them turned out to be philosophy, particularly the philosophy of science. The voyage of the Western Flyer was, as reading of The Log proves, a profoundly philosophical quest. During the trip, Ricketts and Steinbeck spoke about George Darwin (Charles’ son) and Vincent van Gogh, and made social and political comments in two respective journals that Steinbeck then reworked into one piece. The Log moves from discussing the behavior of the amoeba under the microscope to “spiritual teleology,” or “the tidal theory of cosmogony”—all that on board the Western Flyer, in between staring at turtles, red rock lobsters and schools of jumping tuna. “We knew that what we would see and record and construct would be warped,” Steinbeck wrote, sounding like a postmodernist, “as all knowledge patterns are warped, first by the collective pressure and stream of our time and race, second by the thrust of our individual personalities.” Perhaps Ricketts needed someone like Steinbeck to cross the limits of his discipline and land on the frontiers of ecology and environmentalism, awakening our common consciousness that, as Steinbeck wrote, “going into the Sea of Cortez means becoming forever a part of it”; “that our rubber boots slogging through a flat of eel-grass, that the rocks we turn over in a tide pool make us truly and permanently a factor in the ecology of the region.” There it is—a boat taken straight from literature—slightly swaying in the morning sun in Moss Landing Harbor where it has been docked since the first week of October 2023, to the delight of the Elkhorn Yacht Club, whose members will escort the Western Flyer toward Monterey on its big homecoming day, Saturday, Nov. 4. The description is still accurate: “She was seventy-six feet long with a twenty-five-foot beam,” Steinbeck wrote. “Her deckhouse had a wheel forward, then combination master’s room and radio room, then bunkroom, very comfortable. After the galley, a Photos from the original voyage of the Western Flyer, from right to second-from-left: Sparky Enea and Travis “Tex” Hall swimming during the Sea of Cortez expedition. Aboard the Baby Flyer: Ed Ricketts, John Steinbeck, Carol Steinbeck and Ritzi “Tiny” Colletto during the Sea of Cortez expedition. It is one of only two known photos of Steinbeck and Ricketts together. Travis “Tex” Hall (left) and Horace “Sparky” Enea (second from left) aboard Western Flyer with three unknown men. The Western Flyer before it fell into disrepair (1940) and at its worst in 2015, before its recent restoration. Courtesy of the Martha Heasley Cox Center for Steinbeck Studies Courtesy of Western Flyer Foundation Petrich Family Collection
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