The Log From The Sea of Cortez

The Appendix opens at dusk in April 1948 with a description of a typical Sunday evening. Ed Ricketts rolls down his wool sleeves, shrugs into a frayed brown coat, and coaxes his cranky car toward a New Monterey market. Then, the Del Monte Express slides from behind a corrugated warehouse and folds the sedan against its cowcatcher. On the grass, eyes crossed and voice steady, Ed asks a doctor about his wounds. The doctor replies honestly that they are “very bad” (227). Surgeons do what they can; friends fill the waiting room; Ed’s pulse fades, and he dies.

John Steinbeck writes the Appendix to eulogize his friend, with whom he sailed around the Sea of Cortez. Everyone, he says, will know the “force and influence of Ed Ricketts” (228) if they knew him; he will write for the people who did not. There were many different versions of Ed Ricketts, so he piles memory upon memory, trusting the heap will outline a person more honestly than a thesis. He starts at Pacific Biological Laboratories, Ed’s lab, which was filled with jars, cats, and rattlesnakes; microscopes and filing cards; white rats in a smelly room; an immaculate bench beside a disorderly life.