The Western Flyer: Steinbeck's Boat, the Sea of Cortez, and the Saga of Pacific Fisheries 9780226116938

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T h e W e s t e r n F ly e r

Kevin M. Bailey

The Western Flyer St e i n b e c k’s B oat, t h e S e a o f C o rt e z , a n d t h e S aga o f Pac i f i c F i s h e r i e s

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T h e U n i v e r s i t y o f C h i c a g o P r e ss  Chicago and London

Kevin M. Bailey is the founding director of Man & Sea Institute and affiliate professor at the University of Washington. He formerly was a senior scientist at the Alaska Fisheries Science Center and is the author of Billion-Dollar Fish: The Untold Story of Alaska Pollock, also published by the University of Chicago Press. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2015 by Kevin M. Bailey All rights reserved. Published 2015. Printed in the United States of America 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15  1 2 3 4 5 ISBN-­13: 978-­0-­226-­11676-­1 (cloth) ISBN-­13: 978-­0-­226-­11693-­8 (e-­book) DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226116938.001.0001 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Bailey, Kevin McLean, author. The Western Flyer: Steinbeck’s boat, the Sea of Cortez, and the saga of Pacific fisheries / Kevin M. Bailey. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-226-11676-1 (cloth: alk. paper)— ISBN 978-0-22611693-8 (e-book) 1. Fisheries—Pacific Coast (U.S.) 2. Sardine fisheries—Pacific Coast (U.S.) 3. Western Flyer (Ship)  4. Steinbeck, John, 1902–1968. Sea of Cortez. I. Title. sh214.4.b35 2015 639.2—dc23  2014032434 ♾ This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-­1992 (Permanence of Paper).

CO N TE N TS

Prologue  •  vii

1: INTRODUCTION  •   1 An Iconic Boat, Steinbeck, and Pacific Fisheries 2: WESTERN FLYER  •   7 Setting the Stage 3: THE SEA OF CORTEZ  •   23 A Grand Trip on the Western Flyer 4: THE CALIFORNIA SARDINE FISHERY  •   41 A Story of Fortune, Politics, and Woe 5: WHAT HAPPENED TO THE SARDINES?  •   55 The Ecological View of Ed Ricketts 6: ROSE-­C OLORED SEA  •   65 Captain Dan Luketa and the Pacific Ocean Perch Fishery 7: NORTH TO ALASKA  •   81 The Return of the Western Flyer to the Aleutians and the Red King Crab Fishery 8: THE GEMINI YEARS  •   93 A Tale of the Red-­Fleshed Pacific Salmon 9: THE LONG ROAD HOME  •   107 End of the Voyage Acknowledgments  •  115 Notes  •  119 References  •  135 Index  •  143

PRO LO GU E

One merges into another, groups melt into ecological groups until the time when what we know as life meets and enters what we think as non-­life: barnacle and rock, rock and earth, earth and tree, tree and rain and air. And the units nestle into the whole and are inseparable from it. John Steinbeck & Ed Ricketts, Sea of Cortez

The Western Flyer was a fishing boat that John Steinbeck leased in 1940 for a six-­week cruise to the Gulf of California. Steinbeck was accompanied by a colorful crew, including his friend Ed Ricketts, better known for Steinbeck’s portrayal of him as “Doc” in his novel Cannery Row. After the voyage, Steinbeck and Ricketts wrote the story of their trip, Sea of Cortez, and the Western Flyer became a celebrated icon of American literature. Then the boat disappeared from sight. Over forty years later when Michael Hemp started the Cannery Row Foundation,1 a local resident of Salinas named Bob Enea approached Hemp and said, “How’d you like to have the Western Flyer?” Enea was the nephew of both Sparky Enea and Tony Berry, two of the original crew in the Sea of Cortez journey. Enea had been looking for the boat for years, and by back-­ checking the boat’s radio call sign WB4404,2 which stays with the vessel forever, he found that the name had been changed to Gemini. Then it was just a matter of tracking her down. Enea located the Western Flyer in Anacortes, Washington, where the boat was working as a salmon tender. In 1986 contact was made with the owner, Ole Knudson, and Enea reported that he had asked about buying the boat, but Knudson said • vii •

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that it wasn’t for sale.3 Enea and Hemp dreamed of returning the Western Flyer to Cannery Row in a gala celebration. Just imagine the scene of former Captain Tony Berry piloting the boat into Monterey Harbor with all manner of vessels and spectators lining the channel jetties and wharves, blowing their horns and cheering with great fanfare. Hemp and Enea were excited by the idea. Maybe they would haul tourists back to the Sea of Cortez as a way to raise funds and maintain the boat. Later, owner Knudson said of Enea’s attempts to buy the boat, “He never got back to me, so he must have run out of money or something.”4 However, Enea said that he had contacted Knudson many times over the years, but Knudson always said he didn’t want to sell the Gemini. Then in 1993 Enea received a call from Knudson “out of the blue.” Knudson said he had left fishing to work in construction and wasn’t using the Western Flyer anymore. Enea considered how he might raise the funds needed to buy the boat. Time and opportunity slipped by. In 2009 Enea contacted Knudson, who Enea said now told him that he wanted $100,000 for the boat. At this point, Enea formed a nonprofit organization called the Western Flyer Project to raise the funds to buy the boat, but the community wasn’t much interested in donating money for the cause and the effort sputtered. In November 2010, Enea organized a fund-­raiser for the Western Flyer Project. An article in the Salinas newspaper announced the gala dinner, and the event raised $10,000. Other eyes were watching and saw the news of the fund-­ raiser. Just after the event, in December 2010, Knudson called Enea to say that he had another offer on the table. Enea would have to come up with the sale price in cash immediately, plus another $600,000 was needed in an escrow account to restore the Flyer. Knudson said of those funds, “So I know you’ll rebuild the boat.” Enea’s hopes were dashed as he realized this was a nearly impossible task in such a short time. The other offer was from a developer in Florida named Gerry • viii •

Prologue

Kehoe, who had been alerted to the newspaper article about the fund-­raiser. Kehoe had also been looking for the Western Flyer.5 When Enea couldn’t come up with the money, the developer closed the deal to buy the boat in January 2011. Kehoe was well-­known to Salinas residents for his negotiations with the city in 2002 to build a luxury Hilton Hotel resort in the run-­down Oldtown district. The problem was that Hilton Inc. had no interest in a Salinas resort. The Hilton plan fell apart in 2005.6 The developer then put together a new plan, which included several restaurants and nightclubs, but no luxury Hilton. Part of this new plan was a boutique hotel with a restaurant on the ground floor.7 Mr. Kehoe’s development company owned several buildings in the Oldtown section of Salinas, including a former men’s clothing shop called Dick Bruhn—­A Man’s Store, a handsome two-­story brick building on South Main Street. After the purchase of the Western Flyer, he announced his plan to restore the boat to her original condition and somehow get the boat from Puget Sound down to Salinas, about a thousand miles. The new owner stated his intention to build a moat in the former haberdashery, dock the Western Flyer inside, and turn the 76-­foot-­long ship into a floating restaurant. They would serve meals to tourists on her aft deck.8 The boat would be accompanied by a simulated dock and colored fountains. Across the street would be a new complex of nightclubs and restaurants being developed by the businessman’s son. They estimated that the new business would bring $15 million of tourist money into the depressed economy of downtown Salinas.9 Kehoe is a serious man and sounds sincere when he talks about preserving some part of the Western Flyer as a museum to honor John Steinbeck. When I visited the Western Flyer on a cold and gray day in January 2011, the boat was moored in a slough under the Twin Bridges near Anacortes, Washington.10 Now bearing the name of Gemini on her bow, she was rusted and dilapidated, contrasting with the swank new Swinomish tribal casino next door. It • ix •

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was a sad sight to behold. Afterward, the Flyer rested dormant in the slough for another eighteen months with blue tarps strewn over the deck and no obvious signs of restoration work. Then in September 2012, a plank in the Western Flyer’s hull ruptured and the boat sank at its mooring. Immediately, the Coast Guard, the state Department of Ecology, the NOAA’s oil spill response team, the state Department of Natural Resources, the Environmental Protection Agency, the Swinomish Nation, and probably some other agencies swooped in on the site to investigate potential hazards, to inform the owner of the regulations, and to insure that he followed strict procedures to rectify the situation. Fines were levied, and spill prevention collars were set up. Divers descended to pump out the remaining fuel and oil. Two weeks later, a salvage crew attempted to refloat the boat. The divers put straps under the hull and attached them to cables, and a giant derrick on a barge gently cradled her. The cables grew taut as the winch reeled in line. The Flyer seemed hesitant to rise up from the soft muck of the seabed where she’d rested for two weeks, like pulling your foot from sucking quicksand. But finally she broke free of the bottom, and her deck emerged, as water, mud, and seaweeds poured out of her portholes and doors. They pumped the sea out of the Flyer’s body and patched over the hole in the planking of her belly that had let the water in. She was a rusting carcass. The Western Flyer Project supporters complained in the newspapers that the owner had neglected the boat. Enea said of Kehoe letting the boat sit for nearly two years and the subsequent sinking that the developer had “bought the boat and pretty much destroyed it.”11 Kehoe volleyed back that if he hadn’t stepped in to buy it, the boat would have sank and nobody would have had the funds to raise her again. Then the Coast Guard would have destroyed the boat. He wrote back to them, “With God’s Blessing and Kehoe ‘stepping up to the plate’ the Western Flyer will be lifted, de watered [sic], remaining

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oil taken off and carefully disposed of, hull repaired to allow it to float and this happens this very week.”12 Kehoe said of the boat, “It’s an American treasure.” And of planting it in Salinas, “It’s Steinbeck’s hometown. It’s appropriate.”13 Kehoe said it cost $100,000 to raise the ship. Still, he was adamant about sticking to his plan. Sometime in the near future, the Western Flyer would embark from her moorage in the slough and head for her resting place in Salinas, where she would be turned into a restaurant with fine dining on the fantail, on the very deck where Doc Ricketts and John Steinbeck spent many hours drinking brandy, gazing at the night sky, and linking coastal ecology to the plight of man. By now some alternative plans for the Flyer’s future were discussed.14 One story was that the boat would be restored and donated to a museum in Salinas. The director of the National Steinbeck Center, in Salinas, the logical recipient, said she hadn’t heard anything about that plan. Another story was that the cabin would be removed from the boat and brought down to Salinas for restoration. One prominent Salinas resident even suggested that the owner could turn the boat into a big planter if he so chose. It is, after all, private property, and nobody else had come up with the funds to buy the boat. Or maybe the owner would carry through on his original plan to completely restore the Flyer? Another rumor had the owner selling the hull to the Western Flyer Project while he would keep and restore selected parts, including the deckhouse. But once again the Western Flyer commandeered the moment. After the Western Flyer was raised from the seabed in October 2012, it was moored at the same dock in the slough for several more months. Then on January 4, 2013, it bowed down once more for an encore and resubmerged into the mud. Former owner Ole Knudson said that “sand fleas ate through the wood.” This time it sat on the bottom for nearly six months. The boat was finally lifted to the surface in June 2013, and by now it was a decomposing hulk. Whole sections of the fir planking of the

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side railings had fallen off. The prow was rotted. The ship was crusted with mud and barnacles, and veiled with a gauze of seaweed. People said it looked “like a ghost ship.” An argument over the Flyer played out in the newspapers. Kehoe offered to sell the boat to the Western Flyer Project or any other well-­intentioned group if they “made him whole,” or, in other words, reimbursed him for his expenses.15 Many people expressed the view that somebody should do something, or that they themselves would help, but nobody stepped forward with genuine effort. Only Kehoe had the will and resources to rescue the boat. Then the Western Flyer was towed to Port Townsend. By now Kehoe must have sunk a couple hundred thousand dollars into expenses related to the vessel’s two sinkings. The damage to the boat was extensive. He had a boat specialist estimate the cost of restoring the Western Flyer, which now was calculated at $1.5 million.16 As a businessman and an admirer of Steinbeck, Gerry Kehoe was disappointed. Meanwhile, there was a steady stream of visitors to the boat in dry dock. When I visited in August 2013, someone had pinned a picture of John Steinbeck to the boat as though it was his casket in a wake. People put their hands to the hull in reverence, as if touching the spirits of Steinbeck and Ricketts. As the story of the Western Flyer has unfolded, it is perhaps fitting that Salinas is where the boat’s voyage will end. Although Steinbeck’s wife, Carol Steinbeck, once said, “John really hated Salinas, you know,”17 I tend to disagree. John Steinbeck loved Salinas as one might love a disappointing adolescent. He said, “I am very much emotionally tied up in the place [Salinas]. It has a soul which is lacking in the East.”18 Nelson Valjean, his biographer, wrote, “He was a lover of hills and valleys, rocks and earth, dogs and ponies and people.”19 John Steinbeck also loved boats. He wrote in the Sea of Cortez, “The sight of a boat riding in the water clenches a fist of emotion in [a man’s] chest. A horse, a beautiful dog, arouses sometimes a quick emotion, but of inanimate things only a • xii •

Prologue

boat can do it.” A boat’s sense of place represents the untethering of earthly worries, adventure on the high seas, and the quest for freedom. Here is where the sailor merges with the elements: “A boat, above all other inanimate things, is personified in a man’s mind. . . . Some have said they have felt a boat shudder before she struck a rock, or cry when she beached and the surf poured into her. This is not mysticism, but identification; man, building this greatest and most personal of all tools, has in turn received a boat-­shaped mind, and the boat, a man-­ shaped soul.”20 Through his writing, John Steinbeck made the Western Flyer famous. Steinbeck’s voyage on the Flyer inspired some of his other books as well. Sparky Enea, a crew member on the trip, said that the idea for Cannery Row was hatched on the back deck of the boat. Every night the boys would have a session, drinking beer and bourbon, and they’d talk about the characters and their experiences in Monterey. John observed closely. Sweet Thursday was a sequel to Cannery Row published nine years later. The idea of The Moon Is Down was hatched by Steinbeck as he listened to reports on the Flyer’s radio of the Norwegian resistance fighting against the invading German Nazis.21 The novella The Pearl came from a story about a boy who’d found a pearl that Steinbeck had heard while visiting a Mexican port on the cruise. The metaphysical discussions of John Steinbeck and Ed Ricketts on the boat’s deck and under the stars, their experiences on the voyage, and their observations of life made while wandering the tide pools—these are contributions of the Western Flyer to American literature and to the development of the Deep Ecology movement.22 The story that follows is how the Western Flyer got to this point in its journey.

• xiii •

1 : I N T R O D U CT I O N An Iconic Boat, Steinbeck, and Pacific Fisheries

All things are one thing and that one thing is all things—­plankton, a shimmering phosphorescence and the sea and the spinning planets and an expanding universe, all bound together by the elastic string of time. John Steinbeck & Ed Ricketts, Sea of Cortez

The Western Flyer passed the lighthouse at Point Pinos on the southern edge of Monterey Bay, rounded the buoy marking the outer reef, and then crossed the ribbon of white foam that announces a transition to the open sea. A strong north wind was blowing. The following swell lifted up the stern of the boat as it surfed down into the trough, sending a spray of seawater into the sky. From the flying bridge on top of the deckhouse, Captain Tony Berry steadied the wheel to keep the boat from yawing as it ran before the waves. Running with a heavy following sea is one of the more skillful aspects of navigating a boat, and Berry was concentrated on his task. Two of his passengers, writer John Steinbeck and marine biologist Ed Ricketts, stood alongside, gazing at the far horizon. Later Steinbeck was to write, “We rose on each swell and skidded on it until it passed and dropped us in the trough. And from the galley ventilator came the odor of boiling coffee, a smell that never left the boat again while we were on it.”1 There was a surging sense of freedom in the afternoon sun and salt air. They were sailing to Mexico. It was March 1940, and Steinbeck and Ricketts had chartered the Western Flyer to collect marine specimens in the Sea

•1•

Chapter One

of Cortez. This was to be the last scientific expedition into the so-­called Vermilion Sea, before it changed forever as its major source of freshwater, the Colorado River, was diverted to irrigate farms in California. These days, the residual trickle of water that is the river dries up in the Sonoran Desert before reaching the Sea of Cortez. The close friends Ricketts and Steinbeck intended to explore the sea and discover emergent truths about the ocean and its inhabitants. They planned to write a book about the trip in order to reimburse their expenses. One year later, Steinbeck and Ricketts published their coauthored volume, Sea of Cortez. It included a 304-­page annotated list of specimens they had collected. After another ten years, Steinbeck republished the narrative portion alone as The Log from the Sea of Cortez. Many people consider the book as one of Steinbeck’s most important works. Both Ricketts and Steinbeck were inspired by their voyage on the Western Flyer to refine a vision of ecological holism, and their treatise became a landmark in environmental writing.2 The two friends were trying to accomplish a huge and maybe impossible task, to marry philosophy and biology in a unified theory.3 For his part, Steinbeck would translate the knowledge he gained from wandering in the tide pools with Ricketts, observing the communities of animals and their struggles for existence, to craft his stories about life in the valleys of central California and tell about man’s impact on the environment and its consequences. The Western Flyer was a fishing boat. In its years of service, the boat took part in the most lucrative fisheries of the Pacific Ocean. Most of these fisheries ended in disaster. The story of this boat could be told of many other boats that fish the world’s oceans, but what separates the Western Flyer from all the others is the tale that Steinbeck and Ricketts wrote about their voyage. Their book immortalized the Western Flyer in American literature. For Steinbeck’s readers, she will never die. Yet the voyage to the Sea of Cortez was only a brief, but important, chapter in the boat’s long history. When Steinbeck and Ricketts took the Western Flyer down •2•

Introduction

Key landmarks in the journey of the Western Flyer. The gray dotted line shows the main path of the boat from 1937 to 2013. The inset drawing is of the original plan of the Western Flyer done by Charles R. Hitz and copied with his permission.

to Mexico, they collected and caroused their way along the coast of Baja California. The boat served not only as a laboratory, but also as a refuge and a sanctuary for them. Steinbeck needed to escape the glare of the public spotlight after writing The Grapes of Wrath. Now that he was famous, brazen tourists sometimes wandered into his home demanding an autograph. Steinbeck’s descriptions of conditions for workers in California’s Central Valley had touched on a raw nerve and unleashed an uproar from the ranchers and farmers there. They accused him of being a liar, drunkard, pervert, and dope fiend. Those were among the less offensive descriptors. Nearby communities held public book burnings that featured Steinbeck’s works. Besides problems with his audience, there were other storms in Steinbeck’s life at the time. J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI were investigating him, he suddenly had fame and money, and his •3•

Chapter One

marriage was troubled. He needed an escape and maybe some healing. What could be better than a voyage to Mexico? Ed Ricketts was a marine ecologist. Steinbeck and Ricketts had become good friends while living in Pacific Grove. Together they explored the tide pools of the central California coast, observing, collecting, and trying to make sense of what they saw and everything else. Ricketts operated a small marine facility on Cannery Row called the Pacific Biological Laboratories and sold animals for teaching and research. He saw the junket to Mexico not only as a scientific expedition, but also as an opportunity to collect specimens for his mail-­order biological supply business. Like Steinbeck, Ricketts had relationship problems of his own. His affair with a local married woman, described as “the love of his life,” was in turmoil.4 He had been in a depression for the past year, and a trip on the Western Flyer might be just the ticket out of his doldrums. It was for a while. The cruise was the best time of their lives. Years later Steinbeck and Ricketts planned to explore the waters of Alaska together. This trip would parallel their expedition to the south. Then on May 8, 1948, a few weeks before they were to leave, Ed Ricketts got into his 1936 Buick to go shopping. Ricketts had just finished looking at statistics on the troubled sardine fishery. He was on his way to buy some steaks to grill. While ascending the hill on Drake Street, his car stalled on the tracks.5 The southbound Del Monte express train rounded a blind curve and found the car right in front of it. The engineer sounded the whistle before the train crushed the car. When Ricketts’s mangled body was extracted from the metal heap, the doctors couldn’t put his insides back together properly, and he died a few days later. His friend Steinbeck rushed to his side from New York, too late to say good-­bye. Although Steinbeck and Ricketts never made their cruise to Alaska, the Western Flyer arrived there over a decade later without them. The Western Flyer continued on her journey through time, witness to the fortunes that her passengers gained (and often lost) in harvesting the riches of the Pacific Ocean, the •4•

Introduction

coming and going of lovers across her gangplank, and even lives sacrificed to the sea from her deck. The Western Flyer was built in 1937 as a purse seiner6 for the sardine fishery of Monterey Bay. The boat was sturdy and snug, made to last. It was durable enough to fish the Pacific coast for sixty years and then rest at anchor for another fifteen. After World War II, the Pacific sardine population along the central California coast collapsed, leaving behind the wreckage of Cannery Row, fishermen’s lives, and boats sinking under mortgages that couldn’t be paid. During the economic collapse, many sardine boats were torched to the water line or scuttled for the insurance claims. But this was not the fate of Western Flyer, not yet. After the pages of the Sea of Cortez were turned, the course of the Western Flyer’s voyage was altered. The boat stayed mostly the same with a few modifications, but the cast of characters on it changed, as did the fish they caught and the seas she sailed. The Western Flyer migrated north to work in other fisheries under a succession of owners. She was converted to a trawler and dragged the bottom of the ocean off Washington and British Columbia for Pacific ocean perch7 until they disappeared. Then the boat moved north again and transformed into a crabber. When she fished for red king crab in the Aleutian Islands, the Flyer was involved in yet another booming and lucrative fishery where boat owners were making their fortunes at sea. But with an unexpected suddenness, the king crab fishery collapsed, gutting the crab fishermen’s bounty from the ocean. The Western Flyer was reconfigured once again, and she returned to near her birthplace in Puget Sound, participating in the fishery for the ill-­fated Pacific salmon. Between stints as a fishing boat, the Flyer conducted research surveys for the Bureau of Commercial Fisheries and the International Pacific Halibut Commission.8 In 1970 a fisherman named Dan Luketa owned the Western Flyer. When he replaced the topline of the flying bridge with a flared metal wall, he also changed the name of the boat to the •5•

Chapter One

Gemini. It’s ironic that a ship’s name can sometimes seal its fate. For example, the Titanic, whose reputation as the most famous ship ever to sink, lived up to its grand name. And in one of the largest oil spills ever to occur, the Exxon Valdez just happened to run aground off the coast of Valdez, Alaska. Then there was the battleship Potemkin, named after the jilted lover of Catherine the Great, the Russian queen who ruled during the golden age of tsars in the eighteenth century. A mutiny on the ship in 1905 against its oppressive officers foreshadowed the Russian Revolution’s purge of the nobility. As Luketa painted over the name on the bow, he didn’t realize how prophetic the switch would be. Luketa was a “space nut” and renamed the boat after NASA’s Project Gemini, whose missions flew with a two-­man crew.9 He probably didn’t know that Gemini, as an astrological sign of the zodiac, represents the twins Castor and Pollux, one of whom was mortal and the other immortal. According to the myth, they were born from the coupling of their mother Leda with the god Zeus. When Castor died, his brother asked Zeus to keep them together, and the great god transformed the brothers into the Gemini constellation. The story represents the two-­sided nature of being, the spiritual and material, one part that gives and creates while the other takes and destroys, merged into one. The story of the Western Flyer/Gemini is an allegory with similar themes. It both explored the sea and exploited it. The boat has its immortal and mortal sides. The Western Flyer was the common thread in a complex braid of boat, lives, and nature. Her portholes opened inward to the lives of people, some famous and remembered, but most of them forgotten, who sailed onboard. The windows looked out on a unique perspective of the environmental history of the Pacific coast and witnessed the collapse of several important fisheries.

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2 : W E S T E R N F LY E R Setting the Stage

Ribs are strong by definition and feeling. Keels are sound, planking truly chosen and set. A man builds the best of himself into a boat—­builds many of the unconscious memories of his ancestors. John Steinbeck & Ed Ricketts, Sea of Cortez

John Steinbeck walked the docks looking for a boat to charter. It was the winter of 1940, and the sardine fleet of Monterey sat idle in the off-­season of the fishery. The locals weren’t interested in his proposition. They were suspicious of Steinbeck and his trip. Finally, one fisherman stepped forward. Tony Berry, the skipper of the Western Flyer, would take Steinbeck to the Sea of Cortez. Nobody imagined the importance of the voyage to the history of American literature or to the lives of the people involved. Steinbeck and Ricketts had first planned a survey of San Francisco Bay, then abruptly decided to go to Mexico instead. They thought about making a road trip to Baja California, but as they peered at maps, they saw that many places on the coast where they wanted to sample were inaccessible by automobile. Furthermore, they needed small boats for collecting marine organisms, and the arrangements to lease boats in the coastal villages were complicated and expensive. So a cruise down the coast by ship was put together on the spur of the moment. Even Steinbeck and Ricketts called it a “makeshift expedition.”1 The voyage would give Steinbeck and Ricketts the opportunity to escape their worldly troubles, have a good time, sample marine organisms, and maybe write a book. In applying for per•7•

C h a p t e r t wo

mits to the Mexican government, they wrote that the purpose of their cruise was “to evaluate and consider the way marine invertebrate species occur along shore—­their inter-­locking associations or societies in their relations to each other and to the environmental factors.”2 Steinbeck and Ricketts initially arranged to charter the New Admiral, which was co-­owned and skippered by Orazio Ferrante. But the Boat Owners Association didn’t want Steinbeck on the boat because “they thought he was a bum.”3 Ferrante and the New Admiral pulled out of the deal. Steinbeck claimed that the arrangement fell through because the vessel owner raised the price at the last minute. He said that the skipper just didn’t want to go and that it was a “typical Sicilian stunt.”4 By now, Steinbeck was desperate because the cruise was organized around the timing of the spring low tides for collecting marine organisms in the shallows. Concerned about the difficulties of finding a charter, Steinbeck approached his old friend Webster “Toby” Street, who was a partner in the law practice of Hudson, Martin & Ferrante. One of the principals of the company, Peter Ferrante, was counsel to the Boat Owners Association. Peter called his uncle Orazio Enea, who told him to contact a Yugoslav named Tony Berry, the owner and skipper of the Western Flyer. Berry was married to Orazio’s daughter Rose. Captain Berry seemed agreeable enough, leading Steinbeck to say of the Yugoslavs, “their initial moroseness and apparent suspiciousness followed by cooperation and genialness is a pleasant contrast to the blatant friendliness of the Sicilian which doesn’t hold up.”5 It turns out that there is a bit more to this story than Steinbeck described. One fisherman reported that John and his wife, Carol Steinbeck, were suspected of writing propaganda for the International Longshoremen’s Association, and this is why no one would charter a boat to him. The locals thought Steinbeck was a radical.6 At the time, the fishermen and cannery workers were prime targets for the unions, and there were two unions competing for their loyalty. The Seafarers International Union •8•

Western Flyer

was affiliated with the AFL, and the longshoremen’s union was with the more radical CIO. The Boat Owners Association, understandably, didn’t want any unions involved. One item of contention for the unions was that the boat owners were taking money out of the workers’ paychecks to cover the cost of groceries. In the autumn of 1939, the CIO called for a labor strike against the Monterey canneries, and by the next winter when Steinbeck was looking for a charter, the animosity still lingered on the docks. Tony Berry later said, “It didn’t make any difference to me who these people were. It was a working boat one way or another.”7 A headline in the Los Angeles Times reported, “Steinbeck, Peeved, Puts to Sea on a Boat Called Unfair by C.I.O.”8 Steinbeck was an ardent supporter of the CIO, and the officials of the union had put the Western Flyer on their list of “unfair boats” because it was manned by an AFL-­leaning crew, including Horace “Sparky” Enea, Orazio’s son and Rose’s brother. Once, Harry Bridges, a famous organizer and leader in the CIO out of San Francisco, sent some goons from the longshoremen’s union down to Monterey, and they beat Sparky with baseball bats.9 Steinbeck inspected the Western Flyer and found a well-­ maintained, good-­looking boat. The engine room was spotless and impeccably organized, impressing Steinbeck favorably. The boat was powered by an Atlas Diesel 165-­horsepower 6, which is a bit small for a 76-­foot boat. The top speed at full throttle was 11 knots. “Her engine was a thing of joy, spotlessly clean, the moving surfaces shining and damp with oil and the green paint fresh and new on the housing. The engine-­room was clean and all the tools polished and hung in their places.”10 The wheelhouse looked inviting, and the flying bridge above it would be a good place to get away and gaze at the ocean. Four portholes peered out to the horizon from the front of the wheelhouse, and there were several more in the bunk rooms. The galley had big windows overlooking the sea. A single small stateroom was usually occupied by the captain. The two sleeping com•9•

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Deck plan of the Western Flyer. Drawing by Charles R. Hitz and copied with his permission.

partments for the crew had plenty of space, and the galley was cozy. There were bunks for twelve. The fish hold could be used to store specimens. A large area of open aft deck was a bonus. Steinbeck liked what he saw, and soon the skipper and author worked out details of the charter in Ferrante’s office. Steinbeck bankrolled the trip and signed the contract to charter the Western Flyer just four days before they were to set sail. Tony Berry chartered the boat to Steinbeck for six weeks for $2,500. In a 1993 interview, Berry elaborated, saying, “When it started, I didn’t know what it was about. Later Ricketts said he expected to earn $15,000 from specimen sales. I told him he should have let me know that when he chartered the boat, I would have charged another $1,000.”11 The ship was outfitted with oxygen tanks, a seawater cooling system, and microscopes. Steinbeck built a portable library desk to hold reference books, but it didn’t fit in the bunk room it was built for, so they lashed it to the flying bridge under tarps, making it somewhat difficult to retrieve the books when needed. The boat was also stocked with three or four cases of whiskey and brandy, wine, and several cases of beer. They held back on buying most of the beer for the cruise because they preferred to stock up on their favorite brew, Carta Blanca, in Mexico. • 10 •

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The voyage was on. The ship was the stage and the crew its ensemble of players.

 Three years before, in early summer of 1937, Martin Petrich drove his black Packard sedan to the boatyard in Tacoma to inspect his new project, the Western Flyer. He might have thought about a great “black roller” that had recently hit Oklahoma. Already, nearly a half million people had fled the drought and dust in the plains states. Petrich liked to read. A writer named Steinbeck had just published a new book called Of Mice and Men about the harsh conditions in California and the poverty of the workers there who’d been displaced from the dust bowl states. Most of the refugees had moved to California in search of better times, but some migrated to Oregon and Washington. “Officially” the population of Tacoma was hardly impacted by the immigrants. Because the nation was in the middle of another recession within the Depression, the lumber mills had slowed down, and there wasn’t much to attract new arrivals. For a while, even work in the boatyard had come to a standstill. The state of Washington didn’t have the draw for the migrants compared to California, with its promise of jobs in industrial agriculture, oil drilling, and fisheries. But many of the migrants drifted northward to Tacoma when they couldn’t find jobs in California, and sometimes they were pushed out by the police. Others moved straight across from the Dakotas. Although Tacoma was growing at a rate less than a half a percent each year, the surrounding rural areas of Tacoma were growing much faster, and some “Okies” had settled in the countryside. Some miles south, in Tumwater, there was a big hobo camp up Percival Creek. In Tacoma there was a camp called “Hollywood on the Flats” on the east side of the Puyallup River that held about two thousand hoboes. The residents lived in shacks made of wood scraps. It was known as a dangerous place. The • 11 •

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government census takers probably were afraid to venture into these enclaves of desperate men to count them. Martin (or Marin in Croatian) Petrich was tall with broad shoulders. He owned the Western Boat Building Company. Sometimes he wore overalls in the shop, but usually he garbed himself in a three-­piece woolen suit and overcoat, topped by a fedora. Often his coat was covered with sawdust from working alongside his crew. Petrich was a perfectionist and an innovator in wooden boat construction. He was known for exceptional work and for making fine seaworthy boats.12 Petrich was a tough boss, and he demanded hard work and precision from his crew. If an employee wasn’t carrying his weight, Petrich would fire him on the spot; however, he was generous with the Croatian community, and he frequently helped families in need. Croatians, like many other immigrants, tended to band together based on the province they came from and their common language, referring to themselves as “od nasi,” or “of ours.” Petrich was born in 1880 in Stari Grad on the island of Hvar in Croatia.13 When he was eight years old, his family immigrated to Los Angeles, where his father found work in a kitchen. The elder Petrich died in 1891, and the family moved north to Tacoma to be near friends. Martin grew up in tough conditions. His mother opened a boardinghouse and baked bread, which Martin sold on the streets to help his family. When he was eleven years old, he went to work in the cedar and shingle mills of Tacoma, where he learned how to use tools and woodworking. He began building houses, but the business was slow, so he fished for some extra money. Then Martin and his friend Joe Martinac heard that other Croatians in Tacoma were making good money building ships. In 1917 Petrich and Martinac founded Western Boat Building on the site of the former Tacoma Mill at the foot of Starr Street. A year later, they realized that there wasn’t enough money in the business to support two owners, so Martinac split off to work in another boatyard, and later he formed Martinac

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Shipbuilding.14 Then in 1922 Western’s boatyard moved to East Eleventh Street on the waterway. The business of building fishing boats was thriving as Western’s reputation for constructing seaworthy boats spread. But the good times were short-­lived, and Petrich reached a rough spot in 1931 with a slowdown in business due to the Depression and a drop in sardine catches. His orders dried up. It seemed as though he would lose his business. During these slack times in the shipyard, he built houses. Then in 1934, sardine catches picked up again and so did his orders. By 1937 he was operating at nearly full capacity and employed about eighty workers in his yard. Orders for Petrich’s most popular line of boats, sardine seiners for the booming sardine fishery, were stacking up. The fishery for sardines had started down in California, where many of his boats were fishing, but now the harvest extended all the way up to British Columbia. Several new sardine canneries on the northern coast gave the fishermen a place to offload their catches. Business was good. His new hires in the boatyard were mostly Croatian immigrants from the old country, or stari kraj, but he also employed men from other countries who could use their hands and maybe had some boatbuilding experience. Some of his best workers were Swedes. Frank Berry (Franjo Bertapeli in Croatian) was a salmon fisherman who worked the off-­season in the boatyard. Like Petrich, he was born on the island of Hvar in the old country. Frank was what they called a “highliner” or a “top boater.” In other words, Berry was a very good fisherman. The fishermen who weren’t so good were sometimes known as “shoemakers,” because they might do better in another profession. Frank’s son Tony (Anton) Berry was working at the boatyard alongside him. Tony also was trying his hand at sardine fishing and working the other part of the year at Western. The two fishermen Tony and Frank Berry and boatbuilder Martin Petrich decided to partner in building the Western Flyer, which would be a state-­of-­the-­art purse seiner.15 This boat

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would be built specifically for the Monterey sardine industry, but could also seine for salmon in Alaska during the off-­season. The Flyer would be the second of seven seiners that WBB would construct that year. It would be the 122nd boat to emerge from the shipyard since its founding twenty years before, and their 86th seiner.16 Many of the boats were built “by eye,” which was based on experience and information on what the buyer wanted. A sketch was drawn, then a model was constructed, and design modifications were made. Petrich specialized in working with old-­ growth fir, which was plentiful in the Pacific Northwest. The old-­growth wood is tight grained and resistant to rot. The boat wrights laid the fir keel of the Western Flyer, sawed and shaped the stem and stern, and bolted the pieces together. They braced the skeleton upright and built scaffolding and stairs around it. Then the rib cage, made out of oak, was added to the backbone. The stringers and bulkheads were connected. The woodworkers reinforced the stringers on the port side with extra pieces to deal with the stress of a net full of sardines pressing against it. Fir planks were steamed in a box to make them pliable, and they were immediately fitted, sawed, and shaped in place. Each plank was butted tight against each other edge to edge, a technique known as carvel planking. The planks were independently fixed to the structure with heavy spike-­like nails, and then cracks were caulked. Next the deck was laid longitudinally on top of the stringers. Finally the deckhouse was built and fastened on top. Once the roof was on the deckhouse, the boat could be moved out of the shed and into the water. When the boat was dry-­docked, the workers would have to spend too much time climbing up and down the scaffolding for tools and materials. Floating the boat at the dock was much more efficient for the finish work. The immersion would also allow the wood planks to swell with water and create a tight seal, so any leaks could be fixed. • 14 •

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Now the boat became a flurry of activity with electricians, plumbers, welders, finish carpenters, and painters busy at their jobs. The trim was mahogany and was applied around the table in the galley, window frames, bunks, and in the pilothouse. The cabinetry was made of white oak. The fittings were brass. The Western Flyer was built to 76 feet in length.17 At 93 gross tons, she could carry a crew of ten. The skiff and net would be carried on the aft deck on a turntable with rollers. The Flyer was painted a bright white with black trim, and now it was ready to embark.18 From the Western Boat Building yard, the Western Flyer headed out of Puget Sound on July 3, 1937. It left the sheltered inland sea, rounded the corner at Cape Flattery, and was immediately buffeted by fresh winds blowing down the coast. Over the next year, the boat went down to the Columbia River to fish for salmon and then to Monterey to fish for sardines. The next spring it sailed to the Aleutian Islands and into Bristol Bay on a salmon survey for the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries.19 From Alaska the Flyer headed down to Baja California to fish for tuna. The boat arrived in Monterey in the autumn of 1938 with Tony Berry at the helm to join the fleet of sardine purse seiners. The rest of the boat’s long voyage was uncharted.

 The cast of characters put together for the trip to the Sea of Cortez included Captain Anton “Tony” Berry, Ed “Doc” Ricketts, John Steinbeck, Carol Henning Steinbeck, and crew members Tex Travis, Horace “Sparky” Enea, and Ratzi (Orazio) “Tiny” Colletto. Except for Carol, they worked in pairs and changed shifts every three hours, with Tiny and Sparky, Doc and Tony, John and Tex as partners. Steinbeck wrote that he met Ed Ricketts in 1930. He was on his way into a dentist’s office on Lighthouse Avenue when Ricketts emerged with a bloody molar and a piece of jawbone stuck to it. They had heard of each other and probably seen • 15 •

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each other before. The two exchanged greetings and decided to go out for a drink, one of many that lubricated a close friendship and collaboration over the next eighteen years. Others suggest that Steinbeck’s version of their meeting has been embellished, that the dentist story may have actually happened, but that they actually first met at the house of a friend in common, Jack Calvin. Calvin was the coauthor of Ricketts’s 1939 book Between Pacific Tides. Steinbeck was still a fledging writer when he encountered Ricketts. Over the next years, Steinbeck frequented Ricketts’s lab on Cannery Row. Together they collected in the coastal tide pools for hours on end. Steinbeck had much to learn from Ricketts, the tide pools, and their journey on the Western Flyer. In the spring of 1939, after getting so much criticism for his book The Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck said, “I have to go to new sources and find new roots.” He continued, “I don’t quite know what the conception is. But I know it will be found in the tide pools and the microscope slide rather than in men.”20 That same year he bought a majority of 384 shares in Ricketts’s Pacific Biological Labs. Ricketts had 282 shares, and twelve other investors divided the remaining 278 shares. Today’s college students who study marine biology and read Ricketts’s book Between Pacific Tides often don’t know that he was the model for the boozy and amorous Doc in Steinbeck’s Cannery Row. Ricketts was a community ecologist who studied how the animals in the tide pools around Pacific Grove relate to one another and form an ecological entity. Another friend, Joseph Campbell, who himself was to become a famous anthropologist, addressed Ricketts as “Protean Ed, Man of the Sea.”21 As a young man, Ricketts was known in school as “the walking dictionary.” One of his undergraduate professors and mentors at the University of Chicago, W. C. Allee, called him “an Ishmaelite,”22 meaning he was disruptive (one whose hand was “against every man, and every man’s hand against him” [Genesis 16:12]), but stimulating. Perhaps he was branded early in life

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to be an outcast. After three years he dropped out of the university without a degree. He went on a several months’ long walk through the South from Indiana to Florida, and eventually moved to Pacific Grove in 1923, where he opened Pacific Biological Labs.23 Ricketts was a smallish handsome man and sometimes sported a Vandyke goatee. A colleague, Joel Hedgpeth, said, “Ed was not a rebel against society, he simply ignored much of it.”24 Ricketts was a careful observer of organisms of the seashore and how they interacted, and he taught his views of ecology to those who strolled the tide pools with him, including Campbell and Steinbeck. Steinbeck said of him, “His mind had no horizons. He was interested in Everything.”25 As a marine biologist, Ricketts was an innovator and a pioneer, and like so many original thinkers, he had difficulty gaining acceptance in the established scientific community.26 Doc Ricketts looked distinguished with his goatee, and he dressed immaculately. John Steinbeck described Doc in Cannery Row as “half Christ and half satyr and his face tells the truth.”27 He had a reputation as a philanderer. Did he deserve it? Carol Steinbeck said of him, “He loved women in any shape or form, and got himself and a lot of other people into some very strange corners.”28 In another unpublished interview, she said, “The beard deceived a lot of people into thinking about him as a Christ-­like father confessor. One look into his mild but goatish eyes told them better. Ed was a womanizer.”29 After Ricketts’s death, Steinbeck was said to have gone to the lab and torn the pages out of his friend’s notebooks that could have been used “as blackmail material on half the female population of Monterey.”30 By contrast, Steinbeck looked hulking and awkward, with big ears. Western Flyer crewman Sparky Enea said of Steinbeck, “He was a big, crude-­looking guy dressed in a seaman’s cap, old levis, and a turtle neck sweater who used to hang out on the wharves looking like a bum.”31 Toni Jackson, Ricketts’s lover

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and partner after the cruise, described Steinbeck as “a very angry man” under the surface, and she remarked that at some level she was afraid of him.32 Steinbeck grew up in the Salinas Valley, just 20 miles from Monterey. As a young man, Steinbeck had been reclusive, although he knew a lot of people. He was an uninspired student and a loner, but he was a dutiful son. He left the valley to attend Stanford, moved from place to place around the central coast, and then parked at his parents’ vacation cottage in Pacific Grove, just up the hill from Cannery Row. It was in Salinas, though, that his talent as a writer was seeded and where many of his stories originated. There he camped with hoboes, traveled to labor camps, watched workers clash with bosses, and wrote about what he saw. As an author, Steinbeck was a storyteller who observed life from the sidelines and wrote about it. His better-­known books are penned in this style. His novels weren’t built from the foundation of his own firsthand experiences, but of what he observed from others (although his nonfiction pieces Sea of Cortez and Travels with Charley were based on his own experiences). This is not the same mold as a writer like Hemingway, who, one can easily imagine, wrote from his direct experience. Steinbeck was an observer of man, and he readily adapted Ricketts’s views of ecological relationships in the tide pools to human interactions. Man was part of the ecological world like other animals, not above it. Steinbeck dreamed of being a biologist and said about his work in the Pacific Biological Labs in 1939, “I was washed up and now I’m alive again, with work to be done and worth doing.”33 After Steinbeck wrote The Grapes of Wrath, the local community despised him. In 1939 on the front page of the Salinas Californian, a report stated that the Kansas City Library Board voted to remove The Grapes of Wrath from the library shelves. A Miss Annette Moore commented, “It portrays life in such a bestial way.”34 The citizenry weren’t flattered by what they read or, more likely, heard about what Steinbeck had written. His later • 18 •

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books reinforced the feeling of ill will between him and the community as a whole. Steinbeck was known to cross the street to avoid confrontations in Salinas when he could see them coming. What’s more, Steinbeck disliked the limelight, saying, “I get thirty or forty letters a day from all sorts of people. They all want to make some sort of freak of me. They want to give me an individual importance which would destroy everything that I want to do with my work.”35 Carol Henning Steinbeck played an unheralded part in John’s early success as a writer, editing, critiquing, and typing his manuscripts. Steinbeck scholar Susan Shillinglaw writes, “Hers is a painfully ordinary plot, an oft-­told tale of a woman who hooks herself to a man’s comet.”36 On the surface, it seems odd that Carol is entirely left out of John’s account of the voyage to the Sea of Cortez. She apparently did her share of duties on the boat, other than cooking, and collected specimens on the seashore with enthusiasm. But by the time the expedition started, their marriage was faltering and had been since publication of The Grapes of Wrath. John had already started an on-­ again, off-­again relationship with Gwyn Conger, who was to become his second wife and mother to his two sons. Carol was suspicious that something was going on behind her back. Carol Steinbeck was a smart, striking, long-­legged redhead with a good sense of humor. Once she had an argument with a very angry John, who said, “I can’t hit a woman in a public place.” Carol responded, “I don’t have a public place.”37 She met John in 1928 while she was on holiday and he was working at a fish and game hatchery near Lake Tahoe. They got married in 1930. Carol and John Steinbeck had many ups and downs in their marriage, which added tension to the atmosphere on the Western Flyer during the voyage. Part of the trouble in their marriage involved the aforementioned Joseph Campbell. In the winter of 1932, the twenty-­seven-­year-­old Campbell arrived in Pacific Grove. He was tall, good-­looking, and athletic, and versed in the classics, literature, and art. He lived next door to Ricketts • 19 •

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and was introduced to the Steinbecks by Ida Henning, Carol’s sister. Campbell had been out of work for five years, was depressed and confused.38 He fell in with the bohemian lifestyle of the Steinbecks and Ricketts, discussing poetry and music, and partying late into the night. Carol Steinbeck was alive, sparkling, and full of fun, and Campbell fell in love with her. Campbell’s love for Carol was described by him as deep and mysterious, a bond that was hard to hide from John, who was suspicious and resentful. Carol craved attention, as her husband John was detached and remote. For her part, Carol was passionate about Campbell. Steinbeck realized the threat, confronted Campbell, and asked if he desired her physically. Campbell replied, “That has nothing to do with the situation at all.” Steinbeck responded, “It’s worse than I thought.” “Yes, it’s pretty bad,” said Campbell. “There are plenty of beautiful women. It isn’t so much the physical beauty I’m in love with.”39 Campbell’s divided loyalty among his married friends caused him a dilemma, and he extricated himself from the sticky situation by traveling with Ricketts on a collecting trip to Vancouver Island in the summer of 1932. He shook hands and said good-­bye to Steinbeck and didn’t see him again for thirty years. Steinbeck biographer Jay Parini wrote, “Carol’s affair with Campbell, such as it was, contributed heavily to the breakdown of trust in their marriage. Steinbeck was too much of a romantic to accept a betrayal of this kind.” Parini continued, “The trust was gone and Steinbeck was unable to recover it.”40 While they were all together on Cannery Row, the Steinbecks, Ricketts, Campbell, and others were part of a group that was “a whole greater than the sum of its parts,” as Joel Hedgpeth wrote, “and out of it made Steinbeck a great writer—­for awhile at least.” Hedgpeth continued with a harsh judgment: “Steinbeck had no clear idea of his own. He was the instrument of the group.”41 Steinbeck didn’t want Carol to participate in the cruise to the Gulf of California, but she insisted. He reluctantly agreed that she could come, but as the cook, and she would have to • 20 •

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sleep alone in the cabin behind the wheelhouse. Berry set aside his private stateroom on the Flyer for Carol and John, but they never slept together. The crew thought it was strange. Instead, John bunked with Tex Travis. Even though Carol was brought on as the cook, she never did cook anything except one lemon meringue pie.42 Another account says that she cooked hamburger a couple of times and attempted to make chicken cacciatore, which ended in failure, and then gave up kitchen duties altogether before they left the harbor in San Diego. Sparky Enea described his version of Carol on the cruise as a very unhappy, sullen, and morose woman who was possibly amenable to affection outside her marriage.43 She flirted openly with Ed and Tiny,44 and perhaps there was more involvement.45 This was a different Carol from the descriptions eight years before. John was demanding, overbearing, and could not have been an easy man to live with. The years must have taken their toll on Carol. When the cruise began, Steinbeck and Ricketts would sit on the bridge on a clear night under the stars, drink brandy, and argue about the nature of the universe. Carol would join in, and at those times it might have seemed that their marriage would survive. As Steinbeck described him, the captain of the Western Flyer, Tony Berry, “had the brooding dark, Slavic eyes and the hawkish nose of the Dalmatian.” Steinbeck continued, “Under way he liked to wear a tweed coat and an old felt hat, as though to say, ‘I keep the sea in my head, not on my back like a Goddamn yachts-­man.’”46 Berry was a reserved man and only gave his opinion when he knew he was right. Berry apparently didn’t hold his watch-­shift partner, Ed Ricketts, in high esteem. He said, “As far as Ricketts was concerned he acted as if he didn’t care if there was a trip or not.”47 He “had no use for Ricketts whatsoever—­he didn’t pull his weight and was soused most of the time.”48 And he complained that Ricketts would sit on deck in a tub for two or three hours a day taking a bath. Of Steinbeck, Berry said, “John paid the bills,” and he remarked that Steinbeck “was a nice man.”49 Berry • 21 •

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and Steinbeck talked for hours and hours during the voyage about fishing and baseball.50 Sparky Enea was Tony Berry’s brother-­in-­law and was the only paid crew member. He received $150 for his work on the cruise. Sparky measured in at five foot one, and perhaps to compensate, he was a teller of tall tales. His father, Orazio, came from Isola delle Femmine off the coast of Sicily. The other deckhand, Tiny Colletto, was Sparky’s lifelong friend. He was five foot two and 118 pounds. Tiny was a feisty ex-­boxer who was reportedly undefeated. At thirty years of age, he was a ladies’ man of legendary proportions. At the time of the voyage, he was going out with one of the girls who worked in Flora Wood’s brothel in Monterey.51 Tiny volunteered for the cruise as an interesting adventure, but afterward Steinbeck paid him $100. The engineer, Hal “Tex” Travis, was a tall Texan with a love of diesel engines, and he planned to get married after the voyage. Paul De Kruif, a bacteriologist, had talked with Ricketts about going on the Sea of Cortez voyage, but it didn’t happen. There was also rumor that the movie star Spencer Tracy would participate. He didn’t either. However, there was another passenger—­Steinbeck’s friend and attorney, Webster Street, who rode with them on the boat from Monterey to San Diego, where he got off because he had to “get back to work.”52

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3 : T H E S E A O F CO RT E Z A Grand Trip on the Western Flyer

We search for something that will seem like the truth to us; we search for understanding; we search for that principle which keys us deeply into the pattern of all life; we search for the relation of things, one to another. . . . John Steinbeck & Ed Ricketts, Sea of Cortez

The Sea of Cortez is a marine oasis, a productive turquoise sea surrounded by the desert. Sometimes it’s called the “Vermilion Sea” because of the red color of its plankton blooms. The great body of water stretches 700 miles as it splits the mainland of Mexico from the Baja Peninsula. The sea holds over five thousand species of macro-­invertebrates and nearly nine hundred fish species. Here is cradled the habitat for one-­third of the world’s whale species, 39 percent of the world’s marine mammal species, and five species of marine turtles. Some have described the Sea of Cortez as a “natural laboratory for speciation,” while the famous ocean explorer Jacques Cousteau portrayed it as the “world’s aquarium.” The major source of freshwater in the Sea of Cortez used to be the Colorado River. If you think of the headwaters of the Colorado River in the Rocky Mountains as the heart of the system, the river gets pumped down through the belly of the Grand Canyon. The leg of the Baja Peninsula arches down to dip in the Pacific Ocean and reaches up the Gulf of California to the Colorado River Delta system. A thin strip of land of only 50 miles wide separates the Sea of Cortez from the Mexico­U.S. border. More than 7 million years ago, the spreading seafloor sheared • 23 •

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off Baja California from the continental mainland. The earth’s sliding plates opened a great fissure in the crust of ground that allowed the waters of the Pacific Ocean to flow into the desert, forming the Gulf of California. The gulf used to be much longer, extending into Southern California, but the vast amount of sediments carried by the Colorado River created a delta, which dammed off the upper end of the gulf. Through geological history, the river has changed course many times, but about five hundred years ago the river shifted eastward and left the Salton Sink behind and parched the Imperial and Coachella Valleys. The last time the sink filled with water was 1905 in a massive flood. The Sea of Cortez was “discovered” in 1533 by a Spanish exploratory ship, La Concepción, dispatched by Hernán Cortés. The crew of the ship mutinied and murdered their captain. The leader of the crew and twenty-­six of his companions were later killed by natives near what is now La Paz. Cortés commissioned another expedition by Francisco de Ulloa in 1539, and he named the great body of water Mar de Cortés. There have been other explorations of the Sea of Cortez. Among the best known was in early 1911 when the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries vessel the Albatross made a two-­month cruise into the Gulf of California. They conducted a thorough survey of everything from marine mammals to insects. The zoologist Charles Haskins Townsend said, “The Great Gulf of California has many forms of animal and plant life that are peculiarly its own.”1 In the spring of 1936, William Beebe explored the Gulf of California in the schooner Zaca. This was just a year after the Hoover Dam was built on the Colorado River, an engineering feat that would gradually change the ecosystem of the Gulf of California forever. In 1938 Beebe wrote a wonderfully descriptive narrative of his voyage in his book Zaca Venture. He was an adept and lyrical writer with flowering descriptions of the marine life he had observed, most unusual for a scientist. Beebe wrote, “The wealth of life in these waters was evi• 24 •

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dent everywhere. Sailfish and huge manta rays leaped high out of the water, while smaller devilfish in even greater numbers and often in pairs somersaulted above the surface. . . . Gold-­ spotted sierra mackerel splashed into the air, while tropic birds and black-­headed gulls swooped as near to the surface as they dared, in pursuit of fry driven forth by the fish.”2 But being a naturalist was different in those times, and Beebe was overly occupied with pursuing and killing giant sailfish, marlin, and dolphins. His crew even harpooned a whale shark without any hope of landing the beast, then wrote about its rarity; they also shot an albatross. In a chapter titled “Turtle Sanctuary,” Beebe described making turtle soup of one of the residents. Coincidentally, a review of Beebe’s book appeared in the October 2, 1938, issue of the Milwaukee Journal right next to a review of Steinbeck’s volume of short stories, The Long Valley.3 Beebe’s book was favorably compared to the works of Darwin and to Thoreau’s Walden Pond. Steinbeck’s narrative descriptions of the Sea of Cortez are reminiscent of Beebe’s words; he had a volume of Zaca Venture in his library on the Western Flyer. Steinbeck often borrowed snippets, stories, and observations from other writers and sources. In Carol Steinbeck’s words, he was a “lint picker.” It wouldn’t be surprising if Steinbeck had learned a few tricks from Beebe to use in his own narrative. The Colorado River has always challenged man’s plans for it. Farmers and engineers dream about moving water from over here to over there. Water was first diverted from the Colorado River to the Imperial Valley in 1901 when the Alamo Canal was built, but the canal quickly filled with sediment. Periodic flooding of the Imperial and Yuma Valleys increased the call to tame the Colorado River, and so the Hoover Dam was conceived. When the massive project was finished and began filling Lake Mead behind it, thus creating the largest man-­made lake on the continent, no water reached the Sea of Cortez for six years. The American Society of Civil Engineers once hailed the structure as one of America’s Seven Modern Civil Engineering Wonders. Now the little water that reaches the Gulf of Cali• 25 •

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fornia is the residue that overflows from floods and agricultural wastewater. The delta system of the Colorado River that once covered more than 2 million acres is presently less than 10 percent of that. Since the water dried up, the estuary has been described as a “dead ecosystem.”4 The Hoover Dam transferred the river’s water from the Sea of Cortez to the desert valleys of Arizona and California, including the Imperial Valley. It turned those dry lands into lush farmland. It also slacked the thirst of the arid cities of Las Vegas, Phoenix, Los Angeles, and San Diego. The flood of humanity that followed the water and migrated from the dust bowl regions to the fertile valleys of California became the source of Steinbeck’s stories about the treatment and misery of farmworkers. The famous ecologist Aldo Leopold described the Colorado River delta as “a milk and honey wilderness” when he visited in 1922.5 The historic surveys on the Albatross, the Zaca, and the Western Flyer showed that the Colorado River provided critical marshland habitat for myriad birds and mammals, and spawning grounds for fishes. Later, in the film version of The Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck’s immigrant character Tom Joad crosses the Mojave Desert, views a verdant orchard, and proclaims, “Well, there it is folks. The land of milk and honey—­California.” The milk and honey had been moved. Now as the water flowed down toward the sea, the dam redistributed its wealth from the natural life of the delta to the farmers of California. Steinbeck and Ricketts’s trip in 1940 was to be a survey of an ecosystem on the cusp of change.6

 After a rousing farewell party in the harbor, the Western Flyer embarked on its way to Mexico. Jimmy Costello reported in the Monterey Peninsula Herald on March 11, 1940, “Early this afternoon the purse seiner ‘Western Flyer’ pushed out of Monterey harbor for a six weeks fishery trip through the Gulf of Califor• 26 •

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nia carrying perhaps the strangest crew ever assigned aboard a local work boat.”7 Captain Berry knew there was going to be a problem on the first night. “I asked Sparky when he thought we might eat and he said Carol had continued drinking after the big bon voyage party and had fallen asleep.”8 After that Sparky took over in the galley. March 11. Out into fair weather but sufficiently pitchy and rolly so that Carol was sick until well into the night, and Tony was tired. John was OK and I miraculously stayed with it. First night, a few porpoises. Many schools of fish off San Luis Obispo. A few sardines. But mostly bait fish, as proven by spotlight. (Ed ­Ricketts)9

The boat stopped for provisions in San Diego. They were surrounded by the hubbub of the U.S. Navy preparing for war. Here they listened to shortwave radio broadcasts about the war in Europe. Steinbeck described the scene, “In the early morning before daylight we came into the harbor at San Diego, in through the narrow passage, and we followed the lights on a changing course to the pier. All about us war bustled, although we had no war; steel and thunder, powder and men—­the men preparing thoughtlessly, like dead men, to destroy things.” The Flyer’s crew provisioned the icebox with perishables and attended such mundane details as having their hair cut. Up to March 15. Into San Diego through beautifully quiet water. Saw the Mexican Consul, got necessary papers, complimentary visa, cleared, signed on ourselves and the boys to articles, talked to a gang of reporters . . . got nets, a few supplies . . . had a good steak dinner with cocktails and brandy. (Ricketts) March 14, 2:10 p.m. Left San Diego. 4:20 p.m. Coronado Island. March 16, 1:00 p.m. Running into fog. 10:00 p.m. Cape Lazarius. (Capt. Tony Berry) • 27 •

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March 15. Off Pt. Baja, Lower California. Water is brilliantly ultra-­marine blue, what the boys call “Tuna Water.” John saw two sea turtles. This is the Region of the Sea Turtle and the Flying Fish. An essay on life at sea would consider navigation, food, and living aboard small boats; all are special techniques. ­(Ricketts) March 16. The abundance of life here gives me a sense of exuberance. I can’t get a full sense of enjoyment from the high Sierra because they’re so barren. But here the surface is teeming with life, sea turtles, flying fish, pelagic rock lobsters, bonita, now these porpoises. And the ocean bed underneath is likely equally rich. And microscopically the water itself will be teeming with plankton. Tuna Water. (Ricketts)

The deep rhythmic hum of the diesel motor was a part of the feeling on the Western Flyer. The vibration of it was felt through the soles of their feet. The oily smell of fresh diesel fuel coming up from the engine room mixed with its burnt exhaust on the aft deck. The residues turned over with whiffs of ocean air, coffee, and whatever was cooking in the galley to make an omelet of odors. With the engine turned off, there was an eerie silence, sometimes broken by the sound of water slapping against the hull. Steinbeck wrote, “There is nothing so quiet as a boat when the motor has stopped; it seems to lie with held breath. One gets to longing for the deep beat of the cylinders.” Below deck the pistons in the diesel engine of the Flyer stroked and clacked. Somehow this pattern is comforting, like a mother’s heartbeat. In the bowels of the ship, the rocking back and forth in calm seas is pacifying. The sway becomes an ingrained rhythm in sailors that is hard to shake off. Many sailors get land-­sick after a voyage. The Flyer reached the end of the Baja Peninsula and rounded the corner into the Sea of Cortez. “The great rocks on the end of the peninsula are almost literary. They are a fitting land’s end of six thousand miles of peninsula and mountains” (Steinbeck). • 28 •

The Sea of Cortez

They passed Point Lázaro, one of the world’s most dangerous bodies of water. In these rough seas, the heaving of the ship is unnerving, irregular, and uncomfortable. In a heavy swell, the movement of your body leaps ahead of the little stones in your ear canals that give you balance; being heavy, they lag behind your accelerating body, then they speed ahead to catch up. It leaves the sensation that your brain is attached to a rubber band as it stretches forth, until finally the end is reached, and it springs back the other way. The cacophony of noises clashes with the timpani of the storm swell; the ship slides down the waves, with pots and pans clanking together as the hull crashes into the bottom. It rises up to meet the next oncoming mass of water with a whoosh. Then the ship tilts back, and everything slides in reverse. As the crest approaches, the wind gusts through lanyards and antennae, whistling and screeching. Ricketts said, “We had some rough water coming down here and John stood it quite well.”10 They hid that night in a bay with a little white sand beach. March 18. A fantastic region of violent rocks. It seemed to me that life here is very fierce. The starfish and urchins here are more strongly attached to the rock even than those at Pacific Grove, Pt. Lobos, etc. (Ricketts)

Steinbeck described the rocks as “ferocious with life.” In this area, they always wore rubber boots while collecting on the beach because most of the animals had a sting of some sort, and some were near lethal. They took samples of crabs, flatworms, sea cucumbers, anemones, sponges, starfishes, and many other animals, until finally they were exhausted, both physically and of sample jars. As one reads his account of the voyage, Steinbeck’s enchantment with the diversity of life-­ forms and how the changes in habitat influence them emerges brilliantly. He describes the species in celebration of their color and shapes, their associations and places in the community. • 29 •

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“The complexity of the life-­pattern on Pulmo Reef was even greater than at Cape San Lucas. Clinging to the coral, growing on it, burrowing into it, was a teeming fauna. Every piece of the soft material broken off skittered and pulsed with life—­little crabs and worms and snails. One small piece of coral might conceal thirty or forty species, and the colors on the reef were electric” (Steinbeck). The sense of place at sea struck Steinbeck. On March 18, he wrote: “Nights at anchor in the Gulf are quiet and strange. The water is smooth, almost solid, and the dew is so heavy that the decks are soaked. The little waves rasp on the shell beaches with a hissing sound, and all about in the darkness the fishes jump and splash.” March 19. Arrived at Espiritu Santo Island. They collected quite a few specimens and are well satisfied. . . . The weather is lovely and I am sorry my wife isn’t here. (Berry)

At night the crew would sit around, read on deck, or drink beer and reminisce. Steinbeck would describe this experience, “We liked it very much. The Brown Indians and the gardens of the sea, and the beer, and the working. They were all one thing and we were that one thing too.” There was a feeling of camaraderie. A few days before he wrote: We sat on a crate of oranges and thought what good men most biologists are, the tenors of the scientific world—­temperamental, moody, lecherous, loud-­laughing, and healthy. Once in a while one comes on the other kind—­what used in the university to be called a “dry-­ball”—­but such men are not really biologists. They are the embalmers of the field, the picklers who see only the preserved form of life without any of its principle. Out of their own crusted minds they create a world wrinkled with formaldehyde. The true biologist deals with life, with teeming boisterous life, and learns something from it, learns that the first rule of life is living. • 30 •

The Sea of Cortez

They visited La Paz. On March 23 they anchored near San José Island. That night they talked and told stories. “Tiny told us a little of his career, which, if even part of it is true, is one of the most decoratively disreputable sagas we have ever heard. . . . The great literature of this kind is kept vocal by the combined efforts of Puritans and postal regulations, and so the saga of Tiny must remain unwritten” (Steinbeck). March 26. Laid at Puerta Escondito on anchor. Not much doing today. The boys had a celebration last night. Quite a few hangovers today. Also, we ran out of water in one tank today. (Berry) March 26. John and I went up into the mountains on an overnight trip with the customs man and the school teacher from Loreto, two Indians, and the owner of a local ranch. . . . The men looked after us kindly, fed us well, gave John a blanket (he had none), fixed up pillows for both of us. Good friends!  . . . This is one of the really good places. (Ricketts)

Steinbeck braided his observations of nature with his philosophy of non-­teleological thinking, writing of the trip: Seeing a school of fish lying quietly in still water, all the heads pointing in one direction, one says, “It is unusual that this is so—­but it isn’t unusual at all. We begin at the wrong end. They simply lie that way and it is remarkable only because with our blunt tool [of reason] we cannot carve out a human reason. . . .” We came back through heat and dryness to Puerto Escondido, and it seemed ridiculous to us that the Western Flyer had been there all the time.

The rift between John and Carol widened. In a later entry in the Sea of Cortez, Steinbeck wrote, “We find after reading many scientific and semi-­scientific accounts of exploration that we have two strong prejudices: the first of these arises where there is a woman aboard—­the wife of one of the members of the • 31 •

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party. She is never called by her name or referred to as an equal. In the account she emerges as ‘the shipmate,’ the ‘skipper,’ the ‘pal.’ Our second prejudice concerns a hysteria of love. . . .” This is the only, albeit veiled, reference to Carol Steinbeck having been on the Western Flyer in the story of the voyage. But Steinbeck does slip up in the first pages of the narrative when he mentions how difficult it is to provision a ship for a crew of seven, instead of the six he names in the book. Sparky wondered if something was going on between Doc and Carol. He said they would sit on deck and talk and giggle like teenagers. Meanwhile Steinbeck would furtively watch them from a window in the galley.11 Steinbeck later wrote in a letter to his friend Bo Beskov: “Relationships are funny things.  .  .  . A man going on living gets frayed and he drags little tatters and rags of things behind him all the rest of his life. . . .”12 Steinbeck was no saint himself; referring to the morals of Steinbeck and Ricketts during port visits on the voyage, Sparky Enea said, “I never did ask too many questions, but I know John and Doc were a couple of studs.”13 Other friends of Steinbeck said, “Steinbeck kept his infidelities secret and even after discovered refused to admit them, whereas he allowed Carol to be open, and then held them against her.”14 They continued on, visiting Loreto, collecting at Coronado Island, Concepción Bay, San Carlos Cove, until finally they reached Ángel de la Guarda Island at the head of the gulf. Captain Berry didn’t want to proceed farther into the gulf because of the dangerous tidal bore of the Colorado River Delta, so they headed across to the other side and Tiburon Island. April 6. Anchored at Guaymas. (Berry)

Steinbeck wrote, “Last night we drank some very old brandy and our crew went on the town. The engineer never did come back. He’s probably in jail. I’ll go in and look in a little while. Here were fights and explosions. The captain got very drunk and isn’t up yet. The two seamen also in their bunks.”15 In • 32 •

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Guaymas there was a fistfight arranged between Tiny and the local boxing champion. Tiny, without any training and hungover, got knocked out with great fanfare. April 7, Guaymas. We have been here since Friday noon. . . . [W]e went to Mitla, a restaurant, had beer (but only High Life) and started drinking Hennessey VSOP. When we left, a couple of the waitresses, Soccoro and Virginia, very nice and jolly, said they’d like to go along. Someone sent ashore for a guitar-­player and for more liquor. I got sick and went to bed, waking up subsequently, vomiting, sick drunk from too much brandy and too much cigar. In the meantime, all the crew had come back from town half drunk and joined the party; they all got stinko and many of them, to judge by the deck in the following morning, got puking drunk. . . . Tony still in bed very sick. Tex didn’t show up at all this morning, having stayed ashore where we thought he might be in jail. (Ricketts)

On April 8 they heard from local fishermen that a fleet of Japanese boats was destroying the shrimp fishery. They came upon six ships that dredged the ocean bottom, each about 150 to 175 feet in length, or twice the size of the Flyer. There was one mother ship of 10,000 tons (probably over the length of a football field). Reports said there were twelve boats overall in the fleet. Steinbeck wrote that “they were doing a very systematic job, not only of taking every shrimp from the bottom, but every other living thing as well.” April 9. Left anchorage for shrimp fishing boats. There are 12 Japs’ boats here. All big boats. They are sure killing a lot of other fish. John and Ricketts went out. (Berry) April 9. Located the first Japanese shrimping fleet quickly. There were 6 or 7 boats. Upon permission being granted by Mexican and Japanese authorities aboard, we boarded the largest boat of that particular fleet. . . . Many many fish, possibly several tons • 33 •

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per haul, which were thrown back; the Japanese saved only the shrimps.  .  .  . The men, both Japanese and Mexicans, were very kind. . . . With their many and their very large boats, with their industry and efficiency, but most of all by their intense energy, the Japanese very obviously will soon clean out the shrimp resources of Guaymas.  .  .  . But there again is the conflict of nations, of ideologies, of two conflicting organisms. And the units in those organisms are themselves good people, people you’d like to know, like the kind young Japanese captain. . . . He was good people. And so were the crew. (Ricketts)

After leaving Guaymas, Steinbeck wrote about observing a school of fish: “The schools swam, marshaled and patrolled. They turned as a unit and dived as a unit. In their millions they followed a pattern minute as to direction and depth and speed. There must be some fallacy in our thinking of these fish as individuals.” This relation of the individual to the group is a prevalent theme in Steinbeck’s writing of human interactions. On April 10 they sampled in Estero de la Luna. It was “a bad place—­bad feelings, bad dreams, little accidents” (Steinbeck). They sampled the beach at Agiabampo the next day and did their last collection at San Gabriel Bay. “At last, and with sorrow, Tex started the engine and the anchor came up for the last time” (Steinbeck). They were on their way home. The Western Flyer rounded the end of the great peninsula at Cabo San Lucas and charged past the capes of San Lázaro and San Eugenio. On April 15, Steinbeck wrote, “The Western Flyer hunched into the great waves toward Cedros Island, the wind flew off the tops of the whitecaps, and the big guy wire, from bow to mast, took its vibration like the low pipe on a tremendous organ. It sang its deep note into the wind.” April 15. Abeam Cedros Light. Change course to NW ½ N. (Berry) April 16. Tied up alongside of Quarantine Wharf in San Diego. (Berry) • 34 •

The Sea of Cortez

April 20. We got into San Diego maybe on Wednesday—­I don’t recall exactly, and have been pretty blnzled [sic] ever since. There were moderate winds and stormy seas for the last 36 hours, and I was out for 22 of them. (Ricketts)

While docked in San Diego, Ricketts looked at the weather report and discovered that another northwester was moving down the coast, so he decided to travel back to Monterey by land. Carol was angry that Ricketts had deserted the ship but stayed onboard. On arriving home, Ricketts wrote in his journal that he was depressed and lonely. He had no one waiting there for him and wrote, “But all things pass, including that feeling; and the good feelings; and all things.”

 After the journey, Steinbeck and Ricketts wrote, “This trip had dimension and tone. It was a thing whose boundaries seeped through itself and beyond into some time and space that was more than all the Gulf and more than all our lives. Our fingers turned over the stones and we saw life that was like our own life.” On their expedition to the Sea of Cortez, Steinbeck and Ricketts covered 4,000 miles, collected 500 different species, bottled thousands of specimens, and discovered 35 new species. Their account of the trip, the Sea of Cortez, was published in 1941 and is considered a seminal work in ecological holism.16 Steinbeck and Ricketts saw their voyage as a great success. They even compared their cruise to that of Darwin’s on the HMS Beagle. But the voyagers complained that whereas they only had days to observe and sample in any one location, Darwin had months. And the duration of their trip was measured in weeks, while Darwin’s took years. They seemed to replicate many elements of Darwin’s cruise, sampling different marine habitats, and even traveling inland on horseback. Steinbeck thought that writing his book about the journey would give him credibility in the science community. • 35 •

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Ricketts wrote to Steinbeck on August 22, 1941: “It would be an understatement for me to say that this little trip of ours is proving to be an important expedition, and that out of it are coming some fairly significant contributions to invertebrate zoology, to marine sociology, and even—­I wouldn’t be surprised—­to human thought.”17 One analyst said, “Ricketts convinced Steinbeck that ecology was both an important and a much-­neglected truth, a new way for people to understand their relationship with nature.”18 Later Ricketts wrote to Steinbeck, “It appears that our unpretentious trip may have achieved results comparable to those of far more elaborate expeditions, and [it was] certainly more unified and ordered in an architectural sense. It may well prove to be, considering its limitations, one of the most important expeditions of these times.”19 They envisioned their cruise as an extension of Darwin’s great trip of discovery, making the next monumental scientific finding, breaking through, transcending natural history to find the meaning of it all and the interconnectedness of all life processes. They thought they could do it from a different direction than Darwin by “looking quickly at the whole field and then diving down to a particular.” The perspective “was reversed by Darwin,” whose approach was to look closely at details and then draw general conclusions. In the long run, even they realized that they fell short of their ambitions, and justified their failings in the log: not enough time, not enough organization, not enough preparation. Ricketts and Steinbeck wanted to combine science and religion into a larger inclusive philosophy, one that could serve as a guide to living a life that is rich and full and packed with meaning.20 It’s like they said in Sea of Cortez, “The first rule of life is living.” They started to think of the cruise as a modern-­ day Odyssey.21 There are clear parallels in their saga with that of Ulysses. The mythic figure battled sea monsters, was held captive by sea nymphs, and encountered cannibals. The crew of the Western Flyer battled giant manta rays, visited brothels, and wrote about the Seri Indians, supposedly cannibals of Tiburón • 36 •

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Island. Their voyage to the Sea of Cortez was another embodiment of Campbell’s “hero’s journey.” After its publication, the Sea of Cortez got generally mixed reviews,22 and although most praised Steinbeck’s writing, one referred to the book as “a chioppino of travel, biology and philosophy.” Another wrote concerning the theme of individuals and groups, “This conclusion is intuitive and not rational, for the science of biology offers it no support. He is dabbling in mystical ideas of unity.”23 Steinbeck countered, “It will outrage the second rate scientists who are ready to yell mysticism at the moment anything gets dangerously close to careful thinking and a little bit out of their league.”24 Others readers applauded the book. Joseph Campbell wrote to Ricketts, “I simply have to tell you how much I enjoyed reading Sea of Cortez.” He continued, “Ed, it’s a great great book—­dreamlike and with no end of implications—­sound implications—­all sustaining implications: everything from the beer cans to the phyletic catalogue is singing with the music of the spheres.”25 Steinbeck and Ricketts’s log of the journey became an outlet for some of the philosophical concepts they had been hashing out over the years. In the text they discuss the subjectivity of society’s definitions of man’s good and bad characteristics. A central theme of their book is non-­teleological thinking, or the holistic acceptance of the natural world on its own terms, rather than an anthrocentric projection of it.26 They write about the complexity of nature and the impossibility of man’s attempts to engineer it. Steinbeck and Ricketts’s concept of the “phalanx” was developed as they described schooling fishes: “And this larger animal, the school, seems to have a nature and drive and ends of its own accord. It is more than different from the sum of its units,” and it seemed to be “directed by a school intelligence.”27 Aggregations of animals may have good and bad qualities. The human parallel is found in the description of the Japanese fishermen they encountered in the act of wasting the sea. They knew what they were doing was wrong, but they did it for the sake of the superorganism, the indus• 37 •

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trial company. Steinbeck had brought up this theme, that the behavior of a group differs from that of the individuals within, in his earlier books and would return to it again: “A man in a group isn’t himself at all.” He wrote, “I want to watch these group-­men, for they seem to me to be a new individual, not at all like single men.”28

 After the cruise, the tides of war lapped at the shores of the United States. John and Carol Steinbeck left for Mexico to film The Forgotten Village. Ricketts joined them there but complained about being snubbed and treated “like a poor cousin.” John and Carol separated in 1941. John married Gwyn Conger in 1942 and moved to New York. Later he became a war correspondent. John Steinbeck died in 1968 at the age of sixty-­six. Carol worked as a jeep mechanic during the war and remarried twice. She died in 1983. When Ed Ricketts returned to Monterey, he became involved with Toni Jackson. Ricketts was drafted in 1942 and served as the head of the local venereal disease clinic at the induction center in Monterey. He died in 1948 at the age of fifty. Tex Travis continued fishing and moved to San Pedro when the sardines in Monterey disappeared. He retired to Lake Havasu and died in 1992. Tiny Colletto died in 1945. His friend Sparky noted that he was concerned about him; he had a bad heart and was dating a woman who was using drugs.29 Both Sparky Enea and Tony Berry served in the military during the war, and afterward they continued fishing. Sparky Enea became a golf caddy when he was done fishing and died in 1994. Tony Berry and the Western Flyer continued their journey together a few more years. Many of the purse seiners in Monterey were commandeered by the U.S. Navy to serve as minesweepers during the war. Berry’s Western Flyer escaped this fate because its homeport was still registered in Tacoma, and the navy already had their quota of ships from there. Berry fished • 38 •

The Sea of Cortez

the Flyer out of Monterey Bay until the late 1940s, and then in 1948 he sold the boat. “After all, the sardines were gone and the tuna had moved far offshore.”30 The Sea of Cortez was published in 1941 with Steinbeck and Ricketts as coauthors. Toni Jackson, Ricketts’s partner at the time, edited and typed the book. By now Carol was out of John’s literary life. The book included the log of their voyage and an extensive catalog of the species they had collected. It sold only about three thousand copies. One reviewer noted, “Steinbeck was sandwiched between hundreds of pages of notes about dreadful little animals.”31 In 1951, after Ricketts’s death, Steinbeck’s editor convinced him to publish The Log from the Sea of Cortez, now excluding the species catalog and with himself as the sole author. He appended an essay on his deceased friend titled “About Ed Ricketts.” Referring to Ricketts’s passing, Steinbeck said, “He haunts the people who knew him. He is always present even in the moments when we feel his loss the most.”

• 39 •

Frank Berry (left) and Martin Petrich Sr. (right) in 1937 at the Western Boat Building shipyard. Photographer Martin Petrich Jr. Reprinted with permission of Coll. NP via Allen Petrich.

The Western Flyer in sea trials, 1937. Photographer Martin Petrich Jr. Reprinted with permission of Coll. NP via Allen Petrich.

Lampara and other fishing boats in Monterey Harbor. Photographer A. C. Harbick, from the Wharf and Other City Projects Album, 1925–­1931. Reprinted with permission of the California History Room & Archives, Monterey Public Library.

The California sardine. From the photo files of the Southwest Fisheries Science Center, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Fishing Boats Next to Monterey Wharf, 1930. Front: lampara, ring boat, and purse seiner (left to right); back: two purse seiners with turntables. Photographer J. B. Phillips. Reprinted with permission of the California History Room & Archives, Monterey Public Library.

Collection of fishing boats in Monterey Bay, with freighter and submarine in background, 1940. Photographer William M. Morgan, Albert Plapp Collection. Reprinted with permission of the California History Room & Archives, Monterey Public Library.

Aerial view of Monterey Harbor, 1946. William L. Morgan, photographer. Reprinted with permission of the California History Room & Archives, Monterey Public Library.

Crew of the voyage to the Sea of Cortez. From left to right: Horace “Sparky” Enea, Travis “Tex” Hall, Rose “Tootsie” Enea (she was not a crew member but the wife of Tony Berry), Tony Berry, Carol Steinbeck, John Steinbeck, Tiny Colletto. Reprinted with permission of the Martha Heasley Cox Center for Steinbeck Studies, San Jose State University.

John Steinbeck writing, 1930s. Photographer unknown. Reprinted with permission of the California History Room & Archives, Monterey Public Library.

Ed Ricketts, 1936. Bryant Fitch, photographer. Reprinted with permission of the California History Room & Archives, Monterey Public Library.

John Steinbeck and Captain Tony Berry on the flying bridge of the Western Flyer. Reprinted with permission of the Martha Heasley Cox Center for Steinbeck Studies, San Jose State University.

The Western Flyer in Monterey Harbor, February 1940. W. L. Morgan, photographer. Reprinted with permission of the California History Room & Archives, Monterey Public Library.

4 : T H E CA L I FO R N I A S A R D I N E F I S H E RY A Story of Fortune, Politics, and Woe

Cannery Row in Monterey in California is a poem, a stink, a grating noise, a quality of light, a tone, a habit, a nostalgia, a dream. Cannery Row is the gathered and scattered, tin and iron and rust and splintered wood, chipped pavement and weedy lots and junk heaps, sardine canneries of corrugated iron, honky tonks, restaurants and whore houses, and little crowded groceries, and laboratories and flop houses. Its inhabitants are, as the man once said, “whores, pimps, gamblers and sons of bitches,” by which he meant Everybody. Had the man looked through another peephole he might have said, “Saints and angels, martyrs and holy men,” and he would have meant the same thing. John Steinbeck, Cannery Row

Life is abundant in the churning waters of coastal central California. In spring and summer, the California Current flows southward right up against the continent. The Earth spins counterclockwise beneath it, and the water floating on the surface lags behind and peels away from the coast. The upper layer of water that has moved offshore is replaced by cool water from underneath in a process called upwelling. The upwelling in coastal zones carries nutrients to the surface and provides a constant source of fertilizer to the microscopic and macroscopic plants there. The phytoplankton creates the basis for the food chain and the rich soup that nourishes a large population of animals feeding on it. Forests of kelp buttress a thriving nearshore community. This abundance and diversity of marine life drew both Doc Ricketts and Tony Berry to Monterey. Ricketts came from Chicago, attracted by the diversity of animals

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living in the nearshore tide pools, and Berry with the Western Flyer came from Tacoma to hunt for the abundance of the sardines living in the waters offshore. Tony Berry was born to Croatian parents living on Vashon Island, Washington. The original family name was Bertapeli, but like many Yugoslavian immigrants, his parents “Americanized” the name. Later they moved to Tacoma, where young Berry grew up. He labored on the railroad and in boatyards until he was about thirty years old, and then he started working on fishing boats. Berry visited Monterey in 1936 when he delivered a boat for the Western Boat Building Company, where he was working at the time. Berry was a big man, about six foot two, with a lean physique and huge rough hands. He was sparse with words and rarely laughed. His hawkish nose gave him a stern look. Through marriage Berry had broken into the world of Sicilian-­controlled sardine fishing on the central coast. He joined a complex family network. In 1935 the DiPaolo brothers started fishing and delivering fish to an Oregon cannery. The DiPaolos had grown up with Berry in Tacoma, and they needed a hand who could work with engines. Berry started fishing with them in 1936 on the Sunset. One of the DiPaolo brothers was engaged to a woman from Monterey named Rose Colletto. Rose Colletto introduced her best friend and family neighbor, Rose “Tootsie” Enea, to Berry. The two Roses were the sisters of Sparky Enea and Tiny Colletto, the crewmates in the Sea of Cortez. When Berry met Rose Enea, his tough shell seemed to melt, and the meeting led to romance. Berry and Rose Enea got married in 1937, the year the Western Flyer was built. Berry was now embedded in the Enea clan with a lineage of fishermen in the family that extended back to Sicily. It was an odd partnership of a stoic Slav with a loud and boisterous Italian family, but it seemed to work. Tony Berry moved to Monterey, fished for sardines, and sometimes chartered his boat, the Western Flyer, to harvest

• 42 •

The California Sardine Fishery

Pacific sardine harvests on the West Coast of North America (heavy line) and in the Monterey (pre-­1967) and central California coast (post-­1981) regions (thin line). The fishery was building capacity in the early years. Declines in sardine biomass mirror the catch levels. Following convention at the time, pre-­1967 landings are in short tons. Landings after 1981 are in metric tons. The values are similar. One short ton equals 0.907 metric ton.

salmon for Alaskan canneries. He fished for the San Carlos Cannery, whereas many of the Sicilians were connected with the Monterey Canning Company.1 Berry and the Western Flyer flourished as the harvest of California sardines boomed in the 1930s. That lasted for a decade, and then it collapsed even more quickly in the late 1940s. At its peak, the sardine fishery ranged from British Columbia down to northern Baja California. It was one of the largest fisheries in the world with a peak catch of nearly 800,000 tons2 in 1936–­ 37, just prior to the launch of the Flyer. At the height of the sardine fishery, the industry employed about twenty-five thousand people. The community of fishermen was dominated by ethnic Italians (mostly Sicilians like

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the fishing family of Berry’s wife), but there were also Japanese, Yugoslavs (from the Dalmatian coast, like Tony Berry), Portuguese, Spanish, and American fishermen. In 1937 most of the fifty-­nine boats operating out of Monterey were owned by Sicilians. There were rivalries between the ethnic groups, and even intense rivalries among the Sicilians originating from different villages on the north coast, such as Isola delle Femmine, San Vito Lo Capo, and Marettimo.3

 At the turn of the twentieth century, fishermen in the salmon and tuna fisheries of California baited their hooks with sardines and also tossed live sardines in the water, a practice known as chumming, to attract the big predatory tunas they were hunting. As early as 1890, California entrepreneurs tried canning sardines. Then in 1902, a tuna packer named Frank Booth began to experiment with canning sardines, but there wasn’t much of a market for them.4 In those early years, the fishermen supplying the canneries would use a gill net to catch fish from a 25-­foot boat powered by sails and oars, with a crew of six to haul in the nets by hand. The fish had to be plucked from the webbing as the nets came in. This process took hours. Another type of fishing gear was the chinchola net, a beach seine from the Mediterranean. Booth also tried using the sail-­powered seiners of the salmon fishery to catch sardines, but they had difficulty chasing down schools of the evasive fish and then enclosing them. Bob Enea, Tony Berry’s nephew, traced the origin of the modern sardine fishing industry in Monterey back to the arrival in America of two fishermen, Rosario and Pietro Aiello, from Isola delle Femmine (the Island of Women) of Sicily.5 As the brothers made their way west, they traveled to Oregon and fished on the Columbia River out of Astoria, and then headed south. They observed the abundance of fishing activity in central California. The Aiellos began fishing there in the 1870s. The brothers • 44 •

The California Sardine Fishery

returned to Sicily and convinced Pietro Ferrante of the opportunity to make a good living in California by catching fish. Ferrante arrived in the San Francisco Bay area in 1889. He began fishing for salmon to supply Frank Booth’s cannery near Pittsburg at the head of the San Francisco Bay. Later Ferrante’s wife, Rosa Enea, and other family came over, and pretty soon they had recruited her whole family including Rosa’s father, Orazio. In 1905 there was a devastating fire at Booth’s cannery. The Ferrantes’ extended family and many other Sicilians left for Monterey and began fishing there for another of Booth’s canneries. By this time, more fishermen from Sicily had arrived; there were about a thousand by 1910, with names like Salvatore Russo, Salvatore Melicia, and Pietro Buffa. In 1906 Ferrante solved the problem of catching sardines by trying out a lampara net that he brought over from Tunisia; in his youth he’d fished widely in the Mediterranean. The net could be used with a powered Monterey clipper, a boat that could keep pace with the sardine schools, and from which the net was easy to deploy. The traditional lampara technique from northern Africa used a lamp to attract the fish and the net was laid out to encircle them. The lampara nets modified for the Monterey sardine fishery were 200 fathoms long as measured at the cork line of the net.6 The old lampara net was similar to a modern purse seine, but there wasn’t a line to close the bottom off; it was smaller, and it had sections of broader mesh netting on the sides, or “wings.” The net had spoon-­shaped sides that closed off the top and bottom of the net in a scoop shape when it was hauled in. Both sides of the net were pulled in simultaneously.7 The standard lampara boat was 32 feet long, and it took six men to pull in the heavy net. The lamparas also pulled a light barge that could hold another 65 tons of fish.8 The lampara net was phased out in the mid-­1920s with the introduction of a gear called a “half riser” or “ring” net, which was the precursor to the modern purse seine. By 1915 there were two sardine canneries in Monterey and • 45 •

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twenty lampara nets fishing. There were a few more lampara fishermen in San Pedro. The Booth Cannery had become the Monterey Fishing and Packing Company in 1906, and the Pacific Fish Company started operations in 1908. At that time another cannery also operated in San Francisco. But since there was still only a small market for sardines, the fishermen mostly made their living supplying dried squid to the Chinese market. One problem confronting many California fisheries at the time was the waste in processing the fish for canning. In the case of sardines, only about half of the sardine is edible muscle, and the rest is discarded. The process of “reduction,” or pressing the oil and water out of the flesh and then drying the remainder, was more common in East Coast fisheries and was used by the Chinese fishermen in California, who applied the residue as fertilizer. But early sardine and tuna fishermen of California dumped their waste next to the canneries.9 When the water next to the docks got too putrid, they hauled it out to sea. Booth began to reduce sardines to use the waste as fertilizer and chicken feed, but a Norwegian named Knut Hovden, who’d been trained in fisheries science in the old country, made the reduction process profitable in 1912 with some engineering improvements. These by-­products increased the value of the landed sardines significantly. During World War I, fish oil became an important commodity used in a number of products like paint and linoleum. Prices for the sardines increased, and reduction became an important aspect of the fishery. After the war, the number of chickens raised in California doubled, and there was an increased demand for poultry feed that was high in protein content. Farmers wanted the fish meal for fertilizer to use in the orchards. Sardines eventually became woven into the fabric of California agribusiness as the reduction fishery and agriculture became codependent. This connection, and the demand for a continuous supply of fish, made the agriculture industry a powerful force in the politics of management of the fishery.

• 46 •

The California Sardine Fishery

Ed Ricketts said that when he first arrived in Monterey in 1923, “The fresh fish market was supplied mostly by the Chinese, whose squid drying activities were olfactory horrors on the road to Salinas.10 Even then Italians controlled the sardine fishery [about 86 percent of the fishermen were Sicilian by 1922].11 I cannot recall any Jugoslavs, now important in the industry.”12 Purse seiners were increasingly popular in the San Diego–­ and San Pedro–­based tuna fishery, and by 1920 there were over a hundred of them in the fishery. But a drop in the market price for the fish and a spike in fuel prices caused many small fishermen to lose their boats. In 1924 only six remained in private hands. The bankrupted seiners were mostly taken over by tuna canners and banks. In 1925 some of these boats entered the sardine fishery out of San Pedro when E. S. Lucido tried out sardine gear on his boat. Then during a strike of the Monterey lampara boats against the canneries in 1926, which was an annual event, the cannery owner Knut Hovden brought two seiners up to Monterey from San Pedro to supply him with fish. By some accounts, the first purse seiner on the scene was The Admiral, skippered by a Slavonian named John Gradis. After another lampara strike in 1929, the purse seiners flooded into Monterey, sounding the death knell for the smaller lamparas. The seiners were more mechanized and more efficient than the traditional gear and would put many fishermen out of work, driving the process of unionization of the fishermen. The purse seine net required the use of bigger boats as the nets were larger and catches were greater. At the top of the net was a cork line, on the bottom was a lead line, and below that was a purse line to close the bottom of the net that was threaded through a set of rings. A large purse seine net was 600 fathoms long at the cork line, but most were 200–­300 fathoms. On the average, they fished to a depth of about one-­tenth of the length of the cork line.13 The new purse seiners were bigger, faster, and more powerful than lamparas. They could cover

• 47 •

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more distance and catch and hold more fish. Purse seiners could bring 200 tons of sardines back to the cannery on each trip, with 50 tons on deck and 150 tons in the hold.

 The Western Flyer and other Monterey Bay sardine purse seiners were berthed at the marina next to Cannery Row. They fished for sardines ten months a year out of Monterey, with April and May off. Before a fishing trip, Berry’s mostly Italian crew of eight would gather together in the afternoon, waiting with their families until Captain Berry arrived.14 Then they would put out for the sardines at night. They didn’t use the old-­world lampara technique of attracting the fish with bright lights, but instead they searched for fish with their lights out, and mostly on nights when there was little moonlight from an hour or two after sunset until just before sunrise.15 They looked for the phosphorescent glow of the water, or “the fire,” as a large school of fish swam by. Berry distinguished anchovy, mackerel, and sardine schools by the size and speed of the glowing fish. He would judge the direction of the currents and the movement of the fish and whether they were “scary,” or apt to dive under the net and escape. His skill determined the success or failure of the trip. The trick to catching sardines was to let the net go from the turntable at just the right moment, then as the net deployed from the reel, the boat would circle the fish in a counterclockwise direction, walling them off with the trailing net, which was held in place at the other end by the skiff. As the net circled, the rope strung through the bottom of the net was drawn in, closing off the opening, and the net was swung to the port side with the boom. At this point the fish would panic and dive toward the bottom, tipping the Western Flyer as the net was drawn closed. The skiff tended to be pulled in against the seiner, and an outrigger pole was lowered to stand it off. In fifteen or twenty minutes, the fish would end their struggle and swim toward the surface, where the water • 48 •

The California Sardine Fishery

would roil with their activity. The fish were scooped out by nets on poles called brails and put in the hold. Once the ship had secured its catch, Berry would radio the cannery that they were on their way home. A siren would sound, alerting the workers to report. They wouldn’t fish on Saturday night so that the cannery workers would have Sunday off, but they fished Sunday nights in order to supply the canneries operating on Monday morning. Each cannery had a distinctive siren to call forth its own crew of workers. The voyage home would take three to five hours depending on how far out they had to travel to find fish. When unloading the boats, the hold was flooded in order to float the fish, and the fishermen scooped them up with a brail. They split the money from the catch into shares, generally with one share per crew and five to eight shares allocated to the captain, vessel, and net.16

 In 1917 California lampara boats caught 105 million pounds of sardines that were delivered to 30 canneries. By 1919 there were 44 canneries taking sardines. But in the 1920s, California State Fish and Game officials put limits on the percentage of sardines for reduction, cutting into the profits of the canneries. Then in 1925 a barge with a reduction plant on it anchored 3 miles offshore from Monterey. This put the harvest outside of the jurisdiction of California officials. More offshore reduction plants followed. Under political pressure caused by the Great Depression and with high unemployment, restrictions on reduction were loosened in order to increase the competitiveness of the land-­based canneries, and in 1932 California retracted the restrictions on reduction processing of the catch for the onshore processors altogether. Oregon and Washington eased their restrictions on reduction three years later so that their canneries would also be competitive. There were good and bad years in the fishery, which depended on the availability of fish, manpower, and boats, as well • 49 •

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as economic conditions and labor strife. Pietro Ferrante said with a thick accent, “The sardine . . . some year they come lots, some year they don’t come lots. Every year they come enough to work in the canneries.”17 By the 1936–­37 season, just as the Western Flyer started fishing, 230 seiners delivered 726,000 tons to 52 processing plants in California. There was rampant underreporting of catches. Canneries would underreport the deliveries by tampering with the weighing scales to cheat the fishermen. Some claimed that the skipper would collude with the cannery in the underreporting scheme so that he could share less with the crew and keep more for himself. About 80 percent of the catch went to reduction. Catches far surpassed the post hoc levels of the maximum sustainable yield (also known as MSY)18 for the fishery, which was later estimated for that period at 250,000–­300,000 tons. The sardine fishery was thriving in spite of the Great Depression around it. Historian Arthur McEvoy called Monterey “a local island of prosperity in a sea of depression.”19 At the high point of the fishery in Monterey, there were 80 purse seiners delivering to 20 canneries along Cannery Row. Catches of sardines multiplied through the 1930s, and then something went wrong. The fishery was overcapitalized, which means that there were too many boats for the amount of fish. In 1940 there were more than 300 seiners fishing for sardines up and down the Pacific coast. There were no limits placed on the catch levels other than those imposed by the fish themselves. During World War II, there was a brief respite for the sardines, and catches leveled off. By 1942, some 2,234 of 8,759 California fishermen were classified as ethnic enemy aliens and were prohibited from fishing.20 A large portion of the fleet had been conscripted for service in the war as minesweepers, reducing the number of boats to 180, but new boats continued to be constructed. In 1944 the fleet had recovered to 206 seiners delivering to 75 canneries. Canned sardines had become an important military ration, and fish meal was a critical source of protein for the booming poultry industry. • 50 •

The California Sardine Fishery

 The sardine population began to show evidence of stress as early as the late 1920s. Boats were spending more time on the water searching for fish, and the average age of individuals in the catch declined from ten to six years old. For the 1939–­40 season, the pioneering California State biologist Dr. Frances Clark suggested putting limits on the fishery of 200,000–­300,000 tons. This limit is very similar to more recent estimates of the maximum harvest that the fishery could have sustained during this period based on historic estimates of the sardine biomass.21 Clark must have recoiled when the fishermen delivered 537,266 tons to canneries that year. Many politicians and scientists were aware of the threat of overfishing by the burgeoning fishery, but restrictions would result in job losses during the Great Depression. The industry vehemently opposed any limits whatsoever. The trade magazine Pacific Fisherman reported in 1935 that “natural factors, not human use, are the essential elements influencing the abundance of these fish.”22 This is a theme that has become something like a mantra to industry officials and some scientists. In 1936 a bill was proposed to the California legislature to limit the reduction fishery. This proposal was met by an onslaught of special interest groups. Finally a spokesman for the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries (USBF) said there was “no clear-­cut or convincing evidence that will satisfy everyone that the sardine supply is in danger of being seriously depleted. We believe very firmly that restrictions which are unnecessary hamper or restrict legitimate business enterprise.”23 The bill was rejected. The hearings exposed the breach between the onshore and offshore interests as well as that among the federal and state agencies. In 1939 the newly elected governor of California, Culbert Olson, replaced all three state Fish and Game commissioners, and the tone of the commission changed from the “imperative need to reduce the harvest” and “unmistakable signs of deple• 51 •

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tion” to a bland statement that there was “no reason to be concerned.”24 In 1940 California Fish and Game scientists warned of the depletion of sardines, but cannery owner Knut Hovden responded, “It is purely talk or theory, nothing short of that.”25 In 1944 the new commissioners proclaimed that the population was in a “comparatively healthy state.”26 In 1943 the federal government preempted the state jurisdiction over the fisheries to support the wartime effort. Oscar Elton Sette, who was coordinator of fisheries for the War Food Administration, knew as early as 1941 that the fishery was in poor health. Attempts to conserve fish were considered un-­ American, and government food-­ purchasing agents urged managers to “overlook all technicalities” that might prevent them from supplying fish to the armed forces.27 In 1945, against his better judgment, Sette gave in to political pressure and ordered a 33 percent increase in the catch in the name of national security to satisfy the military’s demand for more fish. The sardine population responded with a strong signal of its depleted state. Effort had increased, but catches flatlined. It was taking the fishermen a lot more searching in the ocean to find enough fish to harvest. By the 1940s, older fish were depleted in the population, and catches were dominated by two strong cohorts that were born in 1938 and 1939. Hindsight shows us that the population was in rapid decline. Because sardines have the natural tendency to gather in big schools, the schools are easily located. Even as their numbers declined, records were set in the fishery. As the death knell of the fishery tolled, the port of Monterey received a record for a single-­day landing of 9,000 tons of sardines delivered on September 25, 1945, with one boat bringing in 268 tons. Then against expectations, by mid-­December the fish all but disappeared from the central coast. In the 1944–­45 season, 555,000 tons were harvested off the California coast alone from a total stock biomass estimated at 720,000 tons of fish two years of age and older from Mexico to • 52 •

The California Sardine Fishery

British Columbia, about 77 percent of the total biomass. In the 1946–­47 season, the fishery was still fairly strong in San Pedro, but they were small fish. Harvests in Monterey fell dramatically in 1946–­47, but then they increased slightly in 1948–­49 and again in 1949–­50, as there was a moderate recruitment of the 1946 and 1947 year classes. The fishing pressure on these fish was intense because of high prices. It was a brief hiccup. The Pacific sardine fishery was exhausted. When the sardines collapsed, the fishing families diversified and moved. Some of them changed careers, others targeted alternative fisheries like tuna and squid, and some moved out of the area. The industry needed more supply, and much of the reduction fishery shifted to the Peruvian anchoveta. There aren’t any boats fishing for sardines out of Monterey now. Cannery Row and Monterey Harbor are tourist destinations. After the collapse, the sardine stock remained at a very low level for nearly forty years. In 1974 the California legislature banned sardine fishing but stipulated that the fishery could start up again if the population rose above 20,000 tons. That level was attained in 1986, and a harvest of 1,000 tons was approved. By 2002 the fishery was harvesting about 100,000 tons, and the catch increased to 166,000 tons in 2007. This is a significant catch, although still diminished from historical levels. Since then the catches have sputtered and declined once again. The cause of this most recent drop in abundance is as controversial now as it was in the 1940s.

• 53 •

5 : W H AT H A P P E N E D TO THE SARDINES? The Ecological View of Ed Ricketts

Every new eye applied to the peep hole which looks out at the world may fish in some new beauty, and the world of the human mind must be enriched by such fishing. John Steinbeck, foreword to the third edition of Between Pacific Tides

When the sardines became scarce in 1947–­48, cannery owner Knut Hovden said, “Experience has shown us that the abrupt total disappearance of sardines is not a sign of overfishing. . . . Don’t let yourself be mislead [sic] by people with lots of theories and untried ideas, and who have no financial interest in the industry, but who would sacrifice one of the world’s best industries . . . perhaps to attain personal prominence for themselves.”1 In spite of Hovden’s comments, even some industry officials considered overfishing as the cause of the collapse. The pioneering cannery owner Frank Booth called the industry’s relentless pursuit of the sardine “fiendish commercialism.”2 Steinbeck expressed his own eco-­centric view in his novel Sweet Thursday: The canneries themselves fought the war by getting the limit taken off fish and catching them all. It was done for patriotic reasons but that didn’t bring the fish back. . . . It was the same noble impulse that stripped the forests of the West and right now is pumping water out of California’s earth faster than it can rain back in. When the desert comes people will be sad; just as Can-

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nery Row was sad when all the pilchards [sardines] were caught and canned and eaten.3

What became of the fish? Ed Ricketts answered, “They’re in cans.” He continued, “And remedial steps involving conservation can and should be taken.”4 In 1946 Ricketts wrote a letter to his friend Rich Lovejoy explaining what he thought had gone wrong.5 Paraphrasing his argument, he noted that the sardine is a migratory animal that eats plankton, stores fat, and then converts that fat into gonads to reproduce. The breeding place varies with temperature rather than being in a fixed location as with some other species. The sardine especially needs warm temperatures to spawn. He later said, “We mustn’t regard overfishing as the sole factor in the present disaster, although it’s the only one over which we have any control.”6 Ricketts thought that in its natural state when the sardine population is high, the density causes fish to spread out in search of food because it all gets eaten and depleted in the main range of sardines. The big fish can go farther outbound in search of more food because they can swim faster, and then they end up off the coasts of Washington and British Columbia. Here the peak in plankton production is later because the water is colder, and it gives them an extra ration that would otherwise be missed if they’d stayed south. This extra food allows them to put on a lot of fat storage for prolific reproduction the next winter. But when there is a bad plankton year, the large fish can’t get enough food and there is little stored fat for reproduction. The consequence is that the next year’s spawning is a flop. Then in the following year, there aren’t a lot of small fish in the population that would force the larger fish to forage farther north, so they stay south and they don’t get the extra ration from feeding up north. This sequence of events sets off a period of low sardine production. Before the extensive harvesting existed, the population was able to survive these lean times by having a lot of year classes represented in the age distribution, which would buffer the effects of a couple • 56 •

What Happened to the Sardines?

bad years. This was the natural cycle that had evolved over millions of years. Then came the canneries. Ricketts said that in the good years the canning factories got larger and multiplied, just like efficient predators. There were more and more of them. They spread up the coast. The boats supplying the canneries got larger and better equipped. The fishermen got more skillful. Then the industry was so large that it needed a bumper crop of sardines every year to keep the machinery running and feed the market. The effect was that the high levels of population got pulled down by harvesting, and so did the low levels. Whereas natural predators remove small, weakened, and slow-­growing fish, human predators take the fastest-­growing and largest fish. As a result, the number of age classes gets reduced by removing all the larger and older fish. This erodes the natural resilience of the population. In the case of sardines, when there weren’t any older fish left, the fishermen intercepted smaller fish on their migratory cycle. Then a bad climate period with low production turned into a disaster. There weren’t enough sardines, and especially the important big fecund fish, left to rebound. The margin of excess in the population that allowed it to survive a hard period was gone. The explanation was classic Ricketts, one based on observation and intuition, with maybe a little mysticism thrown in. His thinking was holistic and plausible, but he left out one critical detail: that the enormous variability in survival during the planktonic egg and larval stages is likely the major cause of low productivity during poor environmental conditions. What is surprising about this omission is that Ricketts appeared to be unfamiliar with the work of the famous Norwegian zoologist Johan Hjort.7 In 1914 Hjort hypothesized that the major fluctuations in European fisheries were not due to massive migrations of fish, as was the current thinking, but due to fluctuations in year-­ class strength caused by differing survival rates of recruiting • 57 •

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year classes. Hjort explained how environmental conditions during the larval stage cause their survival to vary from year to year. This explanation is a lot simpler than Ricketts’s concept, and Hjort’s hypothesis remains popular among fisheries scientists. However, Hjort didn’t believe that harvesting influenced the fisheries of Norway because at that time the stocks were vast compared with the fishing levels. Nowadays, many scientists believe that the dynamics of marine fish populations is a very complex process, and there isn’t a single or simple explanation or management-­based solution to fluctuating fisheries. One hindrance for these historical scientists finding common ground was that Ricketts was a marine ecologist while Hjort was a fisheries biologist. Often the scientists in these two disciplines don’t communicate. Many ecologists dismiss fisheries biologists, saying that they are too applied and commercial. And some fisheries biologists say that ecologists are too theoretical and their ideas aren’t useful to manage fisheries. Along with his omission of Hjort, Ricketts makes no mention of Oscar Elton Sette, a well-­known federal fisheries biologist studying the survival of sardine larvae. Ricketts may not have had access to the literature about fisheries where scientists like Hjort and Sette published the results of their research. Even today a communication gap lingers between fisheries biologists and ecologists. Professor Daniel Pauly of the University of British Columbia noted that today’s fisheries scientists are largely ignorant of the writings of Ed Ricketts and he’s rarely cited,8 just as we note that Ricketts was unaware of much contemporary work in fisheries research. Ricketts took a controversial stance by stating that harvesting was at least part of the problem for sardines.9 He wrote Joseph Campbell on October 25, 1946: “For years the canners and reduction plant operators and fishermen have been warned they were taking too many fish. They refused to listen, selected their evidence, petitioned for more and more permits, put pressure on the Fish and Game Comm., lobbied the legislators, always got their way. And now so sad. No fish.”10 His • 58 •

What Happened to the Sardines?

view was opposed by the sardine industry and many federal scientists. Cannery owner Knut Hovden even blamed the sardine demise on toxic wastes from dumping munitions in the sea after the war.11 The War Department responded with a report that most of the waste was not dumped in Monterey, but in Southern California, where the fishery was still strong. Ricketts thought that the sardines would come back quickly, in two, five, ten, or fifteen years at most. He was overly optimistic. The harvest continued on a depleted population, and it was like hammering nails in the lid of a coffin. Many scientists and industry leaders remained delusional about the fate of sardines. In 1948 the annual “Sardine Edition” of the Monterey Herald announced in a headline, “Fish in Fifty Is the Promise of Scientists.”12 It reported that scientists at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography predicted that the sardines would once again be plentiful in 1950. No such luck. A year later the Herald once again voiced optimism, “Monterey’s sardine processing industry, reeling after two years of economically disastrous fish famines, today appeared to be well on the way to a real comeback.”13 Unfortunately, the comeback was really a minor blip on the screen, and the stock kept declining. Once again in 1951, in an article titled “Is the Pacific Sardine Disappearing?,” scientists from Scripps and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service reported, “The Pacific sardine is not disappearing.” They continued, “The catch of Pacific sardines during the current fishing season may reach 350,000 tons, indicating that a substantial recovery is taking place.”14 Unfortunately, that recovery didn’t happen either. Sette complained that any mention by federal scientists of threatened depletions of sardines drew the immediate ire of industry leaders in the form of letters and telegrams to federal officials. Wealthy investors had a lot of political power. “The industry was able to use this clout to either limit laws or block effective conservation legislation.”15 One of the most prominent and outspoken of the industry leaders was Wilbur Chapman, formerly dean of the University of Washington School of • 59 •

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Fisheries and former adviser to the State Department. He later went to work for Van Camp Seafood Company as a lobbyist. Chapman professed his belief that any fish left in the ocean beyond their need to sustain themselves were wasted and needed to be put to use for humans. So did his employers. They didn’t consider that the ecosystem where the fish lived was adapted to variations in their natural abundance levels, and that a healthy ecosystem and a healthy sardine population feed back on each other. Industry leaders found scientists with conflicting opinions to be useful tools for their purpose of smothering debates over management. Some scientists argued that environmental factors were behind the sardine’s demise. To support these views, Chapman worked to secure funding for the Scripps Institution of Oceanography and the U.S. Bureau of Fisheries to obtain four new research vessels and a budget for conducting studies of the sardine in relation to the environment of the California Current system.16 In general, the recipients of the industry largesse fell into one camp, who sought to emphasize the role of environmental factors in the demise of the sardine, while California State Fisheries Laboratory scientists pointed to the detrimental effects of overharvesting.

 But this is all ancient history, right? After all, sardine populations undergo extreme natural variations due to changes in the environment. Records of ancient fish scales in sediments show that sardines, anchovies, and other species undergo cyclic variations over periods of decades and centuries. Even so, just like cyclic variations in the climate, natural changes in fish populations are exacerbated by man’s influence. The collapse of the sardine population in the late 1940s is now attributed by most scientists to unfavorable cooler ocean conditions and low sardine productivity combined with uncontrolled and high levels of harvesting. The role of decreased • 60 •

What Happened to the Sardines?

plankton availability on egg production and larval survival is a complex puzzle to unravel, and the role of cold conditions in making management decisions about the sardine fishery is still controversial. When Garth Murphy published the results of his doctoral dissertation on the population dynamics of Pacific sardine in 1968, even the industry capitulated. Murphy reported: “The decline of the sardine was apparently the result of an intensive fishery together with a series of years in which the environmental regime was unfavorable to the sardine.”17 He continued that it was “improbable that the population would have declined in the absence of fishing, whereas the fishing rates applied to the population lowered reproduction to an extent that a decline was inevitable.” Chapman wrote to a colleague, “I think we would be unwise to artificially downgrade the effect of the fishery from 1937 to 1947 on what happened to the sardine population after 1947. . . . The case is beginning to look too sound to me for us to either hide from the public or to escape the conclusions of.”18 Murphy estimated that it would take twenty-­four to thirty-­eight years to recover, and warned that an increase in the anchovy might delay that recovery even longer due to a competition effect. His prophecy seems to have held up. What now appears to have happened to the sardine is similar to Ricketts’s concept but a bit more complicated. The sardine is widely dispersed along the coast, with larger animals migrating farther north during the feeding season because they can swim faster. A poorly regulated fishery removed most of the large individuals, which are more fecund. When the cooling climate caused a southward shift in the population toward the region where canneries were even more numerous, the situation was exacerbated. It became critical when the poor plankton years caused several years of recruitment failure. The reduced abundance concentrated the fish in the main area of fishing, where they were easy picking. At this point, because there were fewer age classes in the population as a result • 61 •

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of harvesting the largest and oldest fish, the buffer against recruitment failure was gone and the stock collapsed. The collapse of the California sardine is a pretty solid case for conservation. But scientists and industry are still debating whether overfishing or climate is the cause of many distressed stocks. Recent statistical analyses on sardine population dynamics have generally come to the same conclusions as Ricketts did nearly seventy years ago, although they neglect to mention him.19 Most studies conclude that overfishing in the 1930s through the 1960s was a major factor—­if not directly causing the collapse of the Pacific sardine population, then at least accelerating it. However, some studies indicate that sardines might have collapsed even without a fishery. The fishing industry still expertly plays the scientific uncertainty for their own aims, just as battling attorneys might take advantage of a witness’s uncertainty in the courtroom. Furthermore, conflicts of interest, arguments for saving jobs, feeding the hungry people of the world, conflicts between different industry sectors, claims that one group or another is trying to inflate prices by limiting supply, and underreporting of catches are all issues that came up during the sardine collapse, and which get played over and over again in modern fisheries just like a broken record.

 After the sardines collapsed in the late 1940s, some boats started to fish farther south out of San Pedro. For a while the San Pedro–­landed fish were trucked to Monterey for processing in the canneries. Eventually the fish down there disappeared as well. In 1968, the last year of unregulated fishing, airplanes helped the fishermen to find sardine schools. Afterward, a fisherman named Louis Mascola said, “We caught them all in one night.”20 The fishery was driven to commercial extinction. By the time the California legislature banned commercial fishing for sardines in 1974, well after the fish were gone, most • 62 •

What Happened to the Sardines?

of the fleet had long since departed. Some of the remaining larger boats converted to fish for tuna in offshore waters. That required larger boats, bigger holds, and refrigeration for long voyages and many days far out at sea. The Western Flyer, however, was just too small and slow to fish tuna. Tony Berry explained, “It [the Flyer] has only a 110-­ton capacity and I needed 150 tons for tuna.”21 From 1945 to 1950, she was registered under the ownership of the Western Boat Building Company instead of Berry. Berry said that he sold the boat in 1948, and some Coast Guard records show that ownership transferred back to Martin Petrich. The Western Flyer left Monterey and migrated north. Berry bought a smaller boat, continued fishing, and later was elected president of the Boat Owners Association. Then he left fishing altogether and went into construction. Years after, Tony Berry drove his wife, Rose, down to the Sea of Cortez to show her where it all happened. She got an infection there and died. When he was eighty-­six years old, Berry said, “I miss being on the water. I’ve been on it practically my whole life.”22 Captain Tony Berry died in 1998.

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6 : R O S E- ­C O LO R E D S E A Captain Dan Luketa and the Pacific Ocean Perch Fishery

We leave home to face the uncertain and deal with whatever comes up in our effort to provide a better life. Fishing is a tough life. Lives lost, families broken. I’ve heard fishing described as “months of boredom punctuated by moments of sheer terror.” It’s the adrenaline that keeps us coming back. It’s hard to imagine the rush of being out on the ocean in weather that creates an environment trying to rip us apart. Knowing, feeling, and sometimes even seeing so much fish that if we were able to pull it off, beat the odds and set those fish aboard, our family and the families of our crew would be set for months. Paul Piercy, a coastal fisherman 1

Dan Luketa stood on the flying bridge of the Western Flyer as it hauled in a big catch of Pacific ocean perch. When you bring perch up from the deep sea, their gas-­filled swim bladder expands with the decreasing pressure and the fish bloat with air that has no place to go. The net full of fish dragged up by the Flyer exploded from the water like a breaching whale. Luketa called in the catch by radio to “Baby” Dahl’s fish packinghouse, “We got another big load of perch, about . . . 50,000 pounds, I guess.” Dahl responded, “We can’t use them, we are flooded with perch. If you bring them in, they are gonna be mink food2 at a penny-­a-­pound. But I’ll take all the cod or sole you got, regular price.” Luketa could imagine the specter of Baby Dahl as he talked. Dahl weighed in at well over 300 pounds and often sat on two rolling chairs, one for each buttock. He hollered like a foghorn and hammered on the table with fists that were as big as Easter hams. Luketa called back, “Dammit, that’s a friggin’ waste.” He had few choices. The run into Bellingham and • 65 •

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back took two days, and wasn’t worth it at the low price. If the packinghouse didn’t want the fish because they were too small or there was no market for them, then the dying fish were returned to the sea, bloated and floating. So Luketa dumped the 50,000 pounds of fish, and they spread out toward the horizon. The sea was red for nearly as far as you could see. It was a gluttonous feast for the seagulls and sea lions at the surface. And when the wasted fish carcasses sank, the crabs on the bottom ate their fill. Dan Luketa looked like Cary Grant with rough edges. He was a crackerjack fisherman and known as a “tough son of a gun” who was hard-­driven. As a shrewd businessman, he hated to waste fishing days. He often ran three boats and jumped from boat to boat to supervise the fishing while the boat that was full-­up steamed in to unload the catch. It’s said that Luketa only ate carrots at sea because “you fished better if you were hungry.” Running for shelter in rough seas was unheard of, and in a storm he preferred to hold his position and tough it out. He even installed seat belts in the galley for his crew to ride out the storms in the bucking boat. A Norwegian immigrant named Sverre Hansen worked for Luketa as a cook and deckhand on the Western Flyer. He remarked that nobody worked harder than Luketa: “You always made money with him.” Hansen had been out of work and was walking the docks carrying a bottle of Thunderbird wine when he ran into Luketa. Two of Luketa’s crew had just quit, so he hired Hansen. Hansen said, “If it wasn’t for that bottle of Thunderbird I would never had my start.”3 Luketa was friendly with the crew, but he demanded a lot from them. Sometimes Luketa would go out at night drinking and dancing with his men, but if one of them didn’t show up in time the next morning, he was fired immediately. The history of the Pacific ocean perch fishery is intertwined with the life of fisherman Dan Luketa and the journey of the Western Flyer up the coast. What follows is how it all happened. Down in Monterey, the sardine fishery had been teetering on • 66 •

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the edge of extinction for several years before it finally collapsed in 1948. After the collapse, some boats started to fish for sardines farther south out of San Pedro. Eventually the sardines down there disappeared as well. Some of the larger boats switched their target to fish for tuna offshore and off the coasts of Central and South America. This required a larger boat, and the Western Flyer was just too small, too slow, and too underpowered to fish tuna. The Monterey Herald reported large catches of “rosefish” off the coast of Washington.4 In the meanwhile, Tony Berry was looking to get out of the sardine fishery. After Martin Petrich became the registered owner, he sold the Western Flyer to Armstrong Fisheries out of Ketchikan, Alaska, to work the herring harvest. Armstrong was the registered owner 1951–­52. Then in 1952 they sold the boat to an enterprising young fisherman from Seattle named Dan Luketa. Luketa was a Croatian descendant from the Dalmatian coast. Many Croatians left their homeland before and after World War I to find a better life and to escape the tyranny, economic hardships, and cultural tensions in their country. America was the promised land of plenty. Some of them were sailors or had fished for sardines in the Adriatic, and some living inland had been miners. When they arrived in the United States and gained a foothold, they sent for friends and relatives. Croatian communities sprang up in San Pedro, San Francisco, Aberdeen, Tacoma, Seattle, Everett, Anacortes, and Bellingham. The Luketas came from Dubrovnik for the “Porcupine” gold rush in Ontario. Gradually they worked their way down to the Ballard neighborhood of Seattle, where the patriarch Paul Sr. began to fish for a living. Fishing might have been a natural extension of the free-­for-­all mentality of the gold rush. Dan’s mother, Antoinette, ruled the family with an iron fist and ran the family’s business. Young Dan was a tough case for his mother to control. Born in 1916, from an early age he was the black sheep of the family. Dan was smart, but he usually did what he wanted to do. His own strong will clashed with that of his mother. It didn’t take Dan long to figure out that he • 67 •

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wanted to be a fisherman, and he dropped out of Ballard High School. He enjoyed the freedom at sea, untethered from rules. Fishing was a life of hard work, but if you could figure things out, you made a good living. He liked being independent and playing his odds at sea. Fish were plentiful off the coast, and you never knew how much or what you would catch. It was like rolling the dice. Luketa started fishing with his brothers on the family’s boat, the Sunbeam. They would fish for whatever the market would buy, whatever was in season, and whatever they could catch with the gear that they had. At first they caught sardines, Dungeness crab, salmon, shrimp, shark, lingcod, and flatfishes. Shark brought a hefty price for their livers. But mainly they fished for albacore off the coast. After a couple of years, Dan took over as skipper of the New Mexico, and his younger brother Paul Jr. assumed the helm of the Sunbeam. In November 1944, Dan and Paul were crossing the bar at Grays Harbor in rough seas. Paul was less experienced as a skipper and less bold at the wheel than Dan, and he was intimidated by the heavy swell, so he turned the Sunbeam around to head back to the harbor. Dan chased after him in the New Mexico, pulled alongside, and yelled above the noise of the wind and engines, “Come on, let’s go. We can make it over.” He convinced his brother to change his course back seaward. There’s a fine line between courageous and reckless, and it shifts with the tides. Sometimes when Dan crossed back over the bar after a fishing trip, he might surf the waves in his boat coming in at speeds up to 30 miles per hour. Crossing a river bar is tricky, and there are good times and bad times to do it. A bad crossing is at the tail end of a high tide when the river water is pushed back by the ocean. High winds pile up water on top and create huge swells. The skipper needs to throttle down as he slides from the crest of each wave so he doesn’t crash into the trough at the bottom and get swamped by the next crest. This day the Sunbeam was over its head in a

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winter gale and unfavorable tide, and a huge wave, a “sneaker,” swept across its deck and tore the pilothouse right off the boat with Paul captive inside. He was twenty-­six years old. The crew was safe below deck in the hull and all were rescued. Paul’s body washed up on the beach some days later. Some people say that the corpse was found by his wife in the sand outside his own cabin. The loss of his brother took the wind out of Dan’s sails. Risk can be thrilling and sometimes rewarding, but other times it escorts tragedy. Dan continued to fish for albacore until they started to disappear in 1950, but he’d lost his appetite for crossing the Grays Harbor bar, and he began to concentrate more on dragging for bottom fish out of Seattle. Luketa was finding success as a trawlerman. He’d earned enough money to buy a bigger boat when the Western Flyer came up for sale. The boat was built at Western Boat Building, and Luketa knew that the yard had a reputation for constructing sturdy boats. The conversion of the Flyer from a seiner to a trawler would not be that complex. The Atlas engine was replaced with a bright yellow, more powerful D353 Caterpillar. Luketa removed the turntable, which was a platform on deck for stacking the seine net. He installed a powered trawl reel, introducing a new technology to West Coast trawlers, whereas previously it had only been used on seiners and gillnetters. Other fishermen thought the oversize winch installed on deck would capsize the boat. The big winch was chain-driven but had a “self-­spooler” to keep the cables on track, whereas the old winch required a man with an “imbecile stick” to guide them into place. Luketa operated the Western Flyer out of Ballard in the 1950s and early ’60s, dragging the deep water along the coast mainly for Pacific ocean perch, but also petrale sole, cod, and whatever other bottom fish came up in the net. It was hard work trawling the ocean floor. Often they would drop the net 300 fathoms, paying out a half mile of cable, which took forty-­five minutes

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to haul back in. Pulling the nets made Luketa’s hands oversize, and they seemed to dwarf the husky cigar he always held in his right hand.

 In the old days, the red rockfish known as Pacific ocean perch were thick along the coast of the Pacific Northwest. Most fishermen just called them perch, although they aren’t a member of the perch family. Sometimes the fish are marketed as red snappers. These are big teardrop-­shaped fishes with a row of spines on their back like a picket fence. They have pinkish-­red bodies and big black eyes that bulge out from their skull with a look of surprise. Pacific ocean perch range widely from the Bering Sea to Oregon. They live in rocky reefs over the outer margin of the continental shelf before the bottom dives into the abyss. Perch were like the ancient trees of the coastal ecosystem, living up to one hundred years and beyond. They anchored a stable and resilient network of animals in those seas, and they were abundant. One old-­timer remarked that during the late 1940s the rockfish stocks were “so thick, even a beginner could catch them with his underwear.”5 Fishermen and consumers put a high value on Pacific ocean perch because its white meat remains fresh when it’s iced after being caught. This valued characteristic was their ruin. Fishermen had brought some Pacific ocean perch to market since the early 1940s. In those days, the fishing nets were made out of cotton, so they would soak up water, which made them heavy. Bringing the nets up from deep water was difficult and dangerous in a heavy swell. The boats weren’t equipped to land big catches. But as an offshoot of World War II, new technologies developed, such as lightweight nylon for nets, loran for positioning, and sonar for finding fish and determining bottom depths. Deck gear for hauling in nets was improved. Dan was a clever and innovative fisherman, and his surviv• 70 •

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ing brother Frank was an inventor known as “Patent Pending.” Often working together, the brothers made many improvements in their trawling gear. Luketa had seen huge black blots on the fathometer, sonar reflections of immense schools of perch in deep water. The recent improvements in fishing equipment meant that the schools of fish were now more accessible. By 1948 a few boats were targeting the perch, and they landed about 300 metric tons that year. Word spread on the docks, and domestic catches rose to 2,000 tons in 1952. By 1965, that number grew to 7,000 tons.6 A couple other things happened to boost the fisheries. In the 1950s and ’60s, the U.S. government began to promote fisheries as an inexhaustible supply of protein and wealth. Programs were started to research fishing, technology, and utilization. Legislation for subsidies and loans to support the fishing industry was enacted. Stanton Patty reported in the Seattle Times, “When you consider that 60% of the world population today is suffering from animal protein malnutrition, you begin to understand the importance of food from the sea.”7 One influential spokesman for both the government and the fishing industry, Wilbert Chapman, estimated that 1 to 2 billion tons could be harvested from the world’s oceans each year. As noted earlier, he didn’t consider that other animals in the sea also needed to eat, but often expressed his view that fish not harvested are wasted. Scientists now know that the sustainable harvest from the world’s oceans is about one-­tenth that amount and that ecosystem considerations should be an important part of fisheries management decisions. When Dan Luketa and the other local fishermen were dragging for perch, they didn’t drop their nets just anyplace looking for fish, nor did they trawl on promising signs of fish seen by the sonar. This was because the bottom ground of the outer continental shelf was rocky and full of snags. Instead they fished on established locations, or “tows.” These were proven trawling stations that were passed from fisherman to fisher• 71 •

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man. The tows were closely guarded secrets, shared strategically. But some fishermen say that in those days most dragger men were good Samaritans and good seamen. Most of them knew one another, and the good fishermen were almost always helpful to the others, while the not-­so-­good kept secrets. A confident man wasn’t afraid of being outfished. The early draggers on the coast made their tows from landmarks plus bottom depths. Then later, loran positioning was used along with the depth as determined by sonar. Each tow was like an address. The direction and duration of the trawl was determined by the “tow,” or what had been logged about each location. Having a good tow position was critical because the bottom was full of rocks, and often the tow was between snags, so you had to be accurate to drop and then retrieve your net before the end of clear ocean bottom. If you lost your gear on a snag, it would cost thousands of dollars to replace. The tow positions were so accurate that if gear was lost, a skilled fisherman could often return with grappling gear and retrieve it. If a large rock or other snag was retrieved in the net, the fishermen hauled it farther offshore and dumped it. That way fishing lanes were cleared of obstacles over time; pathways for the nets were engineered and the logbooks were like road maps. The problem was that the rocks and reefs provided some measure of protection for the fish. After the Western Flyer reached a tow location, the net was spooled out, followed by about 40 fathoms (a fathom is 6 feet) of dandyline wire, and then the otter doors were released. The doors are rectangular metal slabs that fly through the water at an angle like a sail and hold the net open. Luketa lowered the doors about 5 to 10 fathoms and then sped the boat up to spread them. When the net was wide-­open, the balance of the cable was let out. At a scope of two or three to one for wire out to depth, a 200-­fathom tow would let out 400 to 600 fathoms of wire. If Luketa was fishing for Pacific ocean perch, the tow would ride the bottom for a couple hours. But if he was fishing for petrale sole, the tow might last half the night. • 72 •

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Offshore trawling in the 1960s was hard and treacherous work. The doors were hauled up, and then the dandylines were brought in. Finally the net was reeled in. The Flyer would haul over to the leeward side of the net so that the boat wouldn’t float over it. Then the net was brought alongside. A splitting strap (also known as a cutting strap) was attached at the cod-­ end and another farther back in the net. Two wires leading from the boom would alternatively be raised and lowered to partition part of the total catch into the lower section of the net, which would be dumped on deck. The crew would sort what wasn’t needed from the catch and shovel it over the side. These were fish that were too small and “junk” fish like hake. The perch were put into the hold, where they were covered with a layer of ice. Sometimes they would catch black cod, which they gutted and iced. Then the next section of the net would be dumped on deck and the process was repeated until the net was empty, kind of like stuffing a sausage in reverse. It was hard, tedious work in the wind, rain, and pitching sea. With 25 tons of ice, the Western Flyer could stay out seven to eight days before returning to the fish house to unload. The standard was 80,000–­100,000 pounds of fish per trip; however, there was a delivery schedule, and the boat maintained contact with the fish house. Generally, the fish house gave the fisherman an order list. It might include 40,000 pounds of perch, 10,000 pounds of petrale sole, and 20,000 pounds of codfish. If the fish house was short on fish, they might call you in early. If there were a lot of fish or if you exceeded your order, the excess was made into mink food at an 80 percent reduction in price. Some years, the Western Flyer would deliver to Bornstein or Dahl Seafood in Bellingham. Other years, Luketa would deliver to Main Seafood in Seattle. Fishermen usually belonged to an association of fishermen, who would negotiate the price. They delivered to the fish buyers, who were a group that needed to be watched closely. If the buyer needed fish, then no fish were classified as bad • 73 •

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and everything was smooth. But if there was a glut of fish on the processing line, the buyer would generally find something wrong with the load and discount them. There was always the suspicion that somehow those fish would find their way back on the high-­grade processing line after the fisherman left for another trip at sea. Arguing over the weight of the catch was a daily ritual. Sometimes if the wind was right, the door to the shed was left open so it might lift up on the scales. Other times, there was suspicion that the scales had been tampered with, or maybe the captain and cannery manager were in collusion to underreport weights so that the crew’s share was shorted, and then they secretly split the profit among themselves.8 It was hard for the fishermen to win a fight with the likes of Baby Dahl.

 Pretty soon Luketa was raking in the fish and lots of money. A 100,000-­pound trip catch of perch at five cents a pound brought in $5,000, a nice sum in those years. He fished with three or four crew. Generally, the catch was split forty-­sixty or fifty-­fifty among the crew and skipper/boat’s shares. A fee for the winch, diesel, and other supplies came off the top. For Luketa, such a large catch would gross up to $2,500 in his pocket. Luketa was inventive and a visionary. Referring to the developing trawl fishery, he said, “What is happening now is a dramatic and fantastic thing. It is skyrocketing.” He saw that the lower-­priced bottom fish would be more economically important to the region than salmon or halibut because of the sheer volume. He noted that the trawl fleet had been operating about 60 trawlers out of Puget Sound with an average length of 72 feet and said, “We should be running 90 to 100 foot boats out of Seattle, and about 200 of them.”9 Dan married an intelligent dark-­haired beauty from Florida named Maxine. Maxine had a nose for business, a cheerful way about her, and a nice smile, and she spoke with the remnants of a southern drawl. She was small enough that when they were • 74 •

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on the bridge of the boat, Dan could see the horizon over her head. People remarked that Dan and Maxine were a handsome couple. Dan bought a black convertible Cadillac to show off his beautiful wife and his success. He was devoted to Maxine and brought her with him to sea as much as he could. He made the excuse that his eyesight was bad and she had to pilot for him. And while it was true that his eyesight was bad—­he wore black-­framed glasses with Coke-­bottle lenses—­it could be that he just liked to keep her nearby. Luketa began to get involved in fishermen’s politics. In 1958 he was president of the Fishermen’s Marketing Association, which represented boat owners. He battled the Alaska Fishermen’s Union about crew shares. Luketa argued that crew shares needed to be reduced to pay for improvements to vessels. In 1965 he was now manager of the Fishermen’s Marketing Association and vice president of the Congress of American Fishermen. Motivated by his success, Luketa got more ambitious and bought more boats. At one time or another, his small fleet included the New Mexico, Sunbeam, Sundown, Apollo, the Paul L, the Astronaut, Crossroads, and the Western Flyer. He would fish one of them and hire skippers to run the others. Luketa began to be known on the docks not only as a good fisherman but also as a hustler. Besides being risk takers, there’s often another characteristic of fishermen that gets them in trouble. They tend to be rule breakers. Dan Luketa’s father was involved in a string of court cases with the Washington State fisheries agency. Like they say, the apple doesn’t fall too far from the tree. In Dan’s case, his childhood trouble with authority ripened when he started fishing. He didn’t like government interference. In 1956 the skipper of one of Dan’s boats got arrested for an illegal catch of petrale sole. The fish had been caught off Washington, and Luketa planned to market them in California to avoid a ban on fishing them in Washington State. One time, as the Western Flyer pulled into Neah Bay, a Washington State fisheries enforcement officer jumped aboard and • 75 •

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demanded an inspection just as Luketa started to tie his lines. Luketa promptly gunned the boat and backed away from the pier at full throttle. Then he locked the wheelhouse doors, steamed out of the harbor, and took the agent for a two-­day ride around Vancouver Island with the captive official outside, subject to the wind, cold, and breakers washing over the deck. Another time an IRS agent visited Luketa’s apartment. The agent was armed with a sheath of papers and started naming off violations and crimes that Luketa had committed and the potential punishments. Luketa said, “Where’d you get those papers?” The agent responded, “Your accountant.” Luketa was sharp and knew that his correspondence with his own accountant was protected by law. He said, “Can I see those papers?” The agent handed them over, and Dan sat back in his chair as he flipped through them, cool as a snake. He let out a hiss as if ready to strike, got up, walked over to the fireplace, and threw the papers in the flames. The agent stammered out, “Now you’re in real trouble. You are going to go to jail for destroying government evidence.” Luketa answered, “No, you got those papers illegally and you are the one who is going to jail.” The agent walked out and that was the last that Dan heard from the IRS.10

 Good times don’t last forever, especially in fisheries. Successful fishermen like Dan Luketa profit from harvesting the resource, then they buy more boats to catch even more fish. A profitable harvest attracts more and more fishermen. This is how it worked for Luketa, when the mother lode of his success, the fishery for Pacific ocean perch, lifted off in the 1960s with the Western Flyer in the thick of it. News of the abundance of perch spread and attracted Soviet and Japanese boats to the coast of Washington, since the territorial limit was still only 3 miles from shore. In the Soviet Union, there was a shortage of protein, and • 76 •

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the government had made a concerted effort to increase their fishing capacity to feed the country’s masses. By 1967 the USSR had the largest fishing fleet in the world. The Soviets used a flotilla concept in its distant-­water fisheries. Either trawling ships would catch the fish and deliver them to a “mother ship” factory to process them, or large “factory trawlers” would both catch and process the fish. These fishing vessels were serviced by a fleet of ships to transport the catch back to the homeland, refuel the ships, and carry personnel, supplies, and the like. The largest factory ships were up to 300 feet long and housed several hundred workers. They were like floating villages. The Soviet Union employed a type of fishery known as “pulse fishing.”11 The fleet would engage in a massive fishing effort on local populations until the stock was exhausted, and they would then switch to another stock of the same species someplace else, or to another target species altogether, sometimes in a different ocean. It’s said that the Soviet ships would drag cables over the ocean bottom to saw the tops off the reefs and give their nets easy passage. Share the resource with the locals—­are you kidding? There was no effort to conserve the populations they exploited. Instead, the idea was to catch as much fish as they could, as quickly as possible, and then move on. There were state-­imposed quotas that the fishing fleet had to fill. For Japan’s part, after World War II the Japanese were at first restricted from fishing in the North Pacific by General Douglas MacArthur and the Strategic Command of Allied Powers. MacArthur promoted the development of the fishing industry in order to feed the hungry people of Japan, a nation that was threatened by socialism, so he gradually loosened fishing restrictions. By the late 1950s, the Japanese were fishing off the coast of Alaska. In contrast to the Soviets, the Japanese industry tended to use a strategy of steady exploitation. However, they didn’t know how many fish were there to begin with. The fishing power they exerted in the North Pacific Ocean was massive. Most of the regulations that Japan put on the distant-­ • 77 •

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water fisheries were devised to alleviate discord among their own fishermen and companies, and sometimes to appease U.S. treaty negotiators, but not to conserve fish populations. The Japanese used a diversity of vessel types, including small land-­ based trawlers that would return to Japan when their holds were full, mother-­ship factories that were supplied by catcher vessels, and large factory trawlers that both caught and processed fish. They were efficient, merciless machines. In 1960 the foreign fishery for Pacific ocean perch off the Pacific coast of North America started in earnest, and in that year 6,000 tons were reported as caught. Many scientists now believe these numbers were grossly underreported. In 1962 the fishery boomed. Within six years, almost a half-­million tons were extracted from the Gulf of Alaska and Aleutian Islands regions alone. The fishing pressure increased. The foreign fishing boats spread south, and catches peaked at 15,600 tons in 1966 during the first year of operation off Oregon and Washington. Luketa complained, “The Soviet fleets could easily reduce the fishery stocks off the coast to the extent West Coast fishermen may not be able to catch enough fish to stay in business.”12 When the Soviets started fishing off the coast, Canadian and U.S. agencies took notice. In 1962–­63, the International Pacific Halibut Commission chartered the Western Flyer from Dan Luketa to conduct a trawl survey to assess the abundance of Pacific halibut on the West Coast. A further goal was to evaluate the impact of the foreign coastal dragging activity on the halibut fishery. They were looking at the bycatch of halibut in trawling operations and were particularly concerned about the impact of the Japanese and Soviet trawl fisheries. The survey was the most extensive of its type ever conducted to that point, covering 40,000 square miles and 1,560 stations with several vessels; the Flyer did 877 of those hauls.13 When the Soviet fleet moved south, the U.S. Bureau of Commercial Fisheries—­later renamed the National Marine Fisheries Service—­also became alarmed about the big foreign harvests of Pacific ocean perch and in 1966 hired a young biolo• 78 •

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Catches of Pacific ocean perch on the West Coast of the United States. Total catch is the dark line. The foreign fishery is the gray line. In the 1940s and ’50s, the fishery was just beginning to develop. The biomass of Pacific ocean perch was at its highest level at about 120,000 metric tons, and it and the harvest declined precipitously during the period 1965–­68; the decline slowed afterward. In 2000 the population began to increase modestly to about 20,000 metric tons.

gist from Montana named Dr. Donald Gunderson to run trawl surveys off the coast of Washington to determine the fish’s abundance.14 This was also the year that the foreign fishery appeared en masse off the Washington coast. Before Gunderson’s team of scientists had a chance to figure things out, it was too late. Dan Luketa was right: the process of depletion took just a few years. By 1969 the Pacific ocean perch population had been decimated. For Pacific ocean perch, the recruitment of new fish into the population is an episodic event, occurring once every decade or two. Perch grow slowly and reach maturity after about ten years of age. The fish that lived to be a century old, some born before the Civil War, and which had accumulated so slowly, • 79 •

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they were gone in a flash. It was like clear-­cutting a forest of old-­growth trees. They were the victims of overzealous promotion of fisheries by the U.S. government and the wasteful dumping of fish by domestic fishermen; but mostly the collapse was caused by overharvesting by the foreign fisheries. The situation that Luketa and the Western Flyer witnessed off the Washington coast wasn’t much different from what Steinbeck and Ricketts on the Flyer noted of the Japanese fishery as they dragged up all the life in the Sea of Cortez. The industrial fishing company was like a superorganism whose motives and behaviors were different from the individuals within it. Steinbeck and Ricketts wrote in their narrative, “We liked the people on this boat very much. They were good men, but they were caught in a large destructive machine, good men doing a bad thing.”15 After spending three weeks on a Soviet vessel, Gunderson remarked that in spite of the cold war and enmity among the nations, a sense of camaraderie developed with his Soviet colleagues. As individuals, they shared a sense of common values, even as he investigated the Soviet state’s destructive fishing practices. One positive spin-­off from the collapse of Pacific ocean perch is that the careful documentation of the stock’s demise by Gunderson helped convince Congress to pass the Magnuson Act of 1976. The act extended the exclusive fishing zone of the United States out to 200 miles and mandated the monitoring of fish populations within this area. When the Pacific ocean perch harvest started falling in the 1960s, Dan Luketa realized that he needed a new fishery to support his flotilla. He and the Western Flyer headed north once again, this time to the Aleutian Islands to fish for red king crab in the stormy waters of Alaska.

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7: N O RT H TO A L A S KA The Return of the Western Flyer to the Aleutians and the Red King Crab Fishery

There is in our community an elderly painter of seascapes who knows the sea so well that he no longer goes to look at it while he paints. John Steinbeck, foreword to the third edition of Between Pacific Tides

There are a lot of wild stories about Jackie Ray.1 Dan Luketa hired Ray as a skipper to run the Western Flyer in the Washington trawl fishery. When Luketa heard in the early 1960s that king crab fishermen were making a lot of money in Alaska, he decided he wanted a piece of it and sent the Western Flyer to the Aleutian Islands as a crabber. Ray was a quiet man, but there was something intimidating about him. He scared the daylights out of his crew. He had an odd sense of humor and an unnerving giggle like he was clearing his throat, which he did frequently. Ray sometimes served Canadian Club whiskey with tobacco juice in it for breakfast. Inside him there was a mean streak that ran out-­of-­bounds. He thought he was a tough guy. One time he poured hot coffee into a crew member’s boot just to get a rise. But Ray’s truly distinguishing characteristic was his iron claw. Jackie Ray was born in New Britain, Connecticut. As a teenager, he lost his right hand when it got tangled in the line of a net drum as it was reeling in cable. His doctors replaced it with a grasping iron claw. One veteran of the fishing industry described him as a “dead-­end kid.”2 At age twenty he showed up in Oregon and asked fisherman George Moskovita for a job on his boat. Moskovita was a successful local skipper and didn’t • 81 •

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want to hire Ray, but felt sorry for him and took him on. Moskovita said he was afraid Ray would get his “hook” caught in a trawl net as it was going over the side.3 Known in the fishing harbors of the Pacific Northwest as a “nasty little guy,” Ray was burly and about five foot eight. He wouldn’t talk much about his past. When he was drinking, he turned into a “wildman.” He got crazy after a few beers. Then he wanted to fight. One fisherman who knew him said, “Jackie Ray was an animal.” Another fisherman speaking in a thick Norwegian accent expressed the danger this way, “He was a mean bugger when he got drunk, you had to stay away from him. If he got a hold on you with that iron claw, man, you were in deep trouble.”4 Another said, “He could rip your nose off.”5 Ray didn’t much like parking meters, so he sometimes walked down the street smashing their glass windows with his iron claw as a protest of authority. Once, he got caught and spent some time cooling off in the Newport, Oregon, jail. There’s another story about Ray involving a man in a bar in Astoria who started shooting his pistol drunkenly. Ray ducked behind a counter, counted out six shots fired by the assailant, and then charged out and stuck the shooter in his eye socket with his hook.6 It’s known that Ray was tough on equipment and boats. One fisherman said, “Jackie Ray couldn’t take a boat out without ruining it.” He beached the Thelma II off Crescent City, California. Ray was asleep during a storm, and the anchor line broke. He woke up stranded in the sand. Another time he sank the Ida May when he hit the North Jetty of the Columbia River running full speed ahead in the fog. He came home from Alaska after a crabbing season without Luketa’s boat, the Sunbeam. The details of how it sank are lost. Ray wasn’t popular with his crew because he was intimidating and he pushed them hard. One morning they were fishing for king crab on the Western Flyer in the Aleutian Islands. Ray emerged from the wheelhouse and walked onto the back deck. He didn’t like the way they were deploying the pots, so he was • 82 •

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going to show them how he wanted it done. As a pot was releasing over the side and tumbling into the sea, Ray’s claw got caught in the mesh netting of the pot. When the heavy metal cage went over the side, and before he realized what was happening, his rubber boots were skidding across the deck. He was pulling at his claw desperately as he went over the side. He sank with the 700-­pound pot in a free fall as it disappeared into the darkness of the sea. There was surprise and confusion on deck for a few seconds. The crew looked over the side, thinking Ray would swim to the surface. But he didn’t. Someone ran to the pilothouse and wheeled the boat back around. A grapple hook was thrown at the buoy to snag the line leading down to Jackie and the pot. As they pulled the gear back up to the boat, the crew held their breath in anticipation, expecting Jackie to burst from the surface with a gasp and a curse. They watched the black pot emerge from the depths, materializing first as a dark shadow. It was eerie. Jackie’s body hung, pale and limp, from the side. When the pot broke out of the water and hung in the air, Jackie Ray’s waterlogged corpse broke free from the claw, slipped into the water, and sunk into the abyss. All that remained was his iron claw, still grasping the mesh of the pot.7 The early years of crab fishing in Alaska were dangerous, and Alaskan fishing boats were populated with colorful characters like Jackie Ray. There is still a rumor whispered among them that Ray’s claw is mounted over a bar in Kodiak.

 American fishermen started catching Alaskan red king crab in 1950. The fishery was first developed by salmon fishermen from Kodiak. That first year they landed 60,000 pounds. The fishermen used small mesh trawl nets that they sank to the bottom and which tangled the legs of the crabs. These so-­called tangle • 83 •

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nets were disallowed in 1955 because they caught undersize and female crabs. The females are smaller than males and are not processed for their meat. Then they switched to fishing with conical pots and finally to pots resembling square cages. The standard cage size was 7 by 7 feet and weighed 700 pounds. One fisherman said, “When the deck rolls and pitches, the pot becomes a wrecking ball with sharp edges.”8 It was baited with herring. They ran the pot on a single line with two floats. In those days, there was no hydraulic pot launcher, and the deckhands pushed the pots over the side. In order to outfit the Western Flyer as a crabber, Dan Luketa had an aluminum tank fabricated at Marco Marine in Seattle and installed it below deck to hold the crabs alive in seawater. Once the work was done, he sent the boat up to the Aleutian Islands with the gear stacked all the way to the galley. The life raft was stowed in the bunkhouse. However, Marco had been supplied with a substandard grade of aluminum, and it began corroding from the salt water. The welds of the aluminum tank ruptured while they were fishing near Adak Island, and water leaked down into the bowels of the ship. Normally this is not desirable, although fixable, but this time the lines of the buoys stowed below floated in the water and got caught in the Flyer’s pumps, causing them to malfunction. The ship was sinking. In spite of the calamity, the skipper wouldn’t let the crew deploy the lifeboats until the last minute because he couldn’t swim and didn’t want them to drift out of reach. The skipper smelled something burning, and he scrambled about the boat looking for the source. After a brief search, he found the cook, Sverre Hansen, grilling steaks in the galley. Hansen said, “If we are gonna go in the water, we are gonna go in with a full stomach.”9 Finally, the Coast Guard heard their Mayday call. They flew out in a helicopter and dropped some new pumps, which landed right on the bow. The new pumps saved the ship. When fishing for crab, the Western Flyer would sail with the skipper and two crewmen working on deck. One of the crew would usually cook. The skipper was selective and looked for • 84 •

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good crew, and one who could cook was a bonus. Often the guys were heavy drinkers, but they would be top seamen. Crewing on a small crabber in the North Pacific Ocean was hard work. Fishermen learned to expect storms, high winds, cold temperatures, and heavy seas. Frostbite was a danger, and waves frequently swept the aft deck. A particular hazard was the icing of the metal parts of the ship, which could happen quickly in windy conditions when the sea spray from the ocean blew off the surface, froze, and accumulated on anything metal. This perilous situation escalated when ice piled up on the mesh of the pots. The weight of the ice on such an expanse of surface area could flip the ship, and often did. The ice had to be sledged off with mallets or baseball bats on a slippery deck.

 The Western Flyer fished for red king crab from Attu to Dutch Harbor. In the early years, this was a virgin fishery and crabs were abundant. The fishermen initially explored the bottom, discovering where the crabs gathered and where the catches were largest. Often they would follow the lead of another boat that they knew was catching crabs. Red king crabs were most abundant from 30 to 70 fathoms, or even out to 80. The skipper would look at the fathometer for clues to where the crabs accumulated in large mounds on the bottom. Fishermen looked for an “edge” on the ocean floor where animals would tend to congregate, and they dropped their pots there. Each boat was subject to a 30-­pot limit. Usually the Flyer would carry about a dozen out, put them in the water, and then return for another load. When the fishing was good, they would leave the pots in overnight; and if it was slow, they would let them soak for a couple of days. The pots were retrieved by snagging the line between the float and the pot with a grapple hook on a line or a pole. The Flyer’s crew had several options for selling the crab they caught. Out in Adak, which is in the middle of the Aleutian • 85 •

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Island chain, they would deliver the crabs to a freezer processor called the Merkatur owned by Pan Alaska Fisheries. In the 1960s, Adak was an isolated U.S. Navy base. The Merkatur would tie up at the navy dock and buy crabs. Alternatively, there was a cannery at Captain’s Bay in Dutch Harbor. And finally, there were tenders like the Bethell-­1, a converted World War II minesweeper that roamed the crab grounds. The tenders would collect catches of crab from the fishing boats and deliver them to a processor. The Kodiak-­based red king crab fishery is a good example of what happened to the other Alaskan king crab fisheries because its history is well documented. The king crab fishery around Kodiak developed rapidly. In the early 1950s, catches totaled in the tens of thousands of pounds. By 1958 the catch grew to 11 million pounds, increasing to 21 million pounds in 1959. The fishery was booming in the early 1960s, with 86 million pounds landed in 1964. By 1966, 175 vessels delivered 94 million pounds of crab to 32 processors. By now the crab populations that were closest to the processing facilities were depleted, and the fishery expanded offshore in search of new fishing grounds. The effort by the fishermen was restricted by the 30-­pot limit in the early years, but when the fishermen’s catch rates began to decline, managers loosened the restriction so that the fishermen could maintain a constant supply of crabs. In 1965 the pot limit was dropped, and it became a free-­for-­all. Concerned managers reinstituted a new limit of 60 pots in 1970. But as the population of crabs was further depleted, the price went up. Even more boats entered the fishery, and individual catch rates declined further. Fishermen complained that they couldn’t make a living or pay the mortgages on their boats. Managers responded by increasing the number of pots they were allowed to fish to 75 in 1971, then 100 in 1979, and finally up to 150 in 1981. The greater pot limit multiplied by the increasing number of boats intensified the effort expended in fishing, and the harvests increased, • 86 •

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Red king crab catches in the western Aleutian Islands. The catch in 1960–­83 is west of 172°W longitude, and that of 1984–­2010 is west of 171°W longitude. There is no information on the biomass of the crab stock. The fishery began in the 1960s and crashed in the early 1970s. A similar picture arose in the Kodiak red king crab fishery, and the decline of the stock mirrors the decline in catches.

putting a strain on the population. In 1981 a record number of 309 vessels caught 24 million pounds of king crab. The next year, the harvest collapsed to 9 million pounds. By 1983 the crabs were decimated, and the fishery was closed. The abundance of crabs continued to decline until 1995, when the number remaining was only 2 percent of the amount found in the early 1980s. The red king crab fishery farther west in the Aleutian Islands started in 1960 but is less well documented. This is where the Western Flyer fished. Places like Adak and Attu are about as close to the end of the Earth as you can get. The catches of king crab rose up with breathtaking speed and peaked in 1964/65 at 21 million pounds. This was a virgin population, never before fished. After the apex, catches dropped just as quickly. Two years later, the catch fell to 6 million pounds. Catches lifted up again in the early 1970s as fishermen prospected for new • 87 •

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populations hidden among the islands, venturing clear out to Attu. Then the sputtering harvest belly-­flopped in 1973 to less than 1 million pounds. Now the fishery expanded eastward toward Unalaska and the nearby islands. This fishery peaked in 1966/67, and catches dropped less steeply than harvests near Adak, but it finally closed in 1983. The number of boats had increased from 4 in 1961, to 41 in 1970, and finally 104 in 1980. One well-­known fisherman remarked that king crab in the Aleutians may not be able to sustain a fishery. Out there in a cold, stormy environment, the crabs live on a thin ridge that pokes up from the deep North Pacific Ocean on one side and the frigid Bering Sea on the other; the crabs are like frontier gamblers living on the edge. Aleutian crabs bet their survival as a population on a roll of the dice, a rare event that allows their young to survive the harsh conditions and populate the thin habitat, an event that may happen once a decade. They spread their risk by living for ten or twenty years, so there is at least a minimum population of spawners to roll the dice again. But once a fishery comes in and removes all the big old crabs, the cushion to break the fall from several unfavorable years is taken away, and in a string of tough years, the population can collapse. That’s just what happened. The story of the Aleutian king crab fishery that the Western Flyer took part in is not unlike that told by Ed Ricketts about the California sardine fishery twenty years before: too many fishing boats and not enough known about the status of the resource. Fishermen and some biologists tell the story otherwise, trying to deflect the blame. They attribute the collapse on a change in climate, outbreak of disease or predators, the pollock fishery, sunspots, or even the lunar nodal cycle. The red king crab in the Aleutian Islands was a fragile population living on the fringe of their biological range. There was a complex interrelationship between their survival there, the harsh environment, and their natural history. The intensive fishing pressure added another stress that the red king crab couldn’t handle, and they fell over the edge. • 88 •

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When the red king crab in the Aleutian Islands got played out, fishermen ventured into Bristol Bay and deployed their pots on Slime Bank. The population there seemed to be on the rise. The recovery of meat on these crabs was also much higher, leading to more yield and better profits. Now the main fishery was far away from the port of Dutch Harbor, and the boats ventured farther from shore.10 There were fewer places in this open water for the smaller boats like the Western Flyer to hide from storms.

 The pull of fishing for red king crabs on the Bering Sea shelf was strong because of the amount of money involved. Dan Luketa needed a bigger, faster boat that could handle rough weather, one with a bigger hold to contain more crabs so that it could stay out longer, and with more deck space to carry more pots. He sold the Western Flyer because he had bought a new boat that fit his requirements and he needed cash to outfit it. He named his new vessel the Apollo. He bought the new boat from Sam Rubinstein, the owner of Whitney-­Fidalgo Seafoods. It seems that as a part of the deal, Whitney-­Fidalgo acquired the Western Flyer. After the sale, Luketa was walking on the bridge of his new boat, and his foot went through decking. He called Rubinstein to complain and got the answer, “Haven’t you ever heard of ‘buyers beware’?” Since the Western Flyer’s new owner, Whitney-­Fidalgo, was mainly involved in salmon catching and processing, the Flyer sailed for southeastern Alaska. At this point, Luketa exited the story of the Western Flyer, but what follows is how his own tale ended. He took the Apollo to Marco Marine for conversion to a crabbing vessel and bought a hundred or so pots from Nordby Supply Company on credit. On the promise of making big money, he brought in several investors, reportedly a group of five engineers from the Boeing Company, and they incorporated. Then he hired Howard Carlough as the first skipper. After Luketa saw how much money the • 89 •

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boat was making, he decided to fish the boat himself, so he’d have both the owner’s and the skipper’s share. He also brought Maxine on the boat for a crew’s share in addition to her salary as a corporate employee. Crabs were abundant on the eastern Bering Sea shelf, and Luketa was making a lot of money. The Apollo was the first boat to make more than a million dollars a season in the king crab fishery. But cracks began to appear in Dan’s plan. Luketa had trouble with the crew. One time a crew member came over to Wilburn Hall’s boat, which just happened to be tied up next to the Apollo in Dutch Harbor. The angry fisherman had a gun and wanted to know where Luketa was. The sailor rambled on about Luketa shorting the crew their wages and having sent the money overseas to hide it. He was there to settle the account. Fortunately for Dan, he’d already left for Seattle. Luketa’s word had always been his bond, but now he charged his purchases to the Apollo Inc.’s account and stopped paying the bills. He had some big debts to marine supply stores, shipyards, and fueling stations. The million dollars that he’d made fishing for crabs in one season just disappeared. Like his crew, the investors were knocking at his door demanding their share, but the money wasn’t there. One story says that Luketa had invested $300,000–­$400,000 in a New York Harbor bond and lost almost all of it. Friends noticed that Dan had started to become weird and reclusive. A business associate said that Luketa turned sour and tried to screw everyone he had dealings with. He also developed some eccentricities. He started combing his hair forward so that it lay down on his forehead in bangs, and his voice took on an icy tone. By now he was suffering from diabetes and was nearly blind. People began to avoid him. To pay off his mounting debts, Luketa brought the Apollo back to Seattle and turned it over to his investors. Later in his life, Luketa fished for salmon in Alaska. He and his wife, Maxine, were also known to poach for salmon in Puget • 90 •

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Sound. After Maxine died in 1978, Luketa skippered the Crossroads in the salmon fishery off False Pass, Alaska. Even though he was nearly blind, he was physically able to do the hard work on deck and skipper the boat. He was still a top fisherman, catching around 300,000 pounds of salmon in a three-­month season. In 1983 Luketa was hospitalized for cancer. The disease was complicated by his diabetes. One day he refused further treatment, got up, and walked out of the hospital and went home. When the neighbors of his apartment hadn’t seen him for several days, they called for help. The firefighters who broke down the door found him on the floor; he’d been dead for about three days. Not many people showed up at his funeral at Saint Alphonsus Church in Ballard, by all accounts maybe eight or nine. The poor turnout surprised some of his old fishermen friends. In fact, there weren’t enough men to carry his casket, so one of them had to run down to the wharf and recruit a sixth pallbearer. There wasn’t even an obituary published in the newspaper. The German philosopher Nietzsche said that “if you gaze for long into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.” If you stare at the sea for long enough, you become lost in its vastness and realize your own insignificance. The sailor’s gaze looks outward beyond the horizon, far beyond his immediate world, for some sign of his future in a bigger cosmos. That must have been what happened to Dan Luketa at the end. He saw that he’d had a good run, but his ship was sinking. It had started as a slow leak, and then as his health failed, he realized the inevitability of his voyage. Eventually the sea swallows us all.

• 91 •

8: THE GEMINI YEARS A Tale of the Red-­Fleshed Pacific Salmon

Of all the mysteries and enigmas of our world, man is the strangest and most incomprehensible. John Steinbeck 1

In June 1971 the Western Flyer was working as a salmon tender in southeast Alaska for Whitney-­Fidalgo Seafoods. As a tender, fishermen transferred their salmon to the Flyer, which trucked the fish to the cannery so that the fishing boats didn’t have to make frequent long runs back to harbor when their holds were full. Sailing in heavy seas, the Flyer was laden with 120,000 pounds of Alaskan salmon when there was a loud crunch and a jaw-­clenching shudder. The crew was thrown down to the deck or up against walls. They had hit a reef near Tolstoi Island, close to Ketchikan. The skipper, Rudolph Young, sent out a Mayday, and the crew was rescued. But the keel of the boat was damaged and the on-­site inspection by the Coast Guard declared, “This SE Alaskan fish packer is considered a total loss.”2 A diver was sent down to put a plywood patch over the hull, and the boat was refloated. The catch was salvaged, and the boat was sent to Ketchikan for repairs, where they reinforced the inside of the hull. The Western Flyer was bandaged, but her days working on the open ocean were over. She was now relegated to work in the more sheltered waters of Puget Sound. The Flyer was too small and too slow to pursue salmon, and her bones had been broken and mended too many times. A fish tender is little more than a self-­powered barge, and as a “can-

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nery boat” the skippers changed frequently. Much of the boat’s history during this time is lost or tedious. By coincidence, the Flyer’s former owner Dan Luketa, now in the twilight years of fishing himself, sometimes delivered salmon to his old boat.3 In 1986 the Western Flyer was bought by an Anacortes fisherman named Ole Knudson. In 1990 an article appearing in the Skagit Valley Herald described the Flyer as a ship with turquoise tarnished brass fittings, rusted instruments, missing bulwarks, rotten boards, and a greasy engine. The new owner wasn’t impressed by the boat’s history with Steinbeck. Knudson said, “I thought big whoopie-­do.” Knudson mentioned that he had read The Log from the Sea of Cortez and he wasn’t impressed with it. “I guess it’s kind of neat that a famous author wrote a book about her [the Western Flyer], even if he [Steinbeck] was kind of a horny, beer-­drinking pervert. I guess if you got the money, you should enjoy it, and he did.”4 The Western Flyer had taken a circuitous route to arrive in the hands of Knudson. In 1970 Dan Luketa sold the boat, now called the Gemini, to Whitney-­Fidalgo Seafoods for $60,000 with 10 percent down and 8 percent interest. Whitney-­Fidalgo was founded by Sam Rubinstein, a fishing industry pioneer, in 1964. After the company went public and expanded in 1969, they bought the Flyer. Then in 1974, Whitney-­Fidalgo was sold to a Japanese company called Kyokuyo. However, under Japanese ownership, the Flyer, as a foreign-­owned boat greater than 500 tons weight, would be prevented from unloading fish caught in U.S. waters to a U.S. port by Section 27 of the Merchant Marine Act of 1920, popularly known as the Jones Act. Although cargoes of seafood and passengers were excluded from the original legislation, a further act passed in 1950 required that vessels loading fish needed to be flagged in the United States. In order to be flagged as an American vessel, the principal owners needed to be American. So Kyokuyo appears to have arranged a symbolic sale of the Gemini and its other boats to Citicorp Leasing Company for $10, and then Whitney-­ Fidalgo leased the boats back. This arrangement lasted until • 94 •

The Gemini Years

1985 when Whitney-­Fidalgo was merged into Farwest Fisheries, back under the ownership of Rubinstein. Soon after that, Ole Knudson and his father bought the Gemini for $25,000. Knudson reported in 1990 that he wanted to restore the boat to her original condition. He said, “There isn’t any special reason why I want her in original shape other than she ran for 50 years the way she was built. It must have worked, so getting her back to original may help her last another 50.” He said, “It’s a damn good boat.” He continued, “She was in pretty bad shape, but I want to fix her up as original. One reason is because I like the way things ought to be. And this boat isn’t right until it’s back to original.”5

 The demise of this quintessential fishing boat paralleled that of the iconic salmon fishery it was servicing. The decline of Pacific salmon stocks began over 160 years ago with the onset of the California gold rush.6 Excessive harvesting to feed the hungry miners, along with the impact of mining on stream habitat, decimated salmon in the Golden State. Hydraulic mines and dams were particularly destructive due to the production of silt in the extraction process. The silt drifted in the currents, clogging the gills of salmon fry, and it settled on the streambed, suffocating the eggs. In 1875 the first commissioner of the U.S. Bureau of Fisher­ ies, Spencer Baird, predicted that the future of Pacific salmon would be grim based on what had happened to Atlantic salmon.7 It was the same story on both coasts. Habitat loss, dams, and heavy fishing pressure decimated the stream-­ dependent salmon. Baird endorsed hatchery production and release of salmon to compensate for the loss of natural fish and to avoid the unpopular implementation of regulations on salmon harvests and land use. Baird’s actions started a policy of engineering our nation’s fisheries, much as we might engineer agricultural or forest production, and that tendency con• 95 •

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tinues today. However, the collateral effects of Baird’s policy were not foreseen. Although the goal of enhancing salmon runs with hatchery production was well intentioned, the problem with the hatcheries has been their detrimental effect on the natural runs of wild salmon and the inability of hatchery-­released fish to maintain themselves. The spiraling decline of natural salmon has been the rationale for a perpetual release of hatchery-­reared fish that may be more expensive to maintain than the value of the fish produced. About 5 billion salmon are released into the northeast Pacific Ocean each year, and hatchery-­released salmon represent about 75 percent of all salmon harvested in Washington waters. Flooding the seas with hatchery-­reared salmon may cause the overgrazing of prey resources, and the resulting competition with wild salmon for limited food contributes to their demise. The artificially produced fish may have simply overwhelmed the native salmon. Another factor in the demise of native salmon runs has been the hybridization of transferred stocks of salmon with the natural populations, causing a loss of the adaptive abil­ ity of natural populations to thrive in local conditions.8 Because salmon return to spawn in the same streams they were spawned in, the salmon populations are well adapted to local conditions. When these wild populations became depleted, they were supplemented with hatchery-­reared fish from other river systems. The frequent failure of hatchery fish to recolonize extinct natural populations illustrates the issues of local adaptation and natural biodiversity in wild fish. The hatchery-­reared fish undergo a process of natural selection in the hatchery that favors the survival of fish best able to survive that artificial environment. But they aren’t as fit as native salmon to survive in the natural environment. When they interbreed with wild salmon, they dilute the natural fitness of the wild population. The interaction of wild salmon and hatchery-­released fish operates like a feedback system in a downward spiral; more hatchery fish are produced to com• 96 •

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pensate for fewer wild fish, leading to more competition, more interbreeding, even fewer wild fish, and a need for increased production of hatchery fish. Hatchery-­reared fish are not the only hurdle for survival of wild salmon. The salmon story is full of complexities that depend on the different species and local circumstances. The anthropogenic effects of habitat degradation, blockage of migration waterways, water withdrawals, harvesting, non-­point-­ source pollution, and introduction of exotic species and diseases continue to affect salmon populations.9 In addition, the warming of water behind dams and the interruption of natural cycles of flooding that salmon have become adapted to over thousands of years have lowered survival rates. It’s not just the river habitat that impacts Pacific salmon species. Dr. Colin Levings, a Canadian biologist, thinks that estuaries and their degradation are critical to the demise of wild Pacific salmon, especially chinook. Coincidentally, in 1962–­ 63 while Levings was a young zoology student at the University of British Columbia, he worked on the Western Flyer for nine months. The International Pacific Halibut Commission chartered the boat to participate in a trawl survey of the coast and hired Levings as a technician.10 Levings didn’t realize that the boat he served on was famous from Steinbeck’s Sea of Cortez until years later.11 Now he is a senior scientist studying salmon habitat. Levings says that there is significant degradation of habitat in many estuaries, but he points out that because of the complex life history of the salmon, it is difficult to separate out the effects of any single environment on the fate of salmon survival. For example, the fitness of salmon arriving in the estuarine habitat is determined by conditions that they previously experienced upstream. Likewise, the condition of the fish when they arrive in the ocean is determined by the estuarine environment. Overall, the impact of man on salmon populations has been devastating. In the Columbia River system alone, it is • 97 •

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estimated that 55 percent of the original Pacific salmon runs covering 5 species are extinct, and another 13 have been listed as endangered species.12 In the Georgia Basin, which includes the Puget Sound region, 15 of 55 historical chinook salmon populations are now extinct, as are 6 of 14 of sockeye and 6 of 36 pink salmon runs. Coho and chum salmon have fared better in the Georgia Basin, with 0 of 50 and 3 of 56 becoming extinct, respectively.13 Overall, starting from the first Euro-­American exposure, about 29 percent of 1,400 Pacific salmon runs from California to Vancouver Island no longer exist. Not only have populations gone extinct, but the remaining populations are smaller. In Puget Sound, the historic run size of Pacific salmon has gone from 13–­27 million fish to 1.6 million, or about 8 percent of the original size.14 Despite ongoing hatchery efforts to “enhance” them, the National Academy of Science reported in 1996 that less than half of the salmon runs in Puget Sound are healthy. Furthermore, many of the “healthy” stocks have been buttressed and genetically contaminated with hatchery production. Puget Sound salmon fared better than those in the Columbia River, where only about one-­quarter of salmon populations were rated as healthy.15 Declines of salmon in the Columbia basin steepened in the 1930s with the damming of the river and construction of the hydro system. Don Gunderson wrote, “Salmon had been tacitly condemned to the same fate as the buffalo. They were no longer an important part of the new agro-­industrial cornucopia envisioned by the dam builders, their allies, and the politicians who were re-­designing the entire Columbia River Basin.”16 Prior to European settlement, the number of salmon returning to the Columbia River annually has been estimated at around 10–­16 million fish. Now the return is around 1 million, and most of those are hatchery-­produced fish. The average catch of salmon in Columbia River from 1880 to 1930 was about 34 million pounds and declined to about 1.2 million pounds by the 1980s. Columbia River hatcheries release around 235 million salmon juveniles into the river each year. • 98 •

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Natural events, and especially long-­term cycles in ocean climate, contribute to what has happened to wild Pacific salmon. Dr. Kate Myers, a respected (and now retired but still active) research biologist at the University of Washington, spent her whole career studying salmon in the ocean environment. Myers suspects that ocean productivity of salmon is high right now, particularly for chum and pink salmon, because we are in the middle of a cool period that favors the abundance of the prey of these species.17 The situation for salmon is quite similar to what Ed Ricketts described for sardines. The rise and fall of both fishes has been a consequence of the interaction of human intervention and variability in the natural environment. Prior to the late nineteenth century, salmon and sardines were primarily influenced by climate variability. With the threat of dramatic climate change induced by human activity, along with habitat alteration and overfishing, we might wonder if the role of man has completely eclipsed that of the natural environment to which the species have adapted over thousands of years.

 Pete Knutson (no relation to Ole Knudson) is a Puget Sound gillnetter. Although he didn’t deliver fish to the Western Flyer, Knutson is evocative of many fishermen who did. Fiercely independent, he looks like a well-­weathered version of the campus radical he once was at Stanford in the early 1970s. He has acquired a patina from storms at sea and in the politics of fisheries. Now he’s a socially responsible fisherman who’s concerned about the many factors affecting the future of the salmon and the traditional fishermen’s way of life. Knutson is also a professor in the anthropology department at Seattle Central College, which gives him a unique perspective. Knutson started fishing in 1972, probably just about the same time the Western Flyer moved back to Puget Sound. Back then it was a better time to fish in Puget Sound as the salmon were • 99 •

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still abundant. Now there aren’t so many salmon left there, and although he is still active in the Puget Sound salmon fisheries, Knutson travels to Alaska to catch most of his fish. Before he sets his fishing nets from his boat, the Njord, Knutson first “reads” the water, a process that forty years of fishing has taught him. Ripples are good, while currents, wind, color, and tides all play a role in deciding where to make a set. But each of the five major salmon species acts out a different role. Chums are offshore, while pinks and sockeye are close to the beach. Coho like back eddies. Knutson’s nets are 25 feet deep and anywhere from 1,200 to 1,800 feet long. They come in different tints for camouflage in different water hues and varying conditions of lighting and turbidity. The bottom of the net is held down by a lead line. He deploys the net parallel to the shore and lets the current billow it out. It’s good to put a hook shape in the net at either end to fool the fish. The net is left in the water for no longer than one and a half hours, but less if there is a lot of debris or seaweed in the water that would foul the net and make it more visible to the fish. The net is hauled back, and one or two of the crew pick the fish from the net while another dresses the salmon. The fish are bled, headed, cleaned, and put under ice within thirty minutes of landing on deck. This early care for the product is critical for its quality in the market. As a small, independent fisherman, it has been a challenge for Knutson to get a foothold in the salmon fishery. He says that the big cannery owners in Ketchikan, where he first offloaded his fish, wouldn’t sell him ice to chill his catch, so he had to install a refrigeration system on his boat. The logistics of getting fish from the water to the market was another challenge for the independent fisherman. He felt like the big fishing companies had put a bull’s-­eye on his back and made his business difficult. Now when he fishes in southeast Alaska, he operates out of a small village, Coffman Cove, which is supportive of small independent fishing cooperatives. He still has to get his catch of • 100 •

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fish unloaded from the boat and across the dock on his own. Then he packs the fish in ice and drives them to a terminal, where they are loaded on a ferry for the ride to Seattle, arriving within thirty-­six hours. In Seattle his salmon is sold in farmers’ markets, retailed online, and served in high-­end Seattle restaurants like Tilth, Ray’s Boathouse, and Canlis. Knutson has strong views about wild salmon. He thinks that salmon farms, where 600,000 to 1 million salmon are kept in net pens, are among the major threats to wild salmon populations. In particular, the salmon on the farms carry parasites and diseases that don’t exist in natural populations. Often the salmon farms are situated in channels right in the middle of wild salmon migration pathways, thereby infecting the endemic fish as they move through. It seems more than coincidental that many salmon runs in isolated areas declined precipitously just after salmon farms were installed nearby in the late 1980s. This has happened not only in the Pacific Northwest, but similar events have occurred in Norway. Habitat degradation is another factor that concerns Knut­ son, especially for species like coho and chinook, which spend over a year in a freshwater habitat. Knutson feels that natural runs of these species that have gone extinct won’t come back until the riverine habitat is improved, and those that remain will continue their decline unless something is done. To preserve his way of life for his sons, he works with conservation groups, such as the Sierra Club, to preserve salmon habitat. One recent struggle has been to oppose the increase of coal-­ carrying trains through the Pacific Northwest as a precaution for the potential effects of coal dust on salmon streams. Non-­ point-­ source pollution is another major concern. Knutson notes that efforts to impose a public fix on such environmental problems are often met with stiff opposition by the building, energy, agriculture, and timber industries.

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Somehow it seems fitting that the Western Flyer’s last fishery was the Pacific salmon. Salmon are a so-­ called keystone species: an organism whose presence influences a whole network of other animals in an ecosystem and gives the community its character. The salmon’s red meat is prized by seafood lovers. The salmon fishery and the Western Flyer have deteriorated together. The cost to restore both the fishery and the boat are enormous on their own different scales, and both have hidden costs and expenses continuing into perpetuity. In the Western Flyer’s situation, in spite of Ole Knudson’s pledge to return the boat to its original glory, the boat didn’t get repaired. Pictures taken some years later show that the Flyer was in declining condition. Toward the end of its working life, the boat was even used as a channel marker by Knudson. In 1940 Steinbeck had said of the Western Flyer, “Her engine was a thing of joy, spotlessly clean, the moving surfaces shining and damp with oil. The engine room floor was clean and all the tools polished and hung in their places.”18 But pictures of the engine room during recent years show it looking like a hurricane had run through it. Blue tarps were strewn on the deck to keep water from leaking inside. Knudson stopped working the boat in 1993 because it was too slow and too small to be an efficient vessel to taxi salmon to the cannery. Old boats are expensive to maintain. After the boat sank in 2012 and again in 2013, the cost of restoring the Western Flyer to its former glory was estimated at $1.5 million. The fate of Pacific salmon seems to hinge on theology as much as biology. Genesis 1:28 says, “Fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the air and over every living creature that moves on the ground.” Many people interpret this to mean that the earth was created to serve man. Like Sir Francis Bacon wrote, “The world is made for man, not man for the world.” Others read the same words and understand them to indicate that man should take care of the earth but also improve upon God’s creation. The problem with the implementation of • 102 •

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this view in salmon rivers was that our historic vision of watersheds was flawed, and it still is incomplete. Biologist James Lichatowich explains, “The earth was seen as a giant factory ‘furnished by a great engineer.’ People had the mission of subduing the wild elements, of ridding the land of animals and plants that were useless to humans, and of bringing the whole system under efficient control.”19 As Lichatowich points out, the scheme didn’t work as planned. When the Pacific salmon began to fall, a great effort was put forth to fix the problem. We thought we could intervene and correct the damage man had done to the wild salmon runs by supplementing them. After all, this is how we’ve learned to do things. Salmon recovery efforts in the Pacific Northwest have been costly. From 1982 to 2001, federal agencies spent $6.4 billion on salmon restoration.20 The average hatchery cost to produce an adult salmon in 2002 was reported at $40 and $175 per fish for autumn-­and spring-­run chinook, respectively, and $97 per silver salmon.21 Often, engineering nature isn’t the solution but instead becomes the problem. It’s like the catastrophic consequences of farming in the Great Plains states in the early twentieth century. Under the plow and with a lack of knowledge about soil science, the productive land became a dust bowl. Steinbeck wrote in The Grapes of Wrath, “The land bore under iron, and under iron gradually died.” Likewise, many of our current ecological problems come from the unintended consequences of our own technology, including self-­induced afflictions like greenhouse gases, oil spills, pollution, and nuclear waste, to name but a few. It is hard to engineer changes in a complex system toward a desired objective without sprouting unintended consequences someplace else in the system. Then we hope we can engineer a patch for that problem down the road a ways. In the Sea of Cortez, Steinbeck and Ricketts told the parable of the willow grouse in Norway. The popular game bird’s numbers were declining, much to the dismay of hunters. Government biologists put a bounty on its chief enemy, a hawk • 103 •

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known to feed on willow grouse, thinking that predation was the problem. Large numbers of the hawk were killed, but the grouse continued to decline, and, if anything, even more rapidly. It turned out that there was a parasitic disease that weakened the grouse, and the hawk caught the diseased birds because they were easy prey. When the predators were culled, the diseased birds survived to spread the parasite even more thoroughly. In this case, the hawks were actually preventing the disease from spreading and reaching full intensity. Perhaps unwittingly, Steinbeck and Ricketts’s parable foreshadows the impending fate of the Colorado River. Damming the river in order to tame it devastated the ecology of the Sea of Cortez. Now we are trying to somehow undo the damage. Salmon biologist Dr. Kate Myers spoke to me about one of the many complex interactions between salmon and human engineering.22 We know quite a lot about how the large dams on the Elwha, Snake, Rogue, Skagit, Fraser, and Columbia River systems directly impact native salmon populations. Fry swimming out to sea may get past the dams, but are often injured and suffer delayed mortality. Then the adults returning from their sojourn at sea need assistance to get past the dams and into their spawning habitat. But there are undreamed-­of consequences to damming rivers that we are only beginning to understand. In the Columbia River, the dams reduce flooding and periods of high flow that wash silt to the sea. After damming rivers, the silt settles on the river bottom, from which it needs to be dredged and removed. “Dredge islands” have been created from dumping the excavated silt. These islands are ideal habitat for Caspian terns and double-­crested cormorants, and have enabled these birds to thrive. But both of these bird species are prodigious consumers of juvenile salmonids, and recent studies show that they capture a significant proportion of out-­migrating salmon smolts. Myers points out the conundrum that we face. If we didn’t have the dams, we wouldn’t have cheap power. The arid lands of eastern Washington wouldn’t be irrigated to have apple • 104 •

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orchards, wheat farms, and vineyards. And if we didn’t have hatcheries to correct for the damage done by dams, we wouldn’t have the recreational and commercial salmon fisheries that we enjoy so much. Myers wonders what salmon runs would look like without hatchery enhancement. There is a certain view of nature built on the visions of Steinbeck and Ricketts as well as other spiritual founders of the Deep Ecology movement, like D. H. Lawrence, Aldo Leopold, Paul Ehrlich, Rachel Carson, Aldous Huxley, Robinson Jeffers, John Muir, Arne Naess, Gary Snyder, and others. In this view, rather than man dominating, controlling, and improving upon nature, our place in the world might be different. In this view, there is a holistic acceptance of the natural world on its own terms the way it is, rather than how it could be. In this view, we live in a complex interconnected ecosystem; the fate of one species, of one way of life, is connected to that of many others. Like John Muir said, “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.”23 What is to be the fate of wild salmon? What do salmon need in order to thrive? Can the dream of restoring vibrant wild salmon runs be realized? Or will the wild salmon populations decay like the Western Flyer did, until only memories will remain? In 1949 Aldo Leopold said of preserving ecosystems, “To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering.”24 That is, a holistic and eco-­centric approach is needed. The first step in salmon recovery is to protect what we have remaining. This includes conserving the biodiversity and complexity within each species, preventing overharvest of any one stock, and preserving the structure of the ocean ecosystem. The next step is to restore as much habitat as possible. Finally, assist the natural resilience of salmon to recover by having many populations spawn in different streams. Mitigation efforts are currently under way by artificially increasing the rate of recolonization and promoting the recovery in a natural way. This is • 105 •

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different from the typical hatchery procedure of stock transfer and enhancement. But instead, the objective is to maintain spatial patterns of genetic diversity by capturing native adults of the subject system, breeding them in captivity, and then releasing into areas where they’ve gone extinct.25

• 106 •

Tiny Colletto and Sparky Enea. Reprinted with permission of the Martha Heasley Cox Center for Steinbeck Studies, San Jose State University.

Purse seiners in Monterey Bay, 1940. Reprinted with permission of the National Steinbeck Center, Salinas, California.

Dan Luketa. Date and photographer unknown. Reprinted with permission of Anay Luketa.

Dan and Maxine Luketa. Date and photographer unknown. Reprinted with permission of Anay Luketa.

Catch of Pacific ocean perch. Swim bladders inflated and eyes popping out of their heads, the catch is floating at the surface. From the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s photo files.

The Western Flyer tied up in Bellingham, rigged as a trawler. Reprinted with permission of Whatcom County Museum.

The Western Flyer tied up in Alaska, doing a trawl survey for the International Pacific Halibut Commission, 1962. Reprinted with permission of Colin Levings.

Catch of red king crab. From the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s photo files.

The Western Flyer loaded with crab pots and in trouble in the Gulf of Alaska, July 31, 1964. The boat was rescued by the U.S. Coast Guard. Photographer Colin Levings. Reproduced with permission of Colin Levings.

The Western Flyer now named the Gemini tied up in the Swinomish Slough, March 2011. Photographer Kevin Bailey.

Chinook salmon. From the photo archives of the National Marine Fisheries Service, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

Top: The flying bridge of the Western Flyer after it sank in September 2012. Workers are preparing to lift it. Photographer Kevin Bailey. Bottom: The Western Flyer after it was raised in October 2012. Photograph reprinted with permission of Art Kendall.

The Western Flyer in dry dock in Port Townsend, August 2013. Photographer Kevin Bailey.

9 : T H E LO N G R OA D H O M E End of the Voyage

Mountain and ocean, rock, water and beasts and trees Are the protagonists, the human people are only the symbolic interpreters. Robins on Jeffers

When a bottle is cast into the sea, it rises and falls with the ocean swell as it drifts in the current. Along the way, it picks up some passengers. Maybe at first, a few crusting barnacles attach. They age and bleach, and then some twisting tube worms and razor-­sharp blue mussels fix themselves to it. Over time the microcosm changes members. The skeletons get covered over or fall off, and only traces of them remain. Finally, as the vessel traverses the ocean, the bottom shoals and a wave hoists it one last time to ride the surf ashore. The bottle tumbles to the sand, now a carcass treasured by beachcombers and destined for a windowsill. All journeys come to an end. Like the drifting bottle, the Western Flyer traveled the West Coast of North America. It engaged in different fisheries and hosted an ever-­changing cast of characters onboard. Soon enough, the boat’s own voyage along the Pacific coast will cease. The real estate development company that bought the boat plans to beach her in the landlocked city of Salinas. She will have to be cut into pieces to ship her by truck down the coast, and then at least parts of her will be restored and reassembled. The Western Flyer will become an ornament in the city to attract tourists, just three blocks from the birthplace of John Steinbeck. At first glance, it seems ironic that the Western Flyer could • 107 •

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end its life beached in Salinas. Most of the residents of Salinas used to hate Steinbeck, even though now he’s widely regarded as a local icon. He rebelled against the town’s snobbery and social order. As a young man, Steinbeck worked in the fields and factories around Salinas. He talked to hoboes and migrant workers to find out about their lives. Many of his stories exposed the class system in the valley’s agricultural industry. It wasn’t a popular topic to bring up in Salinas, and Steinbeck became a pariah. Things began to change when John Steinbeck won the Nobel Prize. His fame started to rub the tarnish off his reputation, revealing a shiny button that might embellish the city. When he died in 1968, people forgot all about the animosity. The city named the library after Steinbeck, and his boyhood home was preserved as a landmark. In 1998 the hometown opened a multimillion-­dollar museum dedicated to him. Steinbeck still casts a long shadow in the Salinas Valley, but now it has a cash-­green hue. Yet John Steinbeck had a special feeling for the Salinas Valley landscape. He wrote in 1933, “I was born to it [the Salinas Valley] and my father was. Our bodies came from the soil—­ our bones came . . . from the limestone of our own mountains and our blood distilled from the juices of the earth.”1 When Steinbeck traveled back through Salinas in 1960, he hiked to the top of Fremont Peak in the Gabilan Mountains. From there he looked out over the valley and said, “This solitary stone peak overlooks the whole of my childhood and youth.”2 Although Steinbeck was of the land, he also loved and drew inspiration from the ocean. Guided by Ed Ricketts, he observed the struggle for life in the tide pools. He brought these observations back to land, gave them human character, and made them the central theme of his stories: the struggle of man against man and that of man against nature. Throughout his life, Steinbeck was drawn back to the ocean by the siren’s reach of fog, the smell of seaweed, and his memories of Ricketts and the voyage of the Western Flyer. He said, “To me, personally, the oceans mean safety, mystery, and won• 108 •

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der.”3 The earth and sea were intertwined in Steinbeck’s nature. In East of Eden when he describes a well being drilled through interleaving sedimentary layers of topsoil, gravel, white sea sand with seashells and fragments of whale bone, and then black earth with bits of redwood, the narrator says, “Before the inland sea the valley must have been a forest. And it seemed to me that sometimes at night that I could feel both the sea and the redwood forest before it.”4 Some people say that the future setting of the Western Flyer as a fixture in a restaurant or boutique hotel would have Steinbeck rolling over in his grave, which is, by the way, about a mile away from the proposed dry berth of the boat. Steinbeck and his friend Ricketts preached against things crass and commercial. A central theme of Steinbeck’s novel Cannery Row is the rejection of mindless materialism and a celebration of the spiritual and the marginal in society. Now the old sardine canneries of Monterey, once the haunts of Steinbeck and Ricketts and other bohemians, are among the most popular tourist traps on the central coast, owing largely to Steinbeck’s unintended influence. Steinbeck wrote disapprovingly in Travels with Charley, “The canneries which once put up a sickening stench are gone, their places filled with restaurants, antique shops, and the like.”5 Ultimately, Steinbeck advocated that developers tear down Cannery Row and start something new.6 He said, “You can’t go home again because home has ceased to exist except in the mothballs of memory.”7 Instead, the city planners tried to retain some of the flavor of Cannery Row—­old-­looking buildings with retail shops inside. Will the Western Flyer find a similar fate with her bow pointed backward to retrace her journey instead of looking forward to the horizon? The alchemy that Steinbeck and Ricketts experienced in the Sea of Cortez can’t be re-­created.

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In June 2013 when the Gemini was refloated after spending six months on the bottom of the Swinomish Slough, it was rusted from the weathering of the exposed parts above the water and rotted with worm-­infested timbers below. The specter of a mortal ghost ship contrasted with the immortal image of the Western Flyer drawn by Steinbeck in the Sea of Cortez, that of a sturdy boat with a new crisp coat of white paint, sailing smartly through the blue seas of the Gulf of California: “With the colored streamers set high and snapping, she is very happy, her nose held high and her stern bouncing . . . proud and confident.”8 Befitting her new name, Gemini, the boat’s story has dueling themes. Conservation and exploitation are among the contrasting roles of the boat through its history. The Western Flyer explored life in the Sea of Cortez during a voyage of research and discovery. Then it returned to Monterey and harvested the California sardine resource until the fish were gone. After the sardines disappeared, the Flyer moved up the coast and fished the ill-­fated Pacific ocean perch as if clear-­cutting an ancient forest. Between the fishing seasons, the boat conducted surveys for the International Pacific Halibut Commission to research Japanese and Soviet fishing activity and to conserve the coastal fisheries.9 Dan Luketa renamed his boat the Gemini and then fished for king crab in the Aleutian Islands. Luketa struck it rich in the fishery, but when the crabs collapsed, his dreams were crushed. The boat returned south to service the remnants of the Pacific salmon fishery and to mark channels for the safe passage of fishing boats like a museum docent. The stocks of the Western Flyer’s fishing endeavors—­Pacific sardine, Pacific ocean perch, Aleutian Island red king crab, and wild Pacific salmon—­were all troubled fisheries. We have learned from these fisheries about the complicated interactions of fish populations, fishermen, and nature: what determines the health of fish populations is complex. In the spirit of the ecological holism of Steinbeck and Rick• 110 •

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etts, biologist and professor Don Gunderson says that societies that manage resources responsibly and in an earth-­sustaining manner do the following: —­Are fully mindful of the wealth embodied in the natural resources they have inherited, and committed to passing it on to future generations. —­Appreciate the complex nature of the ecosystems they rely upon, and manage them with caution and humility. —­Create laws, institutions, and marketplaces that effectively punish those who damage these ecosystems, and reward those who sustain them.10

Unlike physics, there aren’t simple and elegant solutions in fisheries. Biology is complicated and messy, especially because of the added element of behavior in both humans and fish, which is a quirky factor. “Sustainable marine fisheries” are not like the fields of “sustainable agriculture” and “sustainable forestry.” In these latter practices, we fertilize, seed, and replant. In fisheries, we just remove and sometimes replace; we can control the effects of man, but not dampen the effect of the environment. In the oceans, we have to mesh with nature to live within it, rather than engineer solutions to control it. In their book, Steinbeck and Ricketts wrote, “It is advisable to look from the tidepool to the stars and then back to the tidepool again.”11 In other words, switch views from the local and immediate to the bigger picture, and back once more. In doing so, perhaps we can find a perspective to unravel some of the damage we have done, while keeping in mind the global change in climate and ever-­increasing demand for resources. Legislation passed in 1935 created the Soil Conservation Service, now the National Resources Conservation Service, a large-­scale program to improve farming practices for drought mitigation, and to avoid another dust bowl era by protecting landscapes. Maybe wild Pacific salmon will also recover with good planning. Fisheries like that for Pacific ocean perch are • 111 •

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slowly rebuilding with conservative long-­range management practices although the immediate restrictions are economically painful. There is even hope for the Colorado River Delta in the Sea of Cortez. In November 2012, “Minute 319” was signed by Mexico and the United States, providing authority under the 1944 Water Treaty, for both countries to commit to restore the Colorado River Delta by dedicating water to sustain it. Negotiators for both countries partnered with Colorado River basin states, water users, and environmental organizations to concur that rather than fight over who gets how much water, to agree to a vision of an adaptable volume that depends on supply. Finally in May 2014, a symbolic pulse of water from the Colorado River was reported to reach the Sea of Cortez for the first time in decades.12

 The juxtaposition of the sea and landscape endows Salinas with a natural rhythm. Every summer when the atmosphere over the ocean heats up, the North Pacific high-­pressure system shifts north, and the clockwise circulation around it makes the wind blow down the coast. The upwelling of cold water from below the ocean’s surface intensifies. Warm moist air flows over the chilly surface, and vapor condenses into a cloud of low-­lying fog. It usually hangs just off the beach in a band on the horizon. This is a region known for its overcast and its clarity when the fog lifts. Down in the tail of the Salinas Valley around Paso Robles, the sun heats the air. Every day the hot gas rises and creates a sort of vacuum in its place. It sucks the fog-­laden coastal air in through the mouth of the valley. In the lowland where the salads grow, the fog flows past Salinas around three or four in the afternoon, just in time to cool off the workers in the fields. It cascades up the valley about 20 miles to Gonzales, where the moisture burns off. At night all that warm air aloft gets

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cold and tumbles back to earth, creating the morning offshore winds that push the fog back to sea. The valley inhales and exhales like a breathing animal. The low-­lying overcast rolls in and out, and the next day does it again. Steinbeck felt the rhythm deeply, saying, “Strange how I keep the tone of Salinas in my head like a remembered symphony.”13 The green valley with its golden hills is a landscape where your roots set in deep. You can’t tear them out cleanly—­ clods of the valley’s dirt stick with you, and its breath lingers. Maybe it’s good if the Western Flyer ends its saga back in Salinas on the central coast of California. This was, after all, the first home of John Steinbeck, who is the reason the boat is famous. The setting is dramatic and only 20 miles from Cannery Row. As the writing of this book comes to an end, the argument about the fate of the boat continues. Bob Enea of the Western Flyer Project says that the boat belongs in Monterey, home of the historic sardine fishery. Gerry Kehoe argues that “the economically struggling town Salinas simply deserves the Western Flyer more than the wealthy flourishing Monterey. Salinas doesn’t have a lot going for it, to be honest with you, but it is the birthplace of the great man.”14 In my own dreams, the Western Flyer is a skeleton perched in the hills overlooking the valley, her whale ribs bleaching in the sun. Steinbeck’s valley breathes in and out, as might a blacksmith’s bellows. The fog drifts in, stretches, and then lifts to reveal the hull of a ghost ship on Mount Toro sounding out in the wind. This is a land that harbors a sense of serenity for the resting carcass. Her dead oaken bones reach into the soil and merge with the roots of the living trees there. Like Tiny Colletto said when their voyage to the Sea of Cortez passed, “Nothing lasts. Everything has to end.”15

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AC KN OWLE DGMEN TS

I thank the following people for reading and commenting on specific chapters or the complete manuscript: Mike Macy, Mary Hunsicker, John Simpson, Mónica Orellana, Lorenzo Ciannelli, Dick Major, Jan Hartung, S. Eric Bailey, Boris Olich, Allen Petrich, Pete Knutson, John Simpson, Kate Myers, Knut Vollset, Orlay Johnson, Mattias Bailey, and Dan Sloan. Barbara Sjoholm made valuable editing suggestions. Peter Mountford’s writing class at Richard Hugo House workshopped one chapter. A group of test readers of the book made valuable comments. They include Sandy McCrae, Fred Utter, and Don Gunderson. Bob Enea generously shared much information about the boat, the sardine fishery, and characters on the voyage to the Sea of Cortez. Allen Petrich provided information on Western Boat Building Company. Boris Olich taught me much about his friend Dan Luketa, dragging on the Pacific coast, and crabbing in Alaska. I thank Allen Petrich, Bob Enea, Peter van Coutren of the Martha Heasley Cox Center for Steinbeck Studies, San Jose State University, Herb Behrens at the National Steinbeck Center, Clare Petrich, Anay Luketa, Dennis Copeland of the California History Room of the Monterey Public Library, Don Rothaus, Kelly Elder, Art Kendall, Anne Shaffer of the Coastal Watershed Institute, Kay Slagle, Colin Levings, Jeff Jewell at the Whatcom County Museum, and Joseph Govednik at the Foss Waterway Seaport for help making photos available. Charles R. Hitz generously provided a line drawing of the ship and deck plan. I appreciate interviews with the following: Mike Hemp, Bob • 115 •

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Enea, Tim Thomas—­“the sardine guy,” Gerry Kehoe, Dennis Copeland (and for access to the Monterey History section of the Monterey Public Library), Pat Hathaway, Allen Petrich, Colin Levings, Jim Winton, Kate Myers, Ole Knudson, Don Gunderson, Tor Tollesen, Carl Wedlund, Anay Luketa, Pete Knutson, Howard Carlough, Peter Haugen, Gabriel Skor, John Jacobsen, Mark Rubinstein, Peter Schmidt, Wilburn Hall, Sam Mezich, Tony Bozanich, and Bruce Whitemore. The following people/institutions supported my efforts with information and/or encouragement: Gary Stauffer, Wayne Palsson, Andrés Hermosilla, Elizabeth Corman, Steve Hirt, Phil Catalano, Mike Canino, Anne Shaffer, Victor Lundquist, Mónica Orellana, Kitty McKoon-­Hennick, Lisa Duff of the Salinas Public Library, Bret Lunsford of the Anacortes Museum, Carmel Findley, Melissa Farris of DNR, Richard Major for providing many contacts and his knowledge of the Croatian community, Tom Dunatov, Steve Kaimmer of the IPHC, Herb Behrens of the National Steinbeck Center, Captain Gene Davis—retired from USCG, Ron Burke of the Puget Sound Historical Society, Art Kendall, Rick Phinney, Dane Winters, Wayne Palsson, Alice Drury of NOAA, the Special Collections archives at Stanford University, Robert Gordon of the city of Monterey, and Mike Hoshlyk. When the manuscript was in revision, a book was published by Susan Shillinglaw on the marriage of Carol and John Steinbeck. Some of the freshness of my information was eclipsed by it. Rather than alter my narrative, I included annotations to Shillinglaw’s scholarly volume. A portion of chapter 3 was put together as an exchange between Steinbeck, Ricketts, and Berry, as author, scientist, and captain on the voyage to the Sea of Cortez. I thank the Penguin Group for permission to reprint phrases from the Sea of Cortez. Some of the dialogue in the book and scenes are, of course, re-­ created. When doing so, I attempted to use source materials to be as accurate as possible and to stay within the bounds of the characters as I came to know them. • 116 •

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Finally, I thank my editor Christie Henry at the University of Chicago Press and her production team, including Erin DeWitt, Micah Fehrenbacher, and Amy Krynak, for their encouragement, suggestions, and support. Carrie Wicks proofread the book. This book is my tribute not only to John Steinbeck, Ed Ricketts, and the rest of the cast who sailed on her, but also to the community of Salinas, where I grew up. It still feels like home to me.

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N OTES

Prologue 1. Michael Hemp founded the Cannery Row Foundation in 1983. Hemp is a historian and author of Cannery Row: The History of John Steinbeck’s Old Ocean View Avenue, first published in 1986. 2. Given the reputations of Steinbeck and Ricketts, it seems appropriate that the WB in the call sign WB4404 stands for Whiskey Bravo. 3. Bob Enea, interview, September 26, 2012. 4. Chad Hutson, “At Sea with Steinbeck,” Skagit Valley Herald, February 22, 1990. 5. Rick Phinney, e-­mail, December 4, 2013. 6. Dania Akkad, “Kehoe Told to Get Out of Oldtown,” Monterey County Herald, August 17, 2005. 7. Dania Akkad, “Oldtown Hotel Plan, Take Two,” Monterey County Herald, April 12, 2006; Adam Joseph, “New Salinas Club Complex Is Bucking the Odds in a High-­End Gamble,” Monterey County Weekly, August 5, 2010. 8. Steve Chawkins, “A Dispute over Boat from the Sea of Cortez,” Los Angeles Times, February 18, 2013. 9. David Schmatz, “Developer Wants Salinas to Fork Over Bucks to Help for Slow-­Moving Projects,” Monterey County Weekly, December 5, 2013. 10. In January 2011, I visited the boat at its moorage under a bridge near Anacortes. As I drove up to the boat, I was excited and full of optimism. I noticed a man fiddling with the lock of the gate to the dock where the boat was tied up. I thought, What luck! The man’s back was turned to me. I hailed him, “Hello, are you the owner of the Western Flyer?” He didn’t respond, but his shoulders tightened up, so I knew he’d heard me. He wore an old army jacket and looked disheveled. Louder, I said, “Excuse me, do you know about this boat?” Now he turned around to face me. “Yeah, I used to own the boat. I sold it.” I was surprised at my stroke of luck and said, “Can I ask you a few questions?” He answered, “I don’t like to talk.” I said, “Okaaay, I see,” as I slowly backed away. I wasn’t prepared for an encounter with this • 119 •

N o t e s t o Pa g e s x– 4 guy under a highway bridge. The introduction to the boat surprised and disappointed me, foreshadowing the events to develop over the next three years. 11. Chawkins, “A Dispute over Boat from the Sea of Cortez.” 12. E-­mail of October 3, 2010, to R. Enea, other members of the Western Flyer Project, and sixteen others. 13. Chawkins, “A Dispute over Boat from the Sea of Cortez.” 14. Several versions of the plan were announced in newspaper articles by the owner, and officials of agencies that I interviewed had been told different stories for what Kehoe planned to do with the boat. 15. Charlie Bermant, “The Past-­Due Rent of Wrath: Boat Linked to John Steinbeck Becomes $7,978 Port of Port Townsend Liability,” Peninsula Daily News, September 15, 2013. 16. Ibid. 17. Jackson J. Benson, Looking for Steinbeck’s Ghost (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1988). 18. Susan Shillinglaw, Coast Weekly, June 25–­July 1, 1998. 19. Nelson Valjean, John Steinbeck: The Errant Knight (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1975). 20. John Steinbeck and Edward F. Ricketts, Sea of Cortez: A Leisurely Journal of Travel and Research (New York: Viking Press, 1941). 21. D. Coers, “Summary of Cannery Row Reunion,” www.canneryrow .org/reunion_summary.html. 22. Peter Kopecky, “Nature Writing in American Literature: Inspirations, Interpretations, and Impacts of California Authors on the Deep Ecology Movement,” Trumpeter 22, no. 2 (2006); Rodney Rice, “Circles in the Forest: John Steinbeck and the Deep Ecology of ‘to a God Unknown,’” Steinbeck Review 8, no. 2 (2011).

Chapter One 1. John Steinbeck and Edward F. Ricketts, Sea of Cortez: A Leisurely Journal of Travel and Research (New York: Viking, 1941). 2. Katherine Rodger, ed., Renaissance Man of Cannery Row: Life and Letters of Edward F. Ricketts (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2002). 3. Michael J. Lannoo, Leopold’s Shack and Ricketts’s Lab (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010). 4. Her name was Jean Ariss. Susan Shillinglaw, Carol and John Steinbeck: Portrait of a Marriage (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2013). 5. There has been some speculation that his death was a planned suicide. • 120 •

N o t e s t o Pa g e s 5 – 1 2 6. A type of boat that encircles fish with its net, described further in chapter 4. 7. The new naming convention of the American Fisheries Society is to capitalize all first letters of the common name, but this has yet to be adopted internationally. I will keep the old system of naming fish consistent with what I was using when I started writing the book. 8. In 1962–­63, the Western Flyer did a trawl survey for the International Pacific Halibut Commission to assess the abundance of Pacific halibut on the West Coast. In 1965, the Western Flyer was contracted to conduct an exploratory survey for Pacific hake off the Oregon-­ Washington coast for the U.S. Bureau of Commercial Fisheries. 9. Luketa’s other boats were named the Apollo and the Astronaut.

C h a p t e r T wo 1. John Steinbeck, The Log from the Sea of Cortez (New York: Viking Penguin Books, 1951). 2. John Steinbeck. Permit application, 1940 (California History Room, Monterey Public Library). 3. Bob Enea, interview, September 20, 2012. 4. John Steinbeck, letter to Herb and Rosa Kline, March 7, 1940. In Katherine Rodger, ed., Renaissance Man of Cannery Row: Life and Let‑ ters of Edward F. Ricketts (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2002). 5. Ibid. 6. Sparky Enea, With Steinbeck in the Sea of Cortez, as Told to Audrey Lynch (Los Osos, CA: Sand River Press, 1991). 7. Bonnie Gartshore, “The Skipper: Tony Berry Speaks of His Boat, Steinbeck and That Fateful Voyage 55 Years Ago,” Monterey County Herald, December 3, 1995. 8. “Steinbeck, Peeved, Puts to Sea on a Boat Called Unfair by C.I.O.,” Los Angeles Times, March 14, 1940. 9. Bob Enea, interview, September 26, 2012. 10. John Steinbeck and Edward F Ricketts, Sea of Cortez: A Leisurely Journal of Travel and Research (New York: Viking, 1941). 11. Gregory MacDonald, “Steinbeck and the Western Flyer” (manuscript; San Jose State University Library, Steinbeck Room, 2002). 12. The author sailed on Western Boat Building’s John Cobb in 1975. The Cobb was a 93-­foot fishing boat built in 1950. It was notable for its cozy comfort and, at least the author felt, an exceptionally fine ride even in rough seas. • 121 •

N o t e s t o Pa g e s 1 2 – 16 13. Much of the information on Martin Petrich and Western Boat Building comes from interviews with Martin Petrich and Clare Petrich, and from Mary Ann Petrich and Barbara Roje, The Yugoslav in Washington State: Among the Early Settlers (Tacoma: Washington State Historical Society, 1984). 14. Martinac is still a major player in the shipbuilding industry, while Western Boat Building went out of business in 1973. 15. Petrich and Western Boat Building would own 50 percent in shares of the Flyer, with 25 percent going to Anton “Anthony or Tony” Berry and 25 percent to his father, Frank Berry. The Petrich ownership was further divided among three of Martin’s sons. 16. Petrich specialized in building for the local Croatian community. Petrich often entered into partnerships with the Croatian fishermen whose boats he built. 17. Seventy-­one feet is the length measured and reported by the Coast Guard. Their measurement is taken at the waterline. The more common measurement of the Western Flyer is 76 feet, measured as the maximum stem-­to-­stern length of the hull. This is the length used by Steinbeck in Sea of Cortez. 18. In 1937 the Flyer was headed into an uncertain and perilous world. Hitler had just announced his war plans in Europe. In April the German Luftwaffe had destroyed the Basque city of Guernica in Spain. A prison camp called Buchenwald had opened. Japan had joined Germany in an anti-­communist alliance called the Anti-­Comitern Pact, and it looked like Italy would join in. The Japanese had invaded China and were headed toward Nanking. There were rumors of atrocities being committed along the way. It was hard to say if the country would pull out of the Depression. 19. The Bureau of Fisheries was consolidated into the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in 1940; in 1956 it was separated out as the Bureau of Commercial Fisheries in the Department of Interior, and in 1970 it transformed into the National Marine Fisheries Service in the Department of Commerce. The Western Flyer was involved in a program to tag salmon in Bristol Bay, as American fishermen complained that the Japanese high-­seas salmon fishery was impacting Alaska stocks. 20. Robert DeMot, ed., Working Days: The Journals of the Grapes of Wrath, 1938–­1941 (New York: Penguin Books, 1989). 21. Joseph Campbell, letter to Ed Ricketts, October 10, 1939. Stanford University Special Collections, box 9, M291.

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N o t e s t o Pa g e s 16 – 2 2 22. Eric Enno Tamm, Beyond the Outer Shores (New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 2004). 23. The original lab was located in Pacific Grove. In 1930 the lab was moved to Ocean View Avenue in Monterey on Cannery Row. 24. Richard Astro, John Steinbeck and Edward F. Ricketts: The Shaping of a Novelist (New Berlin, WI: University of Minnesota Press, 1973). 25. Steinbeck, The Log from the Sea of Cortez. 26. Rodger, Renaissance Man of Cannery Row. 27. John Steinbeck, Cannery Row (New York: Viking Press, 1945). 28. Tom Leyde, “Cannery Row’s Real Doc—­Ed Ricketts,” The Sun, January 27, 1981. 29. C. P. Pearson Steinbeck, unpublished. 30. Tamm, Beyond the Outer Shores. 31. Enea, With Steinbeck in the Sea of Cortez. 32. Tamm, Beyond the Outer Shores. 33. Jackson J. Benson, John Steinbeck, Writer: A Biography (New York: Penguin, 1990). 34. John C. Rice, “That Man Steinbeck,” Salinas Californian, August 18–­19, 1939. 35. Ibid. 36. S. Shillinglaw, Carol and John Steinbeck: Portrait of a Marriage (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2013). 37. Stephen Larsen and Rubin Larsen, A Fire in the Mind: The Life of Joseph Campbell (New York: Doubleday, 1991). 38. Astro, John Steinbeck and Edward F. Ricketts. 39. Ibid. 40. Jay Parini, John Steinbeck: A Biography (New York: Henry Holt, 1995). 41. Astro, John Steinbeck and Edward F. Ricketts. 42. Benson, John Steinbeck, Writer. 43. Audrey Lynch, interviews with Sparky Enea, undated, National Steinbeck Center Archives, Salinas, CA. 44. Benson, John Steinbeck, Writer. 45. Shillinglaw, Carol and John Steinbeck. 46. Steinbeck, The Log from the Sea of Cortez. 47. Gartshore, “The Skipper.” 48. Michael J. Lannoo, Leopold’s Shack and Ricketts’s Lab (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010). 49. Gartshore, “The Skipper.” 50. Dave Nordstrand, “Sailing with Steinbeck,” Salinas Californian, September 3, 1993.

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N o t e s t o Pa g e s 2 2 – 2 7 51. Sparky Enea, With Steinbeck in the Sea of Cortez. 52. Jimmy Costello, “Steinbeck, Ricketts Embark on Cruise,” Monterey Peninsula Herald, March 11, 1940.

Chapter Three 1. Charles Haskins Townsend, “Scientific Results of the Expedition to the Gulf of California in Charge of C. H. Townsend, by the U.S. Fisheries Steamship ‘Albatross’ in 1911. Commander G. H. Burrage, U.S.N., Commanding,” Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History 35 (1916). The Albatross was reportedly the first vessel built specifically to conduct marine research in 1882. It worked for the U.S. Fish Commission with a navy crew. It was sold and served as a schooling and training ship. In 1928 the ship arrived in Hamburg, and its crew demanded that the ship be auctioned to pay their wages. There its story ends mysteriously. 2. W. Beebe, Zaca Venture (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1938). 3. The reviewer in the Milwaukee Journal commented that Steinbeck showed “strength in his writing and a way with words.” Steinbeck and Ricketts were aware of Beebe’s work as they list the book in the appendix of Sea of Cortez. The similar nature of their journeys, taken only four years apart, is striking. 4. P. L. Fradkin, A River No More: The Colorado River and the West (New York: Knopf, 1981). 5. Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac (New York: Oxford University Press, 1949). 6. R. D. Sagarin et al., “Remembering the Gulf: Changes to the Marine Communities of the Sea of Cortez since the Steinbeck and Ricketts Expedition of 1940,” Frontiers of Ecology and the Environment 6 (2008). The authors of this report took part in a much-­heralded cruise in 2004 to the Gulf of California, retracing the original cruise track of the Western Flyer and sampling in the same area to document changes over the past sixty years. 7. Jimmy Costello, “Steinbeck, Ricketts Embark on Cruise,” Monterey Peninsula Herald, March 11, 1940. 8. Bonnie Gartshore, “The Skipper: Tony Berry Speaks of His Boat, Steinbeck and That Fateful Voyage 55 Years Ago,” Monterey County Herald, December 3, 1995. 9. The following “journal dialogue” is re-­created from the quotes extracted from Ricketts’s notes that he kept on the cruise and are • 124 •

N o t e s t o Pa g e s 2 9 – 3 7 published in J. W. Hedgpeth, ed., The Outer Shores, Part 2 (Eureka, CA: Mad River Press, 1978). Captain Tony Berry’s deck log that he kept on the cruise is in Hedgpeth’s The Outer Shores, Part 2, and from John Steinbeck’s narrative in the log portion of Sea of Cortez, coauthored by John Steinbeck and Ed Ricketts. 10. Costello, “Steinbeck, Ricketts Embark on Cruise.” 11. Sparky Enea, With Steinbeck in the Sea of Cortez, as Told to Audrey Lynch (Los Osos, CA: Sand River Press, 1991). 12. Jackson J. Benson, John Steinbeck, Writer: A Biography (New York: Penguin, 1990). 13. Audrey Lynch. Interviews with Sparky Enea, undated, National Steinbeck Center Archives, Salinas, CA. 14. S. Shillinglaw, Carol and John Steinbeck: Portrait of a Marriage (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2013). 15. John Steinbeck, letter to McIntosh and Otis Agency, April 6, 1940. In Elaine Steinbeck, ed., Steinbeck: A Life in Letters (New York: Penguin, 1976). 16. Katherine Rodger, ed., Renaissance Man of Cannery Row: Life and Letters of Edward F. Ricketts (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2002). 17. Ibid. 18. Michael J. Lannoo, Leopold’s Shack and Ricketts’s Lab (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010). 19. Rodger, Renaissance Man of Cannery Row. 20. Lannoo, Leopold’s Shack and Ricketts’s Lab. 21. Shillinglaw, Carol and John Steinbeck. 22. J. R. McElrath, J. S. Crisler, and S. Shillinglaw, eds., John Steinbeck: The Contemporary Reviews (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Betty Louise Yates Perez, “The Collaborative Roles of John Steinbeck and Edward F. Ricketts in the Narrative Section of Sea of Cortez” (PhD diss., University of Florida, 1972). 23. W. O. Ross, “John Steinbeck: Earth and Stars,” in Steinbeck and His Critics, ed. E. W. Tedlock and C. V. Wicker (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1957). 24. Peter Lisca, “John Steinbeck: A Literary Biography,” in Steinbeck and His Critics, ed. Tedlock and Wicker. 25. Joseph Campbell, letter to Ed Ricketts, December 26, 1941, Stanford University Special Collections, box 9, M291. 26. Rodney Rice, “Circles in the Forest: John Steinbeck and the Deep Ecology of ‘to a God Unknown,’” Steinbeck Review 8, no. 2 (2011). 27. John Steinbeck and E. F. Ricketts, Sea of Cortez: A Leisurely Journal of Travel and Research (New York: Viking Press, 1941). • 125 •

N o t e s t o Pa g e s 3 8 – 4 5 28. John Steinbeck, In Dubious Battle (New York: Viking, 1938). 29. Sparky Enea, With Steinbeck in the Sea of Cortez, as Told to Audrey Lynch (Los Osos, CA: Sand River Press, 1991). 30. Gregory MacDonald, “Steinbeck and the Western Flyer” (manuscript; San Jose State University Library, Steinbeck Room, 2002). 31. H. Gilroy, “Steinbeck’s Living Sea,” New York Times, September 16, 1951.

Chapter Four 1. Bonnie Gartshore, “The Skipper: Tony Berry Speaks of His Boat, Steinbeck and That Fateful Voyage 55 Years Ago,” Monterey County Herald, December 3, 1995. 2. Following the convention at the time, the landings reported here prior to 1967 are short tons. From 1981 onward, they are metric tons. The numbers are fairly close: 1 short ton equals 0.907 metric ton. The peak catch includes all reporting areas, not just California. 3. C. Chiang, Shaping the Shoreline (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008). 4. In 1889 the Golden Gate Packing Company in San Francisco started canning sardines. The plant closed in 1893 and sold its equipment to the California Fish Company in San Diego. They operated until 1909 before closing. E. Ueber and A. MacCall, “The Rise and Fall of the California Sardine Empire,” in Climate Variability, Climate Change, and Fisheries, ed. M. H. Glanz (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 31–­48. Booth first came to Monterey to can salmon in 1896, but that venture didn’t work. He returned in 1902 to can salmon and sardines in a lean-­to shed and packed under the label Monterey Packing Company beginning in 1903. Most of the sardines were sold in Asia. The Pacific Fish Company opened a cannery in 1908. Chiang, Shaping the Shoreline. 5. Bob Enea, The Rise and Fall of the Monterey Fishing Industry. Video production, 100 Story Project, Museum of Monterey, 2011; Bob Enea Fishing Comes to Monterey. Video production, Museum of Monterey, 2011. Bob Enea, “A Brief Sketch of the Monterey Sardine Fishing Industry” (undated manuscript, Monterey Public Library, California History Room). 6. W. L. Scofield, “Purse Seines and Other Roundhaul Nets in California,” Fish Bulletin (California Department of Fish and Game, 1951). 7. Ibid. 8. Gregory MacDonald, “Steinbeck and the Western Flyer” (manuscript; San Jose State University Library, Steinbeck Room, 2002). • 126 •

N o t e s t o Pa g e s 4 6 – 5 6 9. Stephen R. Palumbi and Carolyn Sotka, The Death and Life of Monterey Bay (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2011). 10. Chinese immigrants had set up a fishing village in Monterey in 1853. They dried the bulk of their catch and sent it to San Francisco. Portuguese whalers settled the area in 1855. The first Italians, from the area around Genoa, arrived in 1873. In the 1890s, Japanese settlers arrived and set up an abalone fishery around Whaler’s Cove near Point Lobos. Chiang, Shaping the Shoreline. 11. T. Mangelsdorf, A History of Steinbeck’s Cannery Row (Santa Cruz, CA: Western Tanager Press, 1986). 12. E. F. Ricketts, Monterey Peninsula Herald, February 27, 1942. 13. Scofield, “Purse Seines and Other Roundhaul Nets in California.” 14. Some of the descriptions of sardine fishing are adapted from descriptions in the video of Bob Enea, A Day in the Life of a Fisherman (Museum of Monterey, 2011). 15. W. L. Scofield, “Sardine Fishing Methods at Monterey, California,” California Division of Fish and Game, Fish Bulletin 19 (1929). 16. Scofield, “Purse Seines and Other Roundhaul Nets in California.” 17. Arthur F. McEvoy, The Fisherman’s Problem (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 18. The maximum sustainable yield is an estimate of the catch that the population can sustain each year, while maintaining a level of the population great enough to replace what was caught. 19. McEvoy, The Fisherman’s Problem. 20. Mangelsdorf, A History of Steinbeck’s Cannery Row. 21. A. D. MacCall, “Population Estimates for the Waning Years of the Pacific Sardine Fishery,” California Cooperative Oceanic Fisheries Inves‑ tigations Report 20 (1979). 22. McEvoy, The Fisherman’s Problem. 23. Ibid. 24. Ibid. 25. Mangelsdorf, A History of Steinbeck’s Cannery Row. 26. McEvoy, The Fisherman’s Problem. 27. Mangelsdorf, A History of Steinbeck’s Cannery Row.

Chapter Five 1. C. Chiang, Shaping the Shoreline (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008). 2. Ibid. 3. John Steinbeck, Sweet Thursday (New York: Viking, 1954). • 127 •

N o t e s t o Pa g e s 5 6 – 5 9 4. E. F. Ricketts, “Science Studies the Sardine,” Monterey Peninsula Herald, March 7, 1947. 5. E. F. Ricketts, letter to Rich Lovejoy, October 22, 1946, in, Katherine Rodger, ed., Renaissance Man of Cannery Row: Life and Letters of Edward F. Ricketts (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2002). 6. E. F. Ricketts, letter to Monterey Peninsula Herald, undated [1948]. 7. I was excited to learn of a letter from Gene Huntsman, a close colleague of Hjort, to Ricketts that was housed at the Special Collections Archive at Stanford University. However, when I inspected it in August 2013, I found it was only a receipt of payment for a reprint article. 8. Eric Enno Tamm, “Of Myths and Men in Monterey,” San Francisco Chronicle, October 16, 2005. 9. In Ricketts’s landmark book published in 1939, Between Pacific Tides, there is no mention of the demise of the California sardine in either the original edition or in the version revised by Ricketts and published in 1948. After his death, a new edition slightly revised by Joel Hedgpeth in 1952 likewise makes little mention of sardines. Then in the fourth edition of 1968, there are major changes by Hedgpeth. To answer the question “What did happen to the sardines?” Hedgpeth writes in detail about oceanography, red tides, and pollution without a mention of overfishing other than to pose this question: “Were we overfishing these apparently inexhaustible stocks of fish?” He goes on to point out changes in the ocean without delving into the fishery. Clearly, Hedgpeth’s opinions diverged from Ricketts’s own views, even though Ricketts would appear to be the author of these views if one didn’t trace back when the changes in the book transpired. 10. Rodger, Renaissance Man of Cannery Row. 11. “Sardine Pack More than Triple That of Previous Season,” Monterey Herald, February 4, 1949. 12. “Fish in Fifty Is the Promise of Scientists,” Monterey Herald, April 2, 1948. 13. “Sardine Pack More than Triple That of Previous Season.” 14. J. L. McHugh and E. H. Ahlstrom, “Is the Pacific Sardine Disappearing?,” Scientific Monthly 72, no. 6 (1951). Ahlstrom later joined the Bureau of Commercial Fisheries. 15. E. Ueber and A. MacCall, “The Rise and Fall of the California Sardine Empire,” in Climate Variability, Climate Change, and Fisheries, ed. M. H. Glanz (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).

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N o t e s t o Pa g e s 6 0 – 6 7 16. Arthur F. McEvoy, The Fisherman’s Problem (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 17. McEvoy, The Fisherman’s Problem. 18. Ibid. 19. A. D. MacCall, “Population Estimates for the Waning Years of the Pacific Sardine Fishery,” California Cooperative Oceanic Fisheries Investigations Report 20 (1979); J. Radovich, “The Collapse of the California Sardine Fishery: What Have We Learned?,” California Cooperative Oceanic Fisheries Investigations 23 (1982); V. N. Agostini, “Climate, Ecology and Productivity of Pacific Sardine (Sardinops sagax) and Hake (Merluccius productus)” (PhD diss., University of Washington, 2005); M. Lindegren et al., “Climate, Fishing, and Fluctuations of Sardine and Anchovy in the California Current,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 110, no. 33 (2013); E. R. Deyle et al., “Predicting Climate Effects on Pacific Sardine,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2013). 20. Ueber and MacCall, “The Rise and Fall of the California Sardine Empire,” p. 35. 21. Bonnie Gartshore, “The Skipper: Tony Berry Speaks of His Boat, Steinbeck and That Fateful Voyage 55 Years Ago,” Monterey County Herald, December 3, 1995. 22. Dave Nordstrand, “Sailing with Steinbeck,” Salinas Californian, September 3, 1993.

Chapter Six 1. Quoted in RaeJean Hasenoehrl, Everett Fishermen (Charleston, SC: Arcadia, 2008). 2. In the 1950–­60s, fur coats were popular, and commercial mink farms raised animals for their pelts. Scrap fish was a popular and inexpensive feed for the minks. 3. Sig Hansen and Mark Sundeen, North by Northwest (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2010). Sverre Hansen was the father of Sig Hansen, one of the stars of the television program Most Dangerous Catch. Some of the stories about Luketa are also told in their book, and I heard many of them repeated in interviews. 4. The newspaper in Monterey probably called any red rockfish including Pacific ocean perch a rosefish, or “rosie,” as they are related to the rosefish, or redfish, of the Atlantic Ocean. However, in Washington State, fishermen referred to the splitnose rockfish as rosefish. This

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N o t e s t o Pa g e s 7 0 – 8 0

5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13.

14. 15.

species becomes more abundant than Pacific ocean perch toward the south. Donald Gunderson, The Rockfish’s Warning (Seattle: University of Washington Bookstore Press, 2011). These early catch statistics don’t include discarded fish, which we presume to be a massive amount. Stanton Patty, “Better Vessels Seen for Trawler Fleet,” Seattle Times, January 4, 1966. D. Gunderson reports that by the late 1960s the fishermen had their own man in the weighing shack to monitor the weighing process. Patty, “Better Vessels Seen for Trawler Fleet.” Boris Olich, compiled from multiple interviews with Kevin Bailey (2011–­13). Dayton L. Alverson, Race to the Sea (New York: iUniverse, 2008). “Protection Asked for Coastal Fishery,” Seattle Times, April 9, 1965. Charles Loftus was the skipper with two deckhands and three biologists. One of the biologists was Colin Levings. Colin Levings, interviews, December 19, 2013; February 8, 2013. Levings remembers the Western Flyer as a great sea boat and very comfortable. The head was outside of the galley door on the portside, and there was a cold-­water shower. They came into port every two and a half weeks and stayed in a hotel with a hot shower. The chief scientist’s log makes frequent mention of sighting Japanese whalers and Russian trawlers, having radio and electronic problems, encountering big storms, catching salmon, and shooting deer. Levings said that Dan Luketa was a bit of a “tightwad.” They had several months’ worth of meat stored in Kodiak, and when they found it had been stolen, Luketa said that they’d have to “make due.” The Norwegian crew resorted to hunting birds and deer. The captain’s log is very brief, with frequent mention of high winds and swells, and snags on the trawl stations, hang-­ups, and torn nets. There is also a haul log that details what was caught and how much of it. Donald Gunderson, interview, December 9, 2013. The situation of the Japanese fishery that Steinbeck and Ricketts saw in 1940 isn’t much different than that encountered by the author in 1974 as an observer on a Japanese crab fishing mother ship in the Bering Sea. The company managers were greatly underreporting their catches, and when they were confronted, the ship’s crew of nice individuals turned into a hostile group. Kevin Bailey, Billion-­Dollar Fish (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013). Even today, environmental crimes are committed by individuals, prob‑ • 130 •

N o t e s t o Pa g e s 8 1 – 9 4 ably nice people who might even believe in conservation, working for industrial fishing companies that claim to be squeaky clean. In 2013 one of those major seafood companies was ticketed by the NOAA for underreporting catches on a wide scale. Seattle Times Business Staff, “American Seafoods Fined over Alleged Deception,” Seattle Times, June 1, 2013. Who knows how widespread this practice really is?

Chapter Seven 1. His name appears on Coast Guard documents as Ray, although some people say it was Rey. 2. Jurgen Westrhiem, as reported by Don Gunderson, personal communication. 3. George Moskovita, Living Off the Pacific Ocean Floor: Stories of a Lifetime Commercial Fisherman off the Pacific Coast (Astoria, OR: by author, 2000). 4. John Sjong, interview, January 28, 2010. 5. Sig Hansen and Mark Sundee, North by Northwest (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2010). 6. Well, that’s how the story plays on the waterfront. Sometimes his prosthetic shifts from a claw to a hook. 7. There’s also another version of this story that isn’t as well known. Some people on the docks say that the crew on the Western Flyer might have stuffed him in the pot and lowered him to the bottom of the sea. They left that pot there as Jackie’s casket. 8. W. McCloskey, “Asking for It,” in Out on the Deep Blue, ed. L. L. Fields (New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2001). 9. Howard Carlough, interview, December 28, 2011. 10. This fishery persisted longer than the Aleutian crab fishery, but the bottom dropped out in 1980.

Chapter Eight 1. John Steinbeck, “Let's Go After the Neglected Treasures Beneath the Sea,” Popular Science, September 1966, 84–­87. 2. U.S. Coast Guard Report, cited in G. MacDonald, “Steinbeck and the Western Flyer” (manuscript; San Jose State University Library, Steinbeck room, 2002). 3. Pete Knutson, interview, June 7, 2013; Ole Knudson, interview, February 18, 2013. • 131 •

N o t e s t o Pa g e s 9 4 – 9 8 4. Chad Hutson, “At Sea with Steinbeck,” Skagit Valley Herald, February 22, 1990. 5. Ibid. 6. R. T. Lackey, D. H. Lach, and S. L. Duncan, “Wild Salmon in Western North America: The Historical and Policy Context,” in Salmon 2100: The Future of Wild Pacific Salmon, ed. R. T. Lackey, D. H. Lach, and S. L. Duncan (Bethesda, MD: American Fisheries Society, 2006). 7. D. L. Bottom et al., “Reconnecting Social and Ecological Resilience in Salmon Ecosystems,” Ecology and Society 14, no. 1 (2009). 8. F. Utter, “Population Genetics, Conservation and Evolution in Salmonids and Other Widely Cultured Fishes: Some Perspectives over Six Decades,” Reviews in Fish Biology and Fisheries 14 (2004). 9. Lackey, Lach, and Duncan, “Wild Salmon in Western North America.” 10. Colin Levings, interviews, February 8, 2013; December 19, 2013. 11. The young student Levings took a correspondence course on philosophy with him on the nine-­month survey and did his work at the table in the galley under the watchful eyes of the Norwegian crew. Levings, stimulated by his work on the Flyer, kept up his studies and earned a PhD in fisheries science and was later to specialize his research on the study of Pacific salmon habitats in estuaries. Coincidentally, Levings was doing salmon research on another boat some years later and encountered the Western Flyer in the middle of the Gulf of Alaska floundering and in trouble. The skipper of the Flyer waved off help as the Coast Guard had been hailed and was almost upon them. Levings also worked on Luketa’s boat the Astronaut when it was chartered by the International Pacific Halibut Commission. They got caught in a huge storm. Luketa inexplicably locked himself in the wheelhouse and rode the storm out at sea for three days. Waves crashed over the boat and water leaked into the engine room, releasing steam. Levings said it was a dangerous situation. 12. Bottom et al., “Reconnecting Social and Ecological Resilience in Salmon Ecosystems.” 13. R. G. Gustafson et al., “Pacific Salmon Extinctions: Quantifying Lost and Remaining Diversity,” Conservation Biology 21, no. 4 (2007). 14. Lackey, Lach, and Duncan, “Wild Salmon in Western North America.” 15. Committee on Protection and Management of Pacific Northwest Anadromous Salmonids, Upstream: Salmon and Society in the Pacific Northwest (Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 1996).

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N o t e s t o Pa g e s 9 8 – 1 1 0 16. Donald Gunderson, The Rockfish’s Warning (Seattle: University of Washington Bookstore Press, 2011). 17. Kate Myers, interview, December 6, 2013. 18. John Steinbeck and Edward F. Ricketts, Sea of Cortez: A Leisurely Journal of Travel and Research (New York: Viking, 1941). 19. J. Lichatowich, Salmon without Rivers (Washington, DC: Island Press, 1999). 20. W. E. McConnaha, R. N. Williams, and J. Lichatowich, “Introduction,” in Return to the River, ed. R. N. Williams (Oxford: Elsevier Academic, 2000). 21. J. Brinckman, “Cost of Hatchery Salmon Careens from $14 to $530 Per Fish,” 2002, www.ecy.wa.gov/programs/wr/hq/pdf/chsc_brinck man.pdf. 22. Myers, interview, December 6, 2013. 23. John Muir, My First Summer in the Sierra (Cambridge: Riverside Press, 1911). 24. Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac (New York: Oxford University Press, 1949). 25. K. A. Young, “Managing the Decline of Pacific Salmon: Metapopulation Theory and Artificial Recolonization as Ecological Mitigation,” Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences 56 (1999).

Chapter Nine 1. Susan Shillinglaw, A Journey into Steinbeck’s California (Berkeley, CA: Roaring Forties Press, 2006). 2. Brian St. Pierre, John Steinbeck: The California Years (San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1983). 3. John Steinbeck, “Let's Go After the Neglected Treasures Beneath the Sea,” Popular Science, September 1966. 4. John Steinbeck, East of Eden (New York: Penguin, 1952). 5. John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley (New York: Viking, 1962). 6. C. Chiang, Shaping the Shoreline (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008). 7. “John Steinbeck States His Views on Cannery Row,” Monterey Peninsula Herald, March 8, 1957. 8. John Steinbeck and Edward F. Ricketts, Sea of Cortez: A Leisurely Journal of Travel and Research (New York: Viking, 1941). 9. In 1962–­63, the Western Flyer did a trawl survey for the International Pacific Halibut Commission to assess the abundance of Pacific hali-

• 133 •

N o t e s t o Pa g e s 1 1 1 – 1 1 3 but on the West Coast. A further goal was to evaluate the impact of all the coastal dragging activity on the halibut fishery. They were looking at the bycatch of halibut in trawling operations and were particularly concerned with the Japanese and Soviet trawl fisheries. The survey was the most extensive of its type ever conducted to that point, covering 40,000 square miles and 1,560 stations with several vessels; the Flyer did 877 of those hauls. Charles Loftus was the skip-

10. 11. 12.

13.

14. 15.

per with two deckhands and three biologists. One of the biol even ogists was Colin Levings. Levings remembers the Western Flyer as a great sea boat and very comfortable. The head was outside of the galley door on the portside, and there was a cold-­water shower. They came into port every two and a half weeks and stayed in a hotel with a hot shower. The chief scientist’s log makes frequent mention of sighting Japanese whalers and Russian trawlers, having radio and electronic problems, encountering big storms, catching salmon, and shooting deer. The captain’s log is very brief, with frequent mention of high winds and swells, and snags on the trawl stations, hang-­ ups, and torn nets. There is also a haul log that details what was caught and how much of it. In 1965 the Western Flyer was contracted to conduct an exploratory survey for Pacific hake off the Oregon-­ Washington coast for the U.S. Bureau of Commercial Fisheries. Donald Gunderson, The Rockfish’s Warning (Seattle: University of Washington Bookstore Press, 2011). Steinbeck and Ricketts, Sea of Cortez. Hal Hodson, “Colorado River Reaches Sea for First Time in Decades,” New Scientist, May 19, 2014; Gary Wockner, “The Colorado River’s Reunion with Its Usually Bone-­Dry Delta,” High Country News, May 28, 2014. John Steinbeck’s journal entry April 24, 1948, cited in Susan Shillinglaw, A Journey into Steinbeck’s California (Berkeley, CA: Roaring Forties Press, 2006). Kirk Johnson, “Salvaging Steinbeck’s Vessel from a Little-­Known Berth,” New York Times, May 25, 2014. Sparky Enea, With Steinbeck in the Sea of Cortez, as Told to Audrey Lynch (Los Osos, CA: Sand River Press, 1991).

• 134 •

RE FE RE N CES

Agostini, V. N. “Climate, Ecology and Productivity of Pacific Sardine (Sardinops sagax) and Hake (Merluccius productus).” PhD diss., University of Washington, 2005. Akkad, Dania. “Kehoe Told to Get Out of Oldtown.” Monterey County Herald, August 17, 2005. ———­. “Oldtown Hotel Plan, Take Two.” Monterey County Herald, April 12, 2006. Alaska King Crab Cowboys. Film by John Sabella and Associates. 1994. “Alaska King Crab Historical Document.” In Regional Information Report, 1–­21. Kodiak: Alaska Department of Fish and Game. Alverson, Dayton L. Race to the Sea. New York: iUniverse, 2008. Astro, Richard. John Steinbeck and Edward F. Ricketts: The Shaping of a Novelist. New Berlin, WI: University of Minnesota Press, 1973. Bailey, Kevin. Billion-­Dollar Fish. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. Barnard, D., et al. “King and Tanner Crab Fisheries of the Bering Sea and Aleutian Islands Regions.” In Stock Assessment and Fisheries Evaluation Report, 1–­592. Anchorage, AK: North Pacific Fisheries Management Council, 2010. Bechtol, W. R., and G. H. Kruse. “Retrospective Analysis of Kodiak Red King Crab.” In North Pacific Research Board Project Final Report, 1–­108. 2008. Beebe, W. Zaca Venture. New York: Harcourt, Brace and Company, 1938. Benson, Jackson J. John Steinbeck, Writer: A Biography. New York: Penguin, 1990. ———­. Looking for Steinbeck’s Ghost. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1988. Bermant, Charlie. “The Past-­Due Rent of Wrath: Boat Linked to John Steinbeck Becomes $7,978 Port of Port Townsend Liability.” Peninsula Daily News, September 15, 2013.

• 135 •

References Bottom, D. L., K. K. Jones, C. A. Simenstad, and C. L. Smith. “Reconnecting Social and Ecological Resilience in Salmon Ecosystems.” Ecology and Society 14, no. 1 (2009): 5. Bozanich, Tony. Interview, April 17, 2013. Brinckman, J. “Cost of Hatchery Salmon Careens from $14 to $530 Per Fish.” 2002. www.ecy.wa.gov/programs/wr/hq/pdf/chsc_brinckman .pdf. Campbell, Joseph. Letters to Ed Ricketts, October 10, 1939; December 26, 1941. Stanford University Special Collections, box 9, M291. Carlough, Howard. Interview, December 28, 2011. Chawkins, Steve. “A Dispute over Boat from the Sea of Cortez.” Los Angeles Times, February 18, 2013. Chiang, C. Shaping the Shoreline. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008. Coers, D. “Summary of Cannery Row Reunion.” www.canneryrow.org /reunion_summary.html. Committee on Protection and Management of Pacific Northwest Anadromous Salmonids. Upstream: Salmon and Society in the Pacific Northwest. Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 1996. Costello, Jimmy. “Steinbeck, Ricketts Embark on Cruise.” Monterey Peninsula Herald, March 11, 1940. DeMot, Robert, ed. Working Days: The Journals of the Grapes of Wrath, 1938–­ 1941. New York: Penguin, 1989. Deyle, E. R., M. Fogarty, C. Hsieh, L. Kaufman, A. D. MacCall, S. B. Munch, C. T. Perretti, H. Ye, and G. Sugihara. “Predicting Climate Effects on Pacific Sardine.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (2013). Enea, Bob. “A Brief Sketch of the Monterey Sardine Fishing Industry.” Manuscript, Monterey Public Library, California History Room, undated. ———­. A Day in the Life of a Fisherman. Video. Museum of Monterey, 2011. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mPmSQ6iwKu4&feature=relmfu. ———­. Fishing Comes to Monterey. Video. Museum of Monterey, 2011. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pg4j1gwM-­f8&feature=relmfu. ———­. Interviews, September 20, 2012; September 26, 2012; February 19, 2013; March 17, 2013. ———­. The Rise and Fall of the Monterey Fishing Industry. Video. Museum of Monterey, 2011. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O3EEINW4o fo&feature=relmfu. Enea, Sparky. With Steinbeck in the Sea of Cortez, as Told to Audrey Lynch. Los Osos, CA: Sand River Press, 1991.

• 136 •

References “Fish in Fifty Is the Promise of Scientists.” Monterey Herald, April 2, 1948. Fradkin, P. L. A River No More: The Colorado River and the West. New York: Knopf, 1981. Gartshore, Bonnie. “The Skipper: Tony Berry Speaks of His Boat, Steinbeck and That Fateful Voyage 55 Years Ago.” Monterey County Herald, December 3, 1995. Gilroy, H. “Steinbeck’s Living Sea.” New York Times, September 16, 1951. Gray, G. W., R. S. Roys, R. J. Simon, and D. F. Lall. “Development of the King Crab Fishery Off Kodiak Island.” In Informational Leaflet. Juneau: Alaska Deparment of Fish and Game, 1965. Gunderson, Donald. Interview, December 9, 2013. ———­. The Rockfish’s Warning. Seattle: University of Washington Bookstore Press, 2011. Gustafson, R. G., R. S. Waples, J. M. Myers, L. A. Weitkamp, G. J. Bryant, O. W. Johnson, and J. J. Hard. “Pacific Salmon Extinctions: Quantifying Lost and Remaining Diversity.” Conservation Biology 21, no. 4 (2007): 1009–­20. Hamel, O. S., and Kotaro Ono. “Stock Assessment of Pacific Ocean Perch in Waters of the U.S. West Coast in 2011.” In Stock Assessment and Fisheries Evaluation, 1–­168. Portland, OR: Pacific Fisheries Management Council, 2011. Hanselman, D. H., S. K. Shotwell, P. J. F. Hulson, J. Heifetz, and J. N. Ianelli. “Assessment of the Pacific Ocean Perch Stock in the Gulf of Alaska.” In Stock Assessment and Fisheries Evaluation Report, 1–­30. Anchorage, AK: North Pacific Fisheries Management Council, 2012. Hansen, Sig, and Mark Sundeen. North by Northwest. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2010. Hasenoehrl, RaeJean. Everett Fishermen. Charleston, SC: Arcadia, 2008. Haugen, Peter. Interview, September 6, 2012. Hedgpeth, Joel, W., ed. The Outer Shores, Part 2. Eureka, CA: Mad River Press, 1978. Hodson, Hal. “Colorado River Reaches Sea for First Time in Decades.” New Scientist, May 19, 2014. http://www.newscientist.com/article /dn25587-­colorado-­river-­reaches-­sea-­for-­first-­time-­in-­decades .html#.U3uDt1hdWSc. Hutson, Chad. “At Sea with Steinbeck.” Skagit Valley Herald, February 22, 1990. Jackson, D. R. “Commercial King and Tanner Crab Fisheries in Kodiak and Alaska Peninsula Areas.” In Regional Information Report, 1–­23. Kodiak: Alaska Department of Fish and Game, 1996.

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References Jacobsen, John. Interview, September 6, 2012. “John Steinbeck States His Views on Cannery Row.” Monterey Peninsula Herald, March 8, 1957. Johnson, Kirk. “Salvaging Steinbeck’s Vessel from a Little-­Known Berth.” New York Times, May 25, 2014. Joseph, Adam. “New Salinas Club Complex Is Bucking the Odds in a High-­End Gamble.” Monterey County Weekly, August 5, 2010. Knudson, Ole. Interview, February 18, 2013. Knutson, Pete. Interview, June 7, 2013. Kopecky, Peter. “Nature Writing in American Literature: Inspirations, Interpretations, and Impacts of California Authors on the Deep Ecology Movement.” Trumpeter 22, no. 2 (2006): 77–­89. Lackey, R. T., D. H. Lach, and S. L. Duncan. “Wild Salmon in Western North America: The Historical and Policy Context.” In Salmon 2100: The Future of Wild Pacific Salmon, edited by R. T. Lackey, D. H. Lach, and S. L. Duncan, 13–­55. Bethesda, MD: American Fisheries Society, 2006. Lannoo, Michael J. Leopold’s Shack and Ricketts’s Lab. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010. Larsen, Stephen, and Rubin Larsen. A Fire in the Mind: The Life of Joseph Campbell. New York: Doubleday, 1991. Leopold, Aldo. A Sand County Almanac. New York: Oxford University Press, 1949. Levings, Colin. Interviews, December 19, 2013; February 8, 2013. Leyde, Tom. “Cannery Row’s Real Doc—­Ed Ricketts.” The Sun, January 27, 1981. Lichatowich, J. Salmon without Rivers. Washington, DC: Island Press, 1999. Lindegren, M., D. M. Checkley, T. Rouyer, A. D. MacCall, and N. C. Stenseth. “Climate, Fishing, and Fluctuations of Sardine and Anchovy in the California Current.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 110, no. 33 (2013): 13672–­77. Lisca, Peter. “John Steinbeck: A Literary Biography.” In Steinbeck and His Critics, edited by E. W. Tedlock and C. V. Wicker, 3–­22. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1957. Luketa, Anay. Interview, November 17, 2011. Lynch, Audrey. Interviews with Sparky Enea, undated. National Steinbeck Center Archives, Salinas, CA. MacCall, A. D. “Population Estimates for the Waning Years of the Pacific Sardine Fishery.” California Cooperative Oceanic Fisheries Investigations Report 20 (1979): 72–­82. MacDonald, Gregory. “Steinbeck and the Western Flyer.” Unpublished • 138 •

References manuscript, 7 pages. San Jose State University Library, Steinbeck Room, 2002. Magagnini, Stephen. “History Is the Catch of the Day: Italy’s Sons Mark Their Founding Role in State’s Fisheries.” Sacramento Bee, May 3, 1999. “The Management of Innovation in the Field of Fishing Gear in Canada.” Ottawa: Canadian Fisheries Marine Service Industrial Developments Branch, 1973. Mangelsdorf, T. A History of Steinbeck’s Cannery Row. Santa Cruz, CA: Western Tanager Press, 1986. Martin, B. “Disappearance of Kodiak King Crab Still a Mystery.” Juneau Empire, March 19, 2007. McCloskey, W. “Asking for It.” In Out on the Deep Blue, edited by L. L. Fields, 193–­212. New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2001. McConnaha, W. E., R. N. Williams, and J. Lichatowich. “Introduction.” In Return to the River, edited by R. N. Williams, 1–­28. Oxford: Elsevier Academic, 2000. McElrath, J. R., J. S. Crisler, and S. Shillinglaw, eds. John Steinbeck: The Contemporary Reviews. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996. McEvoy, Arthur F. The Fisherman’s Problem. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1995. McHugh, J. L., and E. H. Ahlstrom. “Is the Pacific Sardine Disappearing?” Scientific Monthly 72, no. 6 (1951): 377–­84. Montgomery, D. King of Fish. Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 2003. Morovich, Darko. Interview, April 23, 2013. Moskovita, George. Living Off the Pacific Ocean Floor: Stories of a Lifetime Commercial Fisherman off the Pacific Coast. Astoria, OR: by author, 2000. Muir, John. My First Summer in the Sierra. Cambridge: Riverside Press, 1911. Myers, Kate. Interview, December 6, 2013. Nordstrand, Dave. “Sailing with Steinbeck.” Salinas Californian, September 3, 1993. Olich, Boris. Interviews, December 17, 2011; January 23, 2012; February 25, 2013; April 19, 2013. Pacific Fishing, October 1985, 19–­20. Palumbi, Stephen R., and Carolyn Sotka. The Death and Life of Monterey Bay. Washington, DC: Island Press, 2011. Parini, Jay. John Steinbeck: A Biography. New York: Henry Holt, 1995. Patty, Stanton. “Better Vessels Seen for Trawler Fleet.” Seattle Times, January 4, 1966. Pengilly, D. “Adak Red King Crab.” In Stock Assessment and Fisheries Evaluation, 1–­32. Anchorage, AK: North Pacific Fisheries Management Council, 2012. • 139 •

References Perez, Betty Louise Yates. “The Collaborative Roles of John Steinbeck and Edward F. Ricketts in the Narrative Section of Sea of Cortez.” PhD diss. University of Florida, 1972. Petrich, Allen. Interview, February 20, 2012. Petrich, Mary Ann, and Barbara Roje. The Yugoslav in Washington State: Among the Early Settlers. Tacoma: Washington State Historical Society, 1984. Phinney, Rick. E-­mail, December 4, 2013. Pots of Gold. Film by John Sabella and Associates. 1996. “Protection Asked for Coastal Fishery.” Seattle Times, April 9, 1965, 29. Radovich, J. “The Collapse of the California Sardine Fishery: What Have We Learned?” California Cooperative Oceanic Fisheries Investigations 23 (1982): 56–­78. Rice, John C. “That Man Steinbeck.” Salinas Californian, August 18–­19, 1939. Rice, Rodney. “Circles in the Forest: John Steinbeck and the Deep Ecology of ‘to a God Unknown.’” Steinbeck Review 8, no. 2 (2011): 30–­52. Ricketts, E. F. Letter to Monterey Peninsula Herald, undated. Stanford University, Special Collections, box 12, M291. ———­. Monterey Peninsula Herald, February 27, 1942. ———­. “Science Studies the Sardine.” Monterey Peninsula Herald, March 7, 1947. Rodger, Katherine, ed. Renaissance Man of Cannery Row: Life and Letters of Edward F. Ricketts. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2002. Roscovich, Tyla. Salmon Confidential. Film. www.salmonconfidential. ca. 2013. Ross, W. O. “John Steinbeck: Earth and Stars.” In Steinbeck and His Critics, edited by E. W. Tedlock and C. V. Wicker, 167–­82. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1957. Sagarin, R. D., W. F. Gilly, C. H. Baxter, N. Burnett, and J. Christensen. “Remembering the Gulf: Changes to the Marine Communities of the Sea of Cortez since the Steinbeck and Ricketts Expedition of 1940.” Frontiers of Ecology and the Environment 6 (2008). “Sardine Pack More than Triple That of Previous Season.” Monterey Herald, February 4, 1949. Schmatz, David. “Developer Wants Salinas to Fork Over Bucks to Help for Slow-­Moving Projects.” Monterey County Weekly, December 5, 2013. Schmidt, Peter. Interview, April 23, 2013. Scofield, W. L. “Purse Seines and Other Roundhaul Nets in California.” Fish Bulletin (1951): 1–­83. California Department of Fish and Game. • 140 •

References ———­. “Sardine Fishing Methods at Monterey, California.” California Division of Fish and Game. Fish Bulletin 19 (1929): 1–­56. Seattle Times Business Staff. “American Seafoods Fined over Alleged Deception.” Seattle Times, June 1, 2013. Shillinglaw, Susan. Carol and John Steinbeck: Portrait of a Marriage. Reno: University of Nevada Press, 2013. ———­. Coast Weekly, June 25–­July 1, 1998. ———­. A Journey into Steinbeck’s California. Berkeley, CA: Roaring Forties Press, 2006. Sjong, John. Interview, January 28, 2010. Skør, Gabriel. Interview, September 6, 2012. Spencer, P. D., and J. N. Ianelli. “Assessment of the Pacific Ocean Perch Stock in the Bering Sea/Aleutian Islands.” In Stock Assessment and Fisheries Evaluation Report, 1–­58. Anchorage, AK: North Pacific Fisheries Management Council, 2012. St. Pierre, Brian. John Steinbeck: The California Years. San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1983. Staples, Paul. “Trawlers to Discuss Proposals.” Seattle Times, February 18, 1958. Steinbeck, Carol. Interview with Pauline Pearson, undated. National Steinbeck Center Archives, Salinas, CA. Steinbeck, Elaine, ed. Steinbeck: A Life in Letters. New York: Penguin, 1976. Steinbeck, John. Cannery Row. New York: Viking, 1945. ———­. East of Eden. New York: Penguin, 1952. ———­. In Dubious Battle. New York: Viking, 1938. ———­. “Let’s Go After the Neglected Treasures Beneath the Sea.” Popular Science, September 1966, 84–­87. ———­. The Log from the Sea of Cortez. New York: Viking Penguin Books, 1951. ———­. Sweet Thursday. New York: Viking, 1954. ———­. Travels with Charley. New York: Viking, 1962. Steinbeck, John, and Edward F. Ricketts. Sea of Cortez: A Leisurely Journal of Travel and Research. New York: Viking, 1941. “Steinbeck, Peeved, Puts to Sea on a Boat Called Unfair by C.I.O.” Los Angeles Times, March 14, 1940. Tamm, Eric Enno. Beyond the Outer Shores. New York: Four Walls Eight Windows, 2004. ———­. “Of Myths and Men in Monterey.” San Francisco Chronicle, October 16, 2005. Townsend, Charles Haskins. “Scientific Results of the Expedition to the Gulf of California in Charge of C. H. Townsend, by the U.S. Fisheries • 141 •

References Steamship ‘Albatross’ in 1911. Commander G. H. Burrage, U.S.N., Commanding.” Bulletin of the American Museum of Natural History 35 (1916): 399–­476. Ueber, E., and A. MacCall. “The Rise and Fall of the California Sardine Empire.” In Climate Variability, Climate Change, and Fisheries, edited by M. H. Glanz, 31–­48. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Utter, F. “Population Genetics, Conservation and Evolution in Salmonids and Other Widely Cultured Fishes: Some Perspectives over Six Decades.” Reviews in Fish Biology and Fisheries 14 (2004): 125–­44. Valjean, Nelson. John Steinbeck: The Errant Knight. San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1975. Wedlund, Carl. Interview, January 26, 2013. Whittemore, Bruce. Interview, April 24, 2013. Wockner, Gary. “The Colorado River’s Reunion with Its Usually Bone-­ Dry Delta.” High Country News, May 28, 2014. https://www.hcn.org /wotr/a-­kiss-­that-­brought-­hope-­to-­river-­lovers. Young, K. A. “Managing the Decline of Pacific Salmon: Metapopulation Theory and Artificial Recolonization as Ecological Mitigation.” Canadian Journal of Fisheries and Aquatic Sciences 56 (1999): 1700–­1706. Zheng, J., and M. S. M. Siddeek. “Bristol Bay Red King Crab Stock Assessment in Fall 2012.” 1–­105. Anchorage, AK: North Pacific Fisheries Management Council, 2012.

• 142 •

IN DEX

Adak Island, 84–88 Aiello, Rosario and Pietro, 44 Alaska Fishermen’s Union, 75 Albatross, 24, 26, 124n1 American Society of Civil Engineers, 25 Anacortes, WA, vii–ix, 67, 94, 119 anchoveta, 53 Attu, 85, 87–88 Baird, Spencer, 95 Beebe, William, 24–25, 124n3 Berry, Frank (Franjo Bertapeli in Croatian), 13, 122n15 Berry, Tony (Anton), vii–viii, 21; charter, 7–10; expedition, 15–17; expedition after, 37–38; and Ricketts, 21; and Western Flyer, sardine fishery, 41–42, 63, 67, 122n15 Boat Owners Association, 8–9, 63 Boeing Company, 89 Booth, Frank, 44–46, 55, 126n4 Bristol Bay, 15, 89, 122n19 Cabo San Lucas, 34 California Current, 41, 60 California Fish and Game, 52 Calvin, Jack, 16–17 Campbell, Joseph, 16–17, 19, 20, 37, 58

Cannery Row Foundation, vii, 119n1 Carlough, Howard, 89 Carson, Rachel, 105 Chapman, Wilbur, 59–61, 71 chinchola net, 44 Clark, Frances, 51 Colletto, Ratzi (Orazio) “Tiny,” 15, 22, 38, 42, 113 Colorado River Delta, 23, 26, 32, 112 Columbia River, 15, 82, 97–98, 114 Conger, Gwyn, 19, 38 Congress of American Fishermen, 75 Cortés, Hernán, 24 Cousteau, Jacques, 23 Darwin, Charles, 25, 35–36 deep ecology, viii, 105 Dutch Harbor, 85–86, 89–90 Elwha River, 104 Enea, Bob, vii–ix, 44, 113 Enea, Orazio, 8, 22 Enea, Horace “Sparky,” vii–viii, 9, 15, 17, 21–22 Enea, Rose, 8, 42, 63 engineering ecosystems, 24, 95, 103–4 Farwest Fisheries, 95 Ferrante, Pietro, 45

• 143 •

Index Fishermen’s Marketing Association, 75 Fraser River, 104 Gabilan Mountains, 108 Gemini (1970 name change of Western Flyer), vii–ix, 6, 94–95, 110 Gradis, John, 45 Great Depression, 11, 13, 49–51, 122n18 Gunderson, Don, 79–80, 98, 111, 130n8 habitat, 88, 95, 97, 99, 101, 104–5 Hansen, Sverre, 66, 84, 129n3 Hedgpeth, Joel, 17, 20, 125n9, 128n9 Hemp, Michael, vii–viii, 119n1 Hjort, Johan, 57–58, 128n7 Hoover, J. Edgar, 3 Hoover Dam, 24–26 Hovden, Knut, 46–47, 52, 55, 59 Hudson, Martin and Ferrante, 8 Huxley, Aldous, 105 Imperial Valley, 24–26 International Longshoremen’s Association, 8 International Pacific Halibut Commission, 5, 78, 97, 110, 121n8, 132n11, 134n9 Isola delle Femmine, 22, 44 Jeffers, Robinson, 107 Kehoe, Gerry, ix–xii Knudson, Ole, vii–viii, xi, 94–95, 99, 102, 116 Knutson, Pete, 99–101 Kyokuyo, 44 La Concepción, 24 lampara net, 45–49

Lawrence, D. H., 105 Leopold, Aldo, 105 Levings, Colin, 97, 130n13, 132n11, 134n9 long-­term ocean cycles, 99 Lucido, E. S., 47 Luketa, Dan, 5, 65–66; background of, 67–69; boats, 75; buying of Western Flyer, 69; crab fishery and, 80, 89–90; death of, 91; trawlerman, 74–76 Magnuson Act of 1976, 80 Marco Marine, 84, 89 Marettimo, 44 Martinac, Joe, 12 Martinac Shipbuilding, 12, 122n14 McEvoy, Arthur, 50 Merchant Marine Act of 1920 ( Jones Act), 94 “Minute 319,” 112 Monterey Canning Company, 43 Monterey Fishing and Packing Company, 46 Moskovita, George, 81–82 Muir, John, 105 Murphy, Garth, 61 Myers, Kate, 99, 104–5 Naess, Arne, 105 National Marine Fisheries Service, 78, 122n19 National Resources Conservation Service, 111 National Steinbeck Center, xi, 115 Nordby Supply Company, 89 Olson, Culbert, 51 Pacific Biological Laboratories (Pacific Labs), 4, 16–18 Pacific Fish Company, 46, 126n4

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Index Pacific Grove, CA, 4, 16–19, 123 Pacific ocean perch: description of, 70; fishery, 70–74; foreign fisheries, 76–79 Pacific salmon: hatchery fish and, 96–97; history of, 95–96; remediation measures, 103, 105–6; wild salmon demise, 97–99 Pacific sardine: collapse of, 53–62; description of fishery, 48–49; history of, 44–48, 49–53; recov‑ ery, 53; Ricketts’s view, 56–59 Pan Alaska Seafoods, 86 Pauly, Daniel, 58 petrale sole, 69, 72–73, 75 Petrich, Martin, 11–13, 63, 122n15 phalanx theory, 37; man as social unit and, 34, 37–38 Port Townsend, WA, xii Puget Sound, ix, 5, 15, 74, 90, 93, 99–100 Ray, Jackie, 81–83 red king crab: collapse of, 88; description of fishery, 83–85; development of fishery, 83, 88 Ricketts, Ed “Doc” (died May 11, 1948): Between Pacific Tides (with Jack Calvin; 1939), 16–17, 128n9; characterization of, 16–17; death, 4, 39; “Doc,” vii, 6; after expedition, 38; and expedition, xiii, 1–4, 7–8, 35–36; and Joseph Campbell, 16, 19–20, 37; Pacific Biological Laboratories, 4, 16; and sardines, 56–59 Rubinstein, Sam, 89, 94–95 Salinas, CA: John Steinbeck and, xii, 18–19, 108, 113 Salinas Californian, 18 San Carlos Cannery, 93

Scripps Institution of Oceanography, 59–60 Seafarers International Union, 8 Sea of Cortez: description of, 23– 26; expedition crew, 15–22; expedition planning, 7–11 Sea of Cortez: A Leisurely Journal of Travel and Research (Steinbeck and Ricketts), vii, 35; The Log from the Sea of Cortez, 51; reviews of, 37; writing of, 2 Seri Indians, 36 Sette, Oscar Elton, 52, 58–59 Slime Bank, 89 Snake River, 104 Soil Conservation Services, 111 Sonoran Desert, 2 Stari Grad, Hvar, Croatia, 12 Steinbeck, Carol Henning, vii, 15, 17, 19, 38–39; and Joseph Campbell, 20–21; marriage to John Steinbeck, 19, 32; and voyage, 19–21, 27, 31–32, 35 Steinbeck, John: Cannery Row (1945), vii, xii, 16, 17; Carol Steinbeck and, 19–21, 31–32; early life, 18; environmental philosophy of, 37–38; The Forgotten Village (film), 38; The Grapes of Wrath (1939), 3, 16, 18–19, 26, 103; The Log from the Sea of Cortez (1951), 39, 94; The Long Valley (1938), 25; Of Mice and Men (1937), 11; The Moon Is Down (1942), xiii; The Pearl (1947), xiii; Sweet Thursday (1954), xiii, 55; Travels with Charley, 109 Steinbeck, John, and Ed Ricketts: Alaska plan, 4; meeting of, 15–16 Strategic Command of Allied Powers, 77 Street, Webster “Toby,” 8, 22

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Index Swinomish Nation, ix–x Swinomish Slough, 110

Ulloa, Francisco de, 24 Unalaska, 88 U.S. Bureau of Commercial Fisheries, 5, 78, 121–22n8, 134n9 U.S. Bureau of Fisheries (USBF), 15, 24, 51, 60 U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, 95, 122n9

Western Boat Building Company, 12–15, 42, 63, 69, 121n12, 122n14 Western Flyer Project, viii, x–xii, 113 Western Flyer: building of, 13–15; call sign (WB4404); charter by Steinbeck, 7–10; description of, 9–10; refitting, 69, 84; renaming of, 5–6; sinking January 2013, xi; sinking September 2012, x Whitney-­Fidalgo Seafoods, 89, 93–94 World War II: Ed Ricketts in, 38; John Steinbeck in, 38; Italian fishermen and, 50; sardines and, 52

Van Camp Seafood Company, 60

Young, Rudolph, 93

War Food Administration, 52 Water Treaty (1944), 112

Zaca, 24, 26 Zaca Venture, 24–25

Tacoma, WA, 11–12, 38, 42, 67 Travis, Hal “Tex,” 15, 21–22, 33–34, 38 Twin Bridges, ix

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