Searching for
Steinbeck’s Sea of Cortez--A Makeshift Expedition
Along Baja Desert Coast. The book attracted my
attention like an unexpected navigation beacon as I
walked the aisle of Anchorage’s eclectic bookstore,
Title Wave Books. The Alaska-based author, Andromeda
Romano-Lax, tells the story of her family’s travels
by sailboat in an attempt to retrace the journey made by
John Steinbeck and Ed "Doc" Ricketts in 1940.
The book immediately intrigued me, for 15 years ago I and
two companions made a similarly makeshift journey
inspired, in part, by my reading of Steinbeck’s Log
of the Sea of Cortez. Unlike the voyages of
Steinbeck-Ricketts and Romano-Lax, our voyage was made by
vehicle, my 1984 Chevy S-10 pickup. We relied on the
vessels of others, either dive boats from the local dive
shops or the pangas of local fishermen. And like the
other journey’s, ours was not only a change to have
a look-see at the Sea of Cortez, but like most good
travel-adventures, it was a look at ourselves....
We made our trip in December of 1990, the timing opportunistically dictated by the academic calendar of the University of California, Santa Barbara, where I and one of my traveling companions, Brandon, were enrolled. Fall Quarter had just ended. We would leave as soon as Brandon finished his last final. I had helped teach the class where Brandon learned how to dive a year earlier in a class through the UCSB Outdoor Recreation Department where I was an unpaid volunteer recreation assistant. Halfway through the class we had formed an unlikely friendship that did not dissolve as we constantly immersed it salt water over the next 14 months. The third member of our group, my brother Andy, was taking a brief holiday from his job. Andy had learned to dive a few years earlier, partially the result of living with me during my "diving summer" in Santa Barbara when I was diving four days a week and partially the result of an attraction for things aquatic developed while pursuing a life as a prepubescent and teenage surf rat. In fact, it was he that seven summers earlier pointed out with a mixture of glee and trepidation that I had put the "shorty" wet suit on backward, explaining that these things were back, not front, zip. He just kind of rolled his eyes toward heaven and probably muttered a silent prayer that no one he knew would be present as I launched my newly-acquired sailboard the next morning. A camping-dive trip to the Monterey Peninsula a few months was devised to work out the bugs in our travel system before taking it south of the border. Other than a damaged turn lamp lens from backing into a post after an ice-cream stop in Cambria, the trip came off without a hitch. It worked out all very well and since we all came back happier than when we left, I figured we had our team. Not that finding a replacement would have been hard. Lots of people seemed to be willing to travel to Baja as part of the expedition, just so long as it was my vehicle and not theirs that was being used. I was amazed at how many potential explorers just kind of coughed and remembered a pressing dental appointment or other obligation when I mentioned that while I was booked, we could always convoy with as many vehicles as it took. The world of 1990 had great promise while going kind of nuts. The former Soviet Union and Eastern Block had largely dissolved a short time before, freedom seemed to be breaking out all over. In August, the Iraqi dictator Saddam Huesein sent troops to occupy neighboring Kuwait. The United States with a coalition of dozens of nations had responded by taking up defensive positions in Saudi Arabia and were insisting that the Iraqis leave Kuwait or face the consequences. Tensions were running pretty high when we loaded the truck and headed toward the border, destination Mulege, north of the Bajia de los Angeles on the Sea of Cortez. |
