WESTERN FLYER

I first saw WESTERN FLYER on a drizzly February morning in 2015. She was outside on chocks in Port Townsend, Washington, recently salvaged from the bottom of the Swinomish Channel. Dismasted, barnacled, mud-clad, she was a 77' mess. Silty rust oozed from her fastenings, and oakum hung like dreadlocks from her seams. Large chunks of her windlass and bulwarks were chewed away. The elegant, sweeping lines of two lovely boats nearby, FLYING DAWN and PASPATOO, exaggerated FLYER’s ghastly appearance. Yet people were willing to stand in the rain to see her. Most of us, I’m sure, felt the same mix of awe and nausea, like a punch in the gut. People shook their heads, and someone walked off muttering, “She should have been scuttled.”

Maybe. But WESTERN FLYER isn’t just any boat. John Steinbeck and Ed Ricketts sailed her to Baja California on an intertidal collecting expedition in 1940, a trip made famous by their 1941 book, Sea of Cortez: A Leisurely Journal of Travel and Research, which was revised and republished as Steinbeck’s The Log from the Sea of Cortez in 1951.

The two men met in Monterey, California, in the early 1930s and became legendary friends. At the time, Steinbeck was writing The Grapes of Wrath, and Ricketts, a biologist and philosopher who owned a marine lab on Cannery Row, was finishing Between Pacific Tides, his seminal book about intertidal animals (now in its sixth edition). Steinbeck was keenly interested in marine biology, too, and had accompanied Ricketts on collecting trips up and down the coast. The two shared an interest in science, metaphysics, music, and poetry. They used the word ecology long before it became widely known. Steinbeck was so taken by his friend that he fashioned characters after him—Ricketts was Doc in Cannery Row and Sweet Thursday, Jim Casey in The Grapes of Wrath, and Friend Ed in the play Burning Bright.