Sea of Cortez: Recollections and Reflections

It began very inauspiciously. I was grading freshman composition essays in my office in the Oregon State University English Department, a long day’s work punctuated by periodic frustrations over the quality (or rather the lack of it) in this or that student’s writing. As I was reading a particularly disturbing essay about the pollution of the Willamette River (the author saw no problem with a nearby zirconium plant using the river to dispose of its toxic waste) I looked up to see an older man with a very strange visage standing in my doorway; most certainly he was not one of my students. There were no introductions—he simply stood there, looking down at me.

Feeling slightly uncomfortable, I asked if I could help him; no response. Finally, he stepped forward and asked quizzically, “Are you the fellow who wrote a doctoral dissertation on John Steinbeck?” “Yes,” I responded in a halting voice, adding that it had been accepted only two or three months ago. Again, no response. Moments later, scratching his chin, he asked if, in my manuscript, I had talked about Steinbeck’s interest in marine ecology. “Yes, well sort of,” I responded, qualifying my response by substituting the word biology for ecology. Appearing somewhat displeased, he stood another moment and then came into the office and sat down. “We have much to talk about,” he said. “What’s that,” I answered. “If your dissertation is any good at all, I can help you turn it into an important book,” he quipped offhandedly. Pausing, he then asked, “Is it any good?”

I smiled and tried to nod. I must admit, though, strange as this encounter seemed, my interest piqued. “Okay,” I said, mustering the courage to deal with my visitor, “let’s begin at the beginning…who are you?” “Hedgpeth,” he responded, “Joel Hedgpeth, I run the university’s Marine Science Center in Newport. I knew Ed Ricketts well. I knew Steinbeck. I know lots of people who knew them both. I said we have much to talk about.” “Yes, it well may be,” I concurred, somewhat hesitatingly—not sure I heard him correctly or, if I did, trusted what I was hearing. “I’ll come over to your house later this afternoon,” he said. “I live in Newport and can stay here in Corvallis a couple of extra hours. What’s your address?” I told him. He left, and I read a half-dozen more student essays before going home. I wasn’t at all sure he’d show up.

I got home about 4:30, about a half hour before my wife, Betty, who directed the graduate program in the College of Business at Oregon State. As I began telling her about my visit from Hedgpeth, there was a knock on the door. Closer to it than me, she opened it and there he stood. Smiling, she invited him in. Once inside, he turned toward both of us, inquiring what was for dinner. Nonplussed, I don’t recall that we answered. There was no need. It came from him: “a nice steak, burned…a salad, no carrots.” One of us went off to Albertson’s supermarket. The other poured Joel a tall scotch—on the rocks—and then another. What would become a grand adventure was underway.

When I began my doctoral work at the University of Washington, our department chair, the noted Shakespeare scholar Robert Heilman—a giant in the academic literary world at the time—gave me and all of his new students a volume written by Richard Altick titled The Scholar Adventurers. He said we should read it carefully, internalize Altick’s discussion about the excitement of literary research so that we might prosper not only as graduate students but as scholars, whatever our fields of specialization. I stayed up much of the night reading, and my immediate takeaway was that I could become a real sleuth, uncovering all kinds of buried secrets about writers and their work that would validate my choice of career, and, if I were fortunate, would convince my slightly skeptical in-laws that I...