30 SMITHSONIAN.COM | September 2019
money, grants and publicly raised
funds—to make the Western Flyer
seaworthy again. He intends to get
the boat into the water in 2020,
honoring the 80th anniversary of
the Steinbeck and Ricketts voy-
age, and follow their Sea of Cortez
route, with artists, writers and sci-
entists aboard. After that, the boat
will become an education and re-
search vessel.
The Western Flyer, a 77-foot purse
seiner built of old-growth Doug-
las fi r in 1937, has outlasted nearly
all its contemporaries, despite its
sinkings. The people working with
the boat all talk about its extraor-
dinary “life force.” This would not
surprise Steinbeck, who wrote in
The Log that “a boat, above all other
inanimate things, is personifi ed in
man’s mind.” He added a line often
quoted by the shipwrights, scien-
tists and scholars involved with the
Western Flyer today: “Man, build-
ing this greatest and most personal
of all tools, has in turn received a
boat-shaped mind, and the boat, a
man-shaped soul.”
JOHN GREGG IS TALL, blond, blue-
eyed, with a rumpled appearance
and an unfl appable attitude. Look-
ing out at the Sea of Cortez, also
known as the Gulf of California, on
a bright breezy morning in Baja,
he explained to me how his obses-
sion began.
In 1971, when he was 11, his fami-
ly was living in Brunswick, Georgia. It was a poor rural commu-
nity with no library, but every two weeks an eagerly anticipated
bookmobile would arrive. “It was a rounded van, and you de-
posited your books in the front, and went out through the back,”
he says. “You were allowed fi ve or six books, and you only had
fi ve or six minutes to choose them, so it was a scramble. On one
of the covers, I saw a picture of a boat in a big green sea with a
yellow sky. It looked like an adventure book, and that’s what I
liked, so I grabbed it without thinking.”
It was a 1951 edition of The Log from the Sea of Cortez. Although
he was hoping for pirates, monster storms and aggrieved whales,
he became completely absorbed by Steinbeck and Ricketts’ gen-
tler adventures in coastal tide pools and Mexican port towns. “I
already knew I wanted to be a scientist, and I understood they
were doing serious science,” he says. “But they were also hav-
ing fun, talking philosophy under the stars, and catching fi sh.
They were young and
sunburned and drinking.
Every port they went into
sounded great. I loved ev-
erything about it.”
He started reading oth-
er Steinbeck books, and Monterey, California, where Steinbeck and
Ricketts lived in the 1930s and early 1940s, became a “mythical place”
for him. When Gregg went there for the fi rst time, in 1982, he was as-
tonished to discover that Ed Ricketts’ former laboratory still existed,
although it was locked and closed to the public. Sandwiched between
two sardine canneries, the lab had also functioned as a raucous party
spot, and a salon where Steinbeck, Ricketts and others, including Jo-
seph Campbell, the scholar of human mythology, drank heavily and
discussed science, literature, art and philosophy among cages of live
rattlesnakes and jars of pickled sea creatures.FLYER ’S FAMED
TRIP TO MEXICO
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