Leopold’s Shack and Ricketts’s Lab: The Emergence of Environmentalism

10. Daily Lives and Professional Expectations

103 If Aldo Leopold and Ed Ricketts had ever shared the same shack (in fact, they never met and were probably unaware of each other’s existence),1 there would have been every chance that at any particular point in the day, someone would have been awake. Neither slept much. Besides that, Leopold was a morning person to the extreme, awakening at 3:00 or 4:00 A.M. At the Shack he would make a pot of coffee, go outside, get out his notebook, and record birdsongs. In Madison, he’d walk to his oYce and put in a few hours before anybody else showed up. He’d go home for lunch and a nap, and then return. His evenings were short; he was frequently in bed by 9:00, even when hosting guests. Ricketts—as befits one who lived across the street from a brothel—was a night owl. Friends would come over in the afternoon or evening, and gatherings would often carry on until dawn. Although he rarely demonstrated it as an adult, Leopold remained an individualist his entire life. As with many with a touch of genius, he was “solitary in his ways,” and “chafed under social cha p t e r t en Daily Lives and Professional Expectations 104 / Daily Lives, Professional Expectations conventions.”2 Meine writes, “He was in many respects an enlightenment personality confronting the realities of the twentiethcentury world, with the benefits of twentieth-century ecological science at hand.”3 True to this nature, Leopold was a bottom-up thinker, an inductive thinker; to him, everything started with observation, and generalizations were built from there. He was a keen observer, and the words that Bob de Roos had for Ricketts, “the best eyes I have ever seen at work,” also hold for Leopold (and, in fact, for every first-rate biologist I have ever been around). But it was his well-honed ability to draw inferences (and occasionally broad implications) from his observations that formed the basis of Leopold’s legacy. Leopold’s powerful intellect was belied by a quiet, patient, reciprocal approach to his relationships with family, colleagues, and students. Unlike so many accomplished professionals working today, he was secure and confident in his abilities, so much so that he did not need to show them off, or keep reminding others of the talents he possessed. In part, these qualities were what drew students to him, and made them intensely loyal once they were aboard. At first blush, Ed Ricketts’s most distinctive features were his hands and eyes. According to J.J. Benson, he had the hands of a surgeon or artist—long fingers, with a gentle but firm touch that matched his personality.4 He was accepting, almost completely without malice, yet had a kind of sure, inner toughness.5 He had enormous charm, not phony or superficial, usually accepted foibles, and didn’t reject people because of them. The mature Ed Ricketts was a remarkable and complex man, and largely because of Steinbeck he has become a legend, making it very diYcult to distinguish the qualities of the man from those of the legend. Joel Daily Lives, Professional Expectations / 105 Hedgpeth points out that Steinbeck’s portrait of Ricketts as Doc in Cannery Row “is the only full treatment of a marine biologist in English fiction. In the popular imagination, Ricketts has become Doc, a loveable character who lived just as he wanted to live, getting enough to drink, eat, listen to and go to bed with, and in the end, to read. In the minds of some students, all this is what you do when you are a marine biologist and the learning comes just as easy as the wine, women and song.”6 Also clouding the reality of Ed Ricketts were the almost unanimously favorable reactions of those who knew him, reactions that sometimes approach idolatry.7 He was a hardworking, highly rational biologist who sought and uncovered scientific truths, yet he was also eccentric. He lived freely and had little concern for societal constraints. At some level Leopold would have appreciated him. In a statement that sounds like paradox, Leopold once wrote, “Nonconformity is the highest evolutionary attainment of social animals.”8 Part of what made Ricketts so unusual was the fact that the humanities—art, music, literature, and philosophy—were as much a part of his life...