Blog from the Sea of Cortez: Farewall to Safari Voyager!

Western Flyer is licensed by the US Coast Guard as a Research Vessel. That means that, as much as we'd like to, we cannot carry passengers for hire. So, to help pay the cost of our 3 month voyage through the Gulf of California we have partnered with someone who can: Uncruise, an adventure cruise company. 

For the last 10 days their ship, Safari Voyager, a 174 foot, 66 passenger adventure cruise ship, has been shadowing us. Guests have been participating in many of our research activities, such as CTD casts, and intertidal surveys, but then retiring to Voyager for meals and to sleep. In the late afternoons Susan Shillinglaw, one of our board members and a John Steinbeck expert, has been leading the group in reading passages from Log from the Sea of Cortez. 

The results were fantastic. There was something special about reading about an area from the book, say Puerto Refugio, then visiting the actual site with Flyer close at hand. We would compare what Steinbeck and Ricketts saw with what we were seeing. It was also hard not to notice the parallels between the backdrop of war in 1940, to our world today, all of which led to some interesting discussions. 

Take this passage:

We take a tiny colony of soft corals from a rock in a little water world. And that isn’t terribly important to the tide pool. Fifty miles away the Japanese shrimp boats are dredging with overlapping scoops, bringing up tons of shrimps, rapidly destroying the species so that it may never come back, and with the species destroying the ecological balance of the whole region. That isn’t very important in the world. And thousands of miles away the great bombs are falling and the stars are not moved thereby. None of it is important or all of it is.

--- Steinbeck, John. The Log from the Sea of Cortez (Penguin Classics) (p. 4). 

Is this the dawn of a new environmental awareness? Or, is it a nihilistic view of the world where evolution grinds on, indifferent to its outcome? Much of the book discusses "non-teleological thinking," the idea that nature has no purpose, it just "is". Man may do foolish things, but there it is.

With such heady topics, it would have been easy for the group to chase down a rabbit hole, but Susan kept things going and on-topic.

I first read Log from the Sea of Cortez as a late teenager. At the time, it read as an adventure story to me, with vivid descriptions of days and nights at sea. With so few years under the belt, the philosophical musings went over my head and I skipped a lot of them. This time, we all slowed down and thought a bit more deeply about the book. I got so much more out of it.

Still confused, but at a higher level.

--- Popular saying around RWS.