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. An old fire in the lab, Steinbeck writes, divides eras in Ed’s life. A faulty current turned the lab on Cannery Row into tinder; Ed saved his typewriter and car. When the authorities cracked Ed’s beloved safe, they found half a pineapple pie, Gorgonzola, and slightly dry sardines, proof of a fine safe and the comic order of Ed’s chaos. Ed went to court after, then became fascinated by the absurdity and the lack of truth on show at the trial.

Steinbeck remembers his friend’s speech as skewed and exact. An ugly hagfish, for example, could become “delightful and beautiful” (233) in Ed’s description. Similarly, he once affectionately nicknamed a lover “Wormy,” which she did not appreciate even if Ed meant it as a compliment. Steinbeck lists Ed’s dislikes as an insight into his character. He hated hot soup, thin lips, getting his head wet, which is why he would pour cold water in bisque and never submerge his head while collecting. Cruelty would wake a violent courage in Ed, Steinbeck says, such as the time when he passed a man beating a dog and intervened violently on the dog’s behalf. Ed managed necessary pain without drama. During the Great Depression, Steinbeck writes, their group of friends bought a live sheep but it was only Ed who could bleed the sheep cleanly. Ed could explain the anatomy of a merciful death. Time, unless tied to a tide table, offended him. He would be late for dinner, yet early for a minus tide. He liked dogs and tipped his hat to them. He distrusted mysticism yet could not shake it. When his father died, for example, he disconnected the lab intercom due to a fear that his late father’s voice might one day call.

The Cannery Row community wrapped around him. He became good friends with the operator of the local brothel and offered advice and medical help to Madam. In return, she sold him beer outside of hours. Ed was a great lover of beer, but also of people. Hustlers tested their art on him; he admired the craft of a dime-scheme as though it were a clean experiment. Out of his laboratory, he would sell taxidermized cats for scientific purposes. To sell the cats, he offered a bounty to local people to bring them to him. Al, a cat collector, constructed a tomcat trap with a female cat inside.

Later, Al became a de facto research assistant in the lab until one evening, Ed returned to find the lab in chaos. Al staggered through the basement in nothing but rubber boots and an overcoat, pants abandoned, dignity unscarred. The local community of unhoused people were friends with Al. To him, they seemed to be a successful species, low on armor, high on survival. The pimp George sought their fellowship, bringing whiskey and money, but they constantly refused him, much to Ed’s displeasure. Ed warned the men their chill could kill George and, when George finally died, the men refused to accept responsibility for their lack of friendliness.

Ed drank broadly and with delight, suspicious of dry virtue. One of his favorite drinks was of his own making: Ricketts’s Folly was a mix of alcohol, codeine, and grenadine. However, Ed’s true intoxication was music: Steinbeck remembers his fondness for many different types, including plainchant, Byrd and Palestrina, Monteverdi’s heat, Bach’s Art of the Fugue. Ed used music like medicine, playing chants and Bach when Steinbeck was very sick. Steinbeck praises this medical treatment.

Ed would read the love poetry of Li Po and Tu Fu, as well as The Black Marigolds. He sought to learn German so he could better understand his beloved Faust by Goethe. Ed distrusted churches and planned economies. He watched the Soviet Union congeal into power but quickly lost interest in the project when it became apparent that this new form of government was much like previous systems of power.

With Steinbeck, Ed played “speculative metaphysics,” in which their long, winding conversations would touch on many abstract topics. Perhaps, they would discuss, the species thrives in semi-anarchy; perhaps over-integration prophesies extinction. Groups can coordinate; only individuals create. 25 key men removed might overthrow a dictatorship, they debate; remove the American Congress and the President, Steinbeck jokes, and the country would keep blundering forward. The sport always ends with an honest “it might be so.”

Ed loved to test the world by tongue and nose. He popped a glowing nudibranch in his mouth and immediately found, gagging, why nothing eats them. A free-swimming anemone stung his tongue into silence. He could smell a mouse, a snake, the flux of a mood. Ed loved fine tools and despised consumer goods. His living quarters were often in disarray, but his work bench gleamed. He taught his children a three-step ethic, telling them to have as much fun as they could, eat well so they could have fun, and only then to keep the house in order. An eccentric dresser, he wore Bass moccasins and scratchy wool. He kept a Bausch & Lomb loupe pinned to his shirt, he hated hats except in rain, and his bed was a narrow rope-laced box that squealed with the least movement, much to the displeasure of his many female partners.

Ed served in both World Wars. Before Pearl Harbor, he and Steinbeck begin searching for Pacific island data and discovered the wealth of information which was buried in Japanese zoologists’ careful papers, written in English, describing reefs, tides, currents—a beach-landing manual. This information, crucial to the American war in the Pacific, was hiding inside pure science.

Steinbeck and Ed wrote to the government to share what they had found, only for Washington to answer with a mimeograph. A Naval Intelligence officer arrived to ask sternly whether they read Japanese; the idea that scientists would write in English felt to the lieutenant commander like a trap. At Bremerton, a Navy barnacle test produced spotless plates until a woman barnacle expert noted the filtration system had kindly removed all larvae. Ed, a successful World War I company clerk who learned the power of passes and rumor, shrugged and laughed.

Since Ed was so open about his romantic endeavors, Steinbeck writes, then Steinbeck feels the need to share some examples. Ed’s body seemed driven by a racing metabolism, his imagination busily constructing women out of the women he met. He often created idealized images of women that did not match the reality. He wrote nightly letters to a lover and believed, against all evidence, that she wrote nightly back, unable to see that he had deluded himself into falling in love with a fiction of his imagination rather than the actual woman. Ed’s collecting notebooks would mix field reports with candid comments about sexual partners. After Ed’s death, as he sorted through his friend’s papers, Steinbeck censored names before they were sent to the archive.

Following the publication of Steinbeck’s novel Cannery Row, in which Ed happily appeared as a character, people flocked to Ed’s lab and treated him almost like a celebrity. Steinbeck remembers that Ed was content with this; Ed was pleased that some of the callers were attractive women. In the months before Ed’s death, he and Steinbeck were planning another voyage. This voyage was never completed.

Steinbeck reflects on his friend’s great character. What remains, Steinbeck decides, is not Ed’s generosity, which flatters the giver, but his ability to receive gifts, a talent which requires humility and self-knowledge. Ed could receive a thought, a shell, a child’s pride, and make the giver feel enlarged. He learned, after a long season of not liking himself, to like himself enough to stop proving, to listen cleanly, to accept. In the end, the image that will not fade is simple: The lab tidied, the sleeves rolled down, the small car coughing into the mixed light on Ocean View Avenue, a man going out for a steak, at ease in the ordinary, and already a ghost. This image, Steinbeck writes, will be “with [him] all [his] life” (274).