36 SMITHSONIAN.COM | September 2019
book about the Steinbecks’ marriage, has
thought hard about why John omitted Carol
from The Log.
“John was already involved with some-
one else, the marriage was coming apart,
and the trip was supposed to fi x it, which
it didn’t,” she says. “But I think the real rea-
son he left her out is literary. It’s much eas-
ier to make the narrative fl ow without in-
troducing Carol as a character. He doesn’t
introduce Ed as a character either, but he’s
implicit in the ‘we’ that John uses to nar-
rate the book.”
With the engine running day and night,
they went straight to Cabo San Lucas at the
southern tip of the Baja Peninsula. What
is now a ritzy A-list resort was then “a sad
little town,” with a doleful cantina full of
cockroaches and men who couldn’t aff ord
to buy a drink. On the wave-battered coast-
al rocks, however, they found life teeming
with “exuberant fi erceness,” and took sam-
ples of dozens of species. They preserved
them carefully in formaldehyde, and then
sailed into the Sea of Cortez.
Biologically speaking, this 700-mile-
long sea has some of the richest waters on
earth, in drastic contrast to the hard, stony,
cactus-studded desert on the surrounding
shores. Even today, Baja California is domi-
nated by a feeling of remoteness; in 1940 it
seemed like the end of the earth. Tony Berry,
an orderly man who loved solid facts, was
unsettled by the persistent mirages in the de-
ceptive air, and Steinbeck found it all deeply
mysterious, “The sky sucks up the land and
disgorges it. A dream hangs over the whole
region, a brooding kind of hallucination.”
As they moved from one low-tide collect-
ing station to the next, they were studying
the distribution of marine invertebrates, but
their curiosity was “wide and horizonless,”
Steinbeck wrote, and they thought it was a
mistake to look at anything, from a sea cu-
cumber to a Mexican folk saint, without rec-
ognizing that it lay within a vast, outspread-
ing, almost infi nite web of connections.
In port towns, they roistered in cantinas
and brothels, marveled at cathedrals. It was
hard work collecting specimens in the tide
pools, chasing down specimens and prying
others off rocks, getting bitten and stung. Evenings were given
over to fresh fi sh and pasta and copious amounts of wine and
beer. Carol, who had a lively, inquiring mind and a penchant
for witty conversation, would have probably joined in the
philosophical discussions that John and Ed so enjoyed.
Extrapolating from an encounter with an industrial Jap-
anese shrimp fl eet dredging every living thing from the
bottom of the sea, Ricketts and Steinbeck foresaw a global
environmental catastrophe that threatened the “eventual
welfare of the whole human species,” Steinbeck wrote. That
prophecy sounds all too plausible today, but very few people
were making it in 1940.“Out of a hundred, you might
inspire six to do ocean science,
and that would be great.”