Searching for Steinbeck's Sea of Cortez: A Makeshift Expedition Along Baja's Desert Coast (review)

Steinbeck and Captain Tony Berry on the Bridge of the Western Flyer During the Sea of Cortez Trip

This book recounts the April-June 2000 journey by journalist/ writer Andromeda Romano-Lax in an attempt to retrace collecting voyage made by John Steinbeck and his friend Ed Ricketts in 1940 as they explored the Sea of Cortez in Baja, California. In her prologue, Romano-Lax states her qualifications for such a re-enactment: she holds a graduate degree in marine management, while her husband, Brian, is an environmental educator with a degree in biology. Neither is a casual tourist.

Initially, Romano-Lax assesses Steinbeck's motives for the journey as his "need to seek solace in the natural world" (xii) and to have a break from writing fiction after the stress of publishing The Grapes of Wrath (xiii). In her opinion, Steinbeck was attempting to hide from the realities of literary critics, from the politics of the impending war in Europe, and from his own marital troubles. As an admirer of Steinbeck's own account of his journey in The Log From The Sea of Cortez, Romano-Lax wants to re-live the experience rather than just to read about it.

In three sections—"In the Garden," "Fall From Grace," and "A Terrible Thirst"—she recounts her adventures on the Zuiva, the twenty-four-foot sailboat shared with her husband, two young children, Aryeh and Tziporah, and her brother-in-law / skipper, Doug. Compared with Steinbeck's seventy-six-foot-long trawler, The Western Flyer, the Zuiva is a very cramped space, leading to frequent tensions and claustrophobia among its inhabitants.

Romano-Lax's ability to focus on the changes that have taken place in Baja is one of the highlights of this book. Since Steinbeck's visit over sixty years ago, the cost of such a trip has skyrocketed. From $2500 to rent a commercial fishing vessel and hire a full crew of five in 1940, the price has ballooned to over six figures. Similarly, the ecological changes—surprisingly not always negative— reveal the materialistic development of this once pristine wilderness into lush tourist destinations such as Cabo San Lucas.

Most importantly, Romano-Lax provides her own responses to passages from The Log, supplying fresh insights. For example, she responds to the seed story for The Pearl, recounted in The Log as an Indian folk tale that Steinbeck overheard on the voyage: "On first reading it [the novella] had seemed overdramatic and outdated. But as we read it in Baja, it seemed less an overwrought parable than a starkly written account" (98). Those critics who find this tale thin and sentimentalized should take note.

Romano-Lax also notes parallels between Steinbeck and Kino in their discovery that success is often a sham. She finds further similarities between Steinbeck's recent rise to wealth and fame after the publication of The Grapes of Wrath and Kino's discovery of the pearl of the world, noting that each newly found wealth is accompanied by notoriety, adverse criticism, and discontent. Like Kino, too, Steinbeck recognizes that wealth and fame can destroy the sweet Song of the Family, for although his wife, Carol, was aboard The Western Flyer, she is seldom mentioned, evidence of a failing marriage. It is no wonder, notes Romano-Lax, that this small folk tale resonated for Steinbeck, sticking like a cactus burr in his imagination.

Additionally, the author examines The Log's teleological philosophy—the belief that what is, simply is— and finds it "philosophically soothing yet pragmatically irritating," (178), no doubt echoing the reactions of many a Steinbeck scholar. Romano-Lax especially finds disconcerting Steinbeck and Ricketts's assertion that despite the wasteful over-harvesting and careless littering that occurs , there is no waste, no good, no bad. Rather, as Casy says in The Grapes of Wrath, "There...