“It is advisable to look from the tide pool to the stars and then back to the tide pool again.” – John Steinbeck

I read and loved the Grapes of Wrath at a young age. The book may have encouraged me to stop taking Ayn Rand so seriously. Though through the love, the Grapes of Wrath, in all its might, was still a sullen and cruel story. It spoke lowly of humanity. And it seemed to me Steinbeck was a pessimist and my personality just can’t take such men, despite their beauty. So, when Senior Chief recommend Steinbeck’s Sea of Cortez, I said “Steinbeck is too depressing.”

“Steinbeck is a comedian. Haven’t you read Cannery Row?”

“Well, truthfully it’s been on my list but I haven’t prioritized it.”

“Well you should, then read The Log from the Sea of Cortez. They’re everything but depressing.”

I went out and did just that. Cannery Row was, of course, a master piece. And the Log of the Sea of Cortez, specifically the version with a eulogy to Ed Rickets (the marine biologist from Cannery Row), deserves a spot somewhere on the shelf.

Steinbeck is a man of the sea. He views the littoral as an analogy to mankind. His vessel as mankind’s littoral. And the Ocean as the tidepool of all. Cannery Row shows us life and death cycles of the tidepool, with jazzy remarks about the clitoris and the Model-T, and a sad little-and-cute fable about unlucky little ground hogs. The Sea of Cortez analyzes that life and that death further. The two together show us a Steinbeck enthralled with the study of things with a backdrop of the sea.

The Chinaman on Cannery Row

There is something that makes me wet, thinking about Doc staring into one of his tide pools, where each glance must’ve showed [sic] him a microcosm of life, except, or maybe even, the glance that returned a beautiful dead girl’s glance – which was: the lucid death of innocent humanity staring back at god. His tide pools are everything the world gives us in life, maybe specifically sex and murder. He hunts his starfish, his mollusk and octopus throughout the globe in these brief and repetitive exposures of crawling biology – thanks to the giant global breath – tides of the sea like the contrast of day and night. I’m wet thinking of it. But before Steinbeck gives us Doc, he gives us one of the best descriptions of this phenomena of lowtide – better than mine.

“It is a fabulous place: when the tide is in, a wave-churned basin, creamy with foam, whipped by the combers that roll in from the whistling buoy on the reef. But when the tide foes out the little water world becomes quiet lovely.”

And so Doc does his thing. He is well liked. And he in turn, likes well. Perhaps Doc then is the earnest Samaritan in the novel, all to knowing of the suffering which exist along with the necessary breath of the globe (perhaps he is god). He fights for what’s right, and when he gets licked, he gets up and starts over again. Like Steinbeck’s gopher – he’s lucky, then he’s not, and repeat. Like Mac and the Boys, who have philosophized it’s best not to be President, to be in union with another, nor to be bound to work. Mac and the Boys take the low road, and refuse to watch the fireworks, clap at the pompous processions, and march on the cow lines. They survive like some of the creatures in Doc’s tidepools, hiding in the trash of others, awaiting patiently for opportunities, unless hunger strikes first, then probing the nearby pools for easy food, always suspicious of other fish, specifically the larger or attractive ones.

But the Chinaman is who we scratch our head over, right? That stereotypical surreal Asian figure from 20th century literature and film, who wanders in and out of the frame, cloaked in a robe and in mystery. He floats through Cannery Row like some sort of super power – all knowing or all seeing or all something. In the dark of dusk, he disappears beneath the pier that leads out over the ocean. No one knows what he does down there, him and his basket, nightly. And when one of Steinbeck’s poor and savaged boys decides to challenge the unique man, he is given a dream-like view of his destiny, one of grief and loneliness. Is the Chinaman the figure opposite of the dead girl which Doc finds? Is the dead girl the tragic tale of humanity, who is overrun by life. While the Chinaman is the tale of humanity, who learns the secrets of the tide pools (which are only a microcosm of the globe over), and shuns his fellow man to protect it. Maybe Steinbeck’s Chinaman knows why fisherman sail alone? Why the social clubs and canning factories are useless, or maybe dangerous, in the fight of life. Maybe his magical gaze is nothing more than the incompatibility between a savaged boy and an enlightened fisherman.

I think Steinbeck is straighter forward than that. His analogy holds throughout his book. Cannery Row is a Tidepool of course. We, the men of Cannery Row, are mere shrimp, or hermits, or rock crab. Those little creatures who scurry around with both method and randomness are exposed to a lot of repetition. The cycle of the tides. The rush of fellow creatures. The nuance of the home. The philosophies of the great ocean-horizon. But there are also mysteries in the tidepools. There are giant bipedal creatures with tentacle hands who sweep in and do things we don’t know about, or we hear about through friends-of-friends. These creatures are the subject of religion. They are the secretive China Men.

In the Sea of Cortez, Steinbeck also talks about the very instinctual phenomenon. Sailors are constantly exposed to the mirage of the sea. The haze horizon, the burnt islands, and the out-of-place birds. Sailors are exposed to their own microcultures, to turn mirage into religion, and they spread their messages in their ports. And in their ports, they seek sanctuary and explanation for their fears. The want comfort from the mysterious. They dare not wonder. They do not turn over rocks, for fear that the mirage is only that, and that life is equal for both the anemone and the bipedal.

Cayo is Prometheus’ Caucasus

I was reading Steinbeck’s “The Log from the Sea of Cortez” aloud one morning to my two children. We were wading through Chapter 13, where Steinbeck mentions the mysterious Islet of Cayo. My 10 year old daughter piped up when Steinbeck pushed his question of “why?,” an open question for the reader. “It is a riddle we cannot answer, just as we can think of no reason for the big iron rings.”

The Log from the Sea of Cortez is Steinbeck’s adventure with the real version of his character Doc, from the Cannery Row. The two set sail with a small crew, aboard a small boat, during the out break of World War 2, to collect specimen from tidepools in the Gulf of California. True to form, the author ponders each social and physical encounter of his trip and poetically transcribes his thoughts. The Western Flyer, their small fishing boat turned research vessel, has become itself a creature in the larger tide pool of the Pacific Ocean and then of the Sea of Cortez. She is infested with parasitical inhabitants, the scientist themselves and her crew. As Steinbeck sails the Coast of the Baja Peninsula, he cannot escape his gnawing concerns with popular opinion in regard to science. He meets people, children, and he analysis them, in mostly anecdotal ways. He pounds the non-teleological form into his reader, directly, at a sometimes yawning pace. And we reach the Islet of Cayo, black and burnt in the distance. Without a useful shoreline to land their craft, they instead drag their skiff onto the rocks and explore the islands and its littoral. They find a cliff, with old rusted chains of enormous size buried in it. A cave nearby with old artifacts, fire-pit, and large tortoise and clam shells. A well beaten path escapes the cave to the peak of their remote island where a huge squawking crow eyes them, then flies off. Latter that night, they are attacked by black beetles as they sleep…

Steinbeck asks us to recognize the mystical powers of this part of the world. They are obvious to unlearned and innocent people. The horizon always seems to be a mirage (common on coastal seas) and the interaction between historic tradition and modern (1940’s) Catholicism has led a people into transcendent states of awe, where they can be pulled and pushed at the whim of a spirt guide. He is trying to warn us of the lure of fantasy, hope, fable and group-think. Our instincts are nothing more than those other creatures in the tide pool, and thus we need to be methodical in our thought, which leads to action.

My daughter says that the cave on Cayo is the story of Prometheus. The Isle of Cayo is Caucasus, which is the prison Zeus sent the betraying Prometheus to endure eternal suffering. The crow, as crows always are, is the omen. Steinbeck, the scientists, are the heroes on a mission to save man, by giving them fire (knowledge). The Church is Zeus, punishing them for their efforts. And all of this makes sense. I’m impressed and feel some paternal pride of my daughter for her smarts. But we wonder what the beetles are that attack Steinbeck and his ship that night. Are they the probability that coincidence will always spoil the ability to teach reason? I mean, Steinbeck knows there is no significance in such matters. But Tony and Tiny must be turning in their beds. They are being told SOMETHING by the mystical side of the universe.