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217 a few years after the 1940 voyage that Steinbeck, Ricketts, and Carol took to the Sea of Cortez, Carol and a friend were on a fishing boat on Monterey Bay, watching the sunset. Suddenly Carol exclaimed that the scene reminded her of Baja: “Oh what a time we had. That was the happiest time of my entire life.” There were tears in her eyes. It was the only occasion when Viola Franklin , Carol’s friend for over forty years, ever saw her cry. Carol’s recollection might seem baffling, since the six-week trip to the Sea of Cortez in March and April of 1940 was an unsettled time in her marriage—surely not, one would suppose, the happiest time for either partner . While Carol may not have known about Gwen, she must have recognized the unsteadiness in their marriage, the hollow intimacy. Evidence enough is that she and John slept in separate berths throughout the trip, she in the stateroom, he with the crew in a common cabin. (Although this may have been something John would have wanted to do in any case; he would not have wanted to be off in an exalted stateroom.) John was often quiet, while Carol was unpredictable, wild and flirtatious with the crew. But if marital bonds were frayed, intellectual ties remained strong. For six weeks, Carol, Ed, and John, each emotionally fragile when the Western Flyer sailed out of Monterey Bay, revitalized the creative phalanx. Collecting marine invertebrates created a colony of workers on and off the boat, friends and crew bound to a common purpose. And sailing through the little-known Gulf of California was palliative—a place where, as Steinbeck wrote in Sea of Cortez, “the very air . . . is miraculous, and outlines of reality change with the moment. A dream hangs over the whole region, a brooding kind of hallucination.” John, Carol, and Ed took themselves out of time. So Carol’s nostalgia was not far off the mark. Near the end of the voyage, John wrote to his agents that “Carol is beginning to be homesick for her garden . But she has been marvelous on this trip. I don’t know any other woman who could have done it.” Captain Tony Berry concurred: “She was good on On the Sea of Cortez c h a p t e r n i n e 218 carol a nd john st e inb e c k the trip, seventy five percent well behaved.” Perhaps the journey was lifealtering for both, helping each recover psychic balance—despite a doomed marriage. Years later John insisted that Sea of Cortez was his favorite among all the books he’d written. And a perceptive reviewer, Lewis Gannett, wrote in the New York Herald Tribune that the haunting and thoughtful Sea of Cortez contains “more of the whole man” than in “any of his novels . . . the best of Steinbeck is in it.” It remains the seminal text for appreciating his mind— the holistic and ecological sensibilities that he and Ed Ricketts shared. For a writer who spent the 1930s cultivating a “detached” stance, writing this personal , idiosyncratic text was transformative. Conversations structure Sea of Cortez, as Ed noted after publication: it reads, he said, as “a Jon-Ed sit by the fire.” But of course Carol was there too, joining those conversations, a part of the phalanx. The trip had a brief gestation period. In part because John and Carol were restless in the fall of 1939, at marital loose ends, they planned a Christmas collecting trip with Ed Ricketts to take advantage of a “minus tide of unusual depth,” north of San Francisco to Olema, near Point Reyes, and then to Duxbury Reef and Tomales Point—places where Ricketts had often worked in the intertidal. For John, study of marine invertebrates was liberating: “the two most important [things] I suppose—at least they seem so to me,” John wrote to Carlton Sheffield, “are freedom from respectability and most important —freedom from the necessity of being consistent.” To move from social problems to scientific inquiry was, in his mind, to broaden his world outlook immeasurably. After writing Grapes, he wrote a long letter to his uncle Joe Hamilton, explaining this shift from partisan to scientist: The new work must jump to include other species beside the human. That is why my interest in biology and ecology have become so sharpened. . . . The bio-ecological pattern having at its conception base and immeasurable lengthened time sequence, does...

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