Steinbeckia: an Odyssey : A marine expedition through the Monterey Bay...

Pelican on the move... from our chartered whale watching vessel...

An early morning expedition on a whale watching vessel marked the symbolic closure of our explorations of Steinbeck's bay/sea-centric literature (Cannery Row, Sweet Thursday, Tortilla Flat, The Sea of Cortez). While Steinbeck would always maintain some proximity to the ocean for the rest of his life (when he relocated to New York City with his third wife Elaine he purchased a seaside property up the long island sound in Sag Harbor), I wonder how much of his fascination/need for the great deep blue stemmed from his associations with his counterpart Ed Ricketts, to whom the ocean was beyond necessity. In America and Americans, the collected works of Steinbeck's nonfiction, there is an extremely brief piece titled "...like captured butterflies" in which Steinbeck recounts a conversation with his son about attending school--namely, how to survive it, and how to cope with its seemingly unending nature:

"It is customary for adults to forget how hard and dull and long school is. The learning by memory and all the basic things one must know is the most incredible and unending effort...School is not easy and it is not for the most part very much fun, but then, if you are very lucky, you may find a teacher. Three real teachers in a lifetime is the very best of luck. My first was a science and math teacher in high school, my second a professor of writing at Stanford, and my third was my friend and partner, Ed Ricketts..." (America and Americans, 142).

As we toured the deep blue Monterey Bay, I found myself drifting to thoughts of Steinbeck and Ricketts... especially as we passed the backside of Doc's laboratory, now sandwiched painfully between the terminus of the Aquarium and a series of luxury hotels and tchotchke store fronts:

Doc's lab is back there somewhere...

How much of Steinbeck's association and obsession with the water was purely nostalgia? The friend-brother-teacher-partner-in-crime dynamic is a hard thing to find...

As far as the day of aquatic sightseeing was concerned, we had (generally) a great four hour outing. A few folks came down with an acute case of "vomitus maximus" (seasickness...) which definitely affected their enjoyment... funny how different a diesel powered fishing vessel "feels" from other boats... I've been out on sailboats from 20'-60' several times and never really experienced any nausea... but this time, I did feel a bit queasy...for a while... I wonder how much of it was a physical reaction and how much of it was a psychosomatic reaction to all of the "don't forget to take your dramamine or you are going to blow chunks" talk that was rampant the day of the trip... hmm...

The whales, while plentiful, maintained about the same distance from the boat (with one or two humpback exceptions) as our encounter with them off the coast of Hopkins... which was a little disappointing... I really wanted to get some hi-def shots of their faces with pock-marked barnacles all over!!! Dang! We did see quite a few jellyfish, Rizzo dolphins, sunfish (the largest bony fish in the sea!), and we did have a few blue whale sightings... unfortunately, the blues don't seem (or didn't this day) to put on the exhibition that their smaller humpbacked counterparts do...

After the initial voyage was over, a few of us headed back out to sea with Gilly to attempt to snare some squid... Gilly (Bill Gilly, our Stanford University co-director of the institute) is a true squid aficionado. We were lucky enough to have a few classroom lectures centered on squid and their extremely fascinating chromatophore cells (the pigment altering organelles that allow cephalopods to quickly modulate from one skin color schema to another), behavior, and communication abilities... the "squid cam" videos taken on expeditions to Baja were incredible... but I digress... back to the 'bay critters: