This story was selected as a finalist in our “A Book Led Me There” competition. Inspired by the adventures of John Steinbeck, a traveler hitches a ride on a boat, joining a sailing crew on their journey down the west coast of Mexico for a life where cigars are the currency for fish.
Finally, after a couple of weeks at sea, we came into the harbor in Mexico. Sailing into the Sea of Cortez.
As we drifted by marinas, the depth sounder’s shrill alarm blasted. Bill gunned the engine into reverse, but it was too late. Suddenly, unmistakably, we pitched forward. Our nimble boat now felt impossibly heavy. Bill revved the engine, fishtailed, but it stuck stubbornly.
Pete chuckled. “Well, no damage done–it’s soft silt. But we’ll have to sit here until high tide,” he glanced at his watch, “which isn’t for another ten hours.”
Time to read.
*
I hitchhiked a sailboat out of San Diego and down the western coast of Mexico to Cabo San Lucas, and needed a good book for the journey.
I say “hitchhiked” but really, it was the original way of joining a ship’s crew: you walk the docks and talk to boat captains. Richard Henry Dana and Robert Louis Stevenson would’ve commiserated. I flagged people down dockside, put up flyers with my face that said CREW AVAILABLE, and generally felt like an ass.
I got on one boat and then left when I found out the captain of that ship–a hulking ferrocement disaster-in-waiting–had had a multiple-drug-resistant staph infection, as well as serious psychological issues. I jumped ship, almost literally.
In a cupboard-dusty bookstore in San Diego, I unearthed an old John Steinbeck book. Steinbeck was one of my literary heroes, but this book was unfamiliar. The cover had a picture of a fishing boat, the title: The Log from the Sea of Cortez.
On the dust jacket, it read that in 1940, a year after publishing The Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck left his home in Monterey, California, on a sardine boat–the Western Flyer–and went down Baja and around the Sea of Cortez. It was an expedition led by the marine biologist (and Steinbeck’s close friend) Ed Ricketts. For six weeks, they collected specimens of sea creatures, returning with what Ricketts called “the greatest lot of specimens ever to have been collected in the Gulf by any single expedition.”
After a week of wandering the docks in hot California sun and feeling like an idiot, I finally found a captain willing to let me on his boat. There were three of us on board: myself and two retirees. The next youngest was my senior by nearly four decades.
The boat was named Sail La Vie, and she was going to sail down Baja California and into the Sea of Cortez, the thumb of ocean separating Baja from the mainland. Sail La Vie was a forty-three-foot Spindrift cutter, a lovely little thing, all clean white with wood trim and bright chrome. She felt like a well-kept log cabin, cozy and sturdy.
Leaving land behind was an anxious thrill, an exhalation, a gloriousness, a trepidation. The planning and doubts, so crowding in a moment before, became utterly trivial.
It’s just us, the boat, the wind, the sea.
Though Sea of Cortez is nonfiction, Steinbeck still shows the skills that make his novels so great–like his trademark ability to draw characters.
The engineer aboard the Western Flyer, Tex, was “a sure man with an engine. When he goes below, he is identified with his engine. He moves about, not seeing, not looking, but knowing…we truly believe that a burned bearing or a cracked shaft gives him sharp pains in his stomach.”
The captain, Tony, “master and part owner of the Western Flyer, and our satisfaction with him as master increased constantly. He rarely talked or laughed…Tony has one great passion: he loves rightness and hates wrongness.”
Bill, the captain and owner of Sail La Vie, was quiet and stern. He was a retired accountant who seemed empty of humor–a consequence, I thought, of an uninteresting life. A Victory cigar stuck permanently in the corner of his mouth, exhaling plumes of sweet, cloying smoke.
The boat looked wonderfully seaworthy, and I was excited to sail, but I was concerned that food was going to be an issue with us. Not that we’d go hungry, but I’m a bit of a gourmand. Compared to the captain, at least. Cap’n Bill’s idea of a good meal was a Swanson’s TV Dinner and Bush’s Baked Beans fresh from the can. He looked askance at the fresh lettuce and apples I wanted to stock for provisions. I thought of mentioning the old, time-honored affliction of sailors–scurvy–but decided that, since it was Bill’s boat and bankroll, I better not.
Over one awkwardly quiet dinner, he mentioned that he had been in the Army for five years. Latching on to any conversation topic, I asked where he was stationed. Louisiana, Georgia, and Vietnam, he said. I asked if he ever saw combat there.
“Yes, I got two Purple Hearts.”
So then I had to ask how he got them. Soon, both our dinners sat cold on the table as he told stories of jumping out of airplanes over enemy territory, grenade attacks, being shot by Vietcong in the jungle, and being carried for days.
Pete, the first mate, was the best sailor among us. He could have singlehanded the whole sail, but joined us just for kicks. Pete had a potato-skin tan from a half-century of California sun. It wasn’t a tan so much as a hide–an iguana could no more sunburn than could Pete. He had worked for decades as a diesel mechanic and, if anything went amiss with the engine, he would pull up the floorboards and lower himself into the bowels of the boat, screwdriver in his teeth.
He would sit at the bow for hours just watching the open sea. If I sat with him, as I often did, he would point out sea life or subtleties in distant wave patterns. The flash of a dorado or leap of a sailfish. He would talk with great passion and gesticulation about sail trim and wind mechanics.
The crew called me “the Kid”, more out of endearment than condescension. I think they would’ve called anyone under fifty a kid. “Have the Kid climb the mast;” “Let the Kid climb down into the dinghy;” “Can the Kid fit into the chain locker?” (Yes, actually, he can).
We tried to do a little fishing, trolling a line off the stern with a big flashing spoon on a treble hook. I was hoping for a bright dorado, maybe even a tuna.
Steinbeck wrote in Travels with Charley, “all plans, safeguards, policing, and coercion are fruitless. We find after years of struggle that we do not take a trip; a trip takes us.” Maybe sometimes it’s better to lose the guidebook.
Travel writing at its best is able to deliver a sense of wonder to your surroundings. When you put the book down, you find yourself thinking, “Even my home is an exotic land to a traveler.”
We set anchor off the coast of Cedros Island: a simple and bare orange chunk of rock and dust. The crew was down below watching Pete plot points on the chart; I stripped nude and dove off the bow. The salt was clean and refreshing; the boat looked so handsome and brave in the strong evening light.
There was a tiny fishing village on the shore: four or five shacks, a rattling generator, a single naked bulb on a front step.
`The iron-colored dust of Cedros, the angle of the late sun on the warm Pacific, the fisherman in the panga pulling something flopping out of his net. I laid out on deck and read.
Sea of Cortez is a bit of a rambling travelogue, much like his famous Travels with Charley. Steinbeck, Ricketts, and the rest of the crew of the Western Flyer putter around in bars all over Baja and western Mexico when they’re not bottling little sea creatures up in formaldehyde or paying local boys to gather them.
At its best, it’s an account of two great friends, Steinbeck and Ricketts, off on a grand sea adventure with a quirky crew.
South of Cedros, the wind picked up. It wasn’t stormy, but there were whitecaps and the strong breeze grabbed our sails. The boat raced over corduroy swells and slapped down into the troughs. The captain became seasick and sat on deck with an unlit Victory cigar chomped in his mouth. He steered the boat when it was his watch, but the heaving seas and gravity prevented him from doing much else.
I’m not affected as badly and Pete is utterly unfazed, so the two of us sailed the Sail La Vie. Finally, when I brought Cap’n Bill a dinner of grilled cheese and hot Campbell’s tomato soup, he grinned, “Well, The Kid gets an ‘attaboy’ for this.”
I think I just got promoted.
We’d been trolling for days, but the line’s been empty. Or maybe it was impossible to see our line in the choppy seas. So, at anchor in Bahia Santa Maria, Bill traded a few precious cigars for a slab of yellowfin tuna from another boat.
I slavered over the thick fillet of dark tuna, imagining juicy steaks of tender fish. Maybe spicy poké, god, I would die for fresh sushi–yellowfin would make the best ever, sliced thin thin…
But when Bill said he’d do dinner and took the tuna into the galley, I started to get a bit nervous, thinking of his canned cuisine and microwaved dinners, which could only look appealing when compared to Army rations. But how bad could he mess up a fillet of fish?
“What are you making?” I asked, trying not to sound shrill.
“You’ll see,” he said.
Pete and I were up on deck when Cap’n Bill finally stuck his head up. “Dinner’s ready! Dig in, crew.”
With trepidation, I went down into the galley. Paper plates. Wonder Bread toast. Bush’s Baked Beans. No sushi, no dark red tuna steaks. A huge bowl of a thick white substance. Mayonnaise and coleslaw.
“Tuna salad!” Cap’n Bill said.
When the crew of the Western Flyer reached the town of Cabo San Lucas, the southernmost point of Baja California, they took an excursion into the town:
“The road to the little town, two wheel-ruts in the dust, tosses us about in the cannery truck. At last, we stopped in front of a mournful cantina where morose young men hung about waiting for something to happen…When we lifted a split of beer to our lips, the eyes of the young men rose with our hands, and even the cockroaches lifted their heads.”
This was the image I had of Cabo San Lucas when we sailed in, twelve days after leaving San Diego. The ribbon of land stretched out, then ended abruptly as if snipped off. The rocky edge of Baja California itself: two enormous orange sea-stacks. Los Frailes. The Friars. Beautiful, tall, and lonely.
Then Cabo came into view. No wheel-ruts in the dust anymore; instead, enormous cruise ships, luxury yachts, pangas, zooming jetskis, paddleboarders, blaring music, and screeching megaphones from the beach cantinas in front of blindingly white resorts.
As we drifted by marinas, the depth sounder’s shrill alarm blasted. A dell thud and our brave little Sail La Vie was stuck for the next ten hours. But I still had a few more chapters of The Log from the Sea of Cortez.
The boat settled at an angle and the deck tilted like a funhouse. I sat drinking a beer when I noticed my copy of Steinbeck, way up by the bow where I left it, had begun to slide seaward. I jumped up but was too slow–it skittered under the gunwales, fluttered once daintily, the bookmark took flight, and the book came to rest face down upon the clear blue-green water.
Throughout the sail, I had followed the Western Flyer like a guidebook. I hadn’t collected any sea creatures, but I had plenty of stories. Perhaps it was now time for the trip to take me.
