Ocean and Tides in John Steinbeck’s The Log from the Sea of Cortez

1 Sailing out

In 1940 the writer and philosopher John Steinbeck and his friend, marine biologist Edward Ricketts, went on an expedition from Monterey down the California coast into Mexican waters around Cabo San Lucas into the Sea of Cortez, or the Gulf of California. They had dreamt about and prepared the expedition for a long time. They hired a 76-foot sardine seiner, the Western Flyer, refitted it for their purposes, and set out on their low-cost, make-shift expedition on March 11 (Christensen 2004, 150, 152; Steinbeck 1960, 89). The objective was to collect samples of all invertebrates, small fish, and other creatures living in the intertidal, littoral zones of the then-little-explored coastline of the Gulf. They sailed, stopped, and collected marine specimens for six weeks, a trip spanning 4,000 miles around Baja California, into the gulf to its head and back. The crew consisted of Steinbeck and Ricketts, Steinbeck’s wife Clara Steinbeck, the captain Tony Berry, the fishermen Horace “Sparky” Enea, Ritzi “Tiny” Coletto, and the engineer Travis “Tex” Hall (MacDonald 2009, 83). All crew members went ashore for specimen collection and helped preserve them; all cooked, ate, and drank beer together and stated that they had a leisurely trip, although they did an incredible amount of work (Astro 1971, 119). The Log describes how intensely they worked, hardly stopping to recreate and hardly missing a tide to collect.

Both Steinbeck and Ricketts had already made a name for themselves: Ricketts, who owned and operated the “Pacific Biological Laboratory” on Cannery Row for 20 years (Astro 1971, 111), had just published Between Pacific Tides (1939) together with Jack Calvin, an analysis of the community ecology of the intertidal zones, which is still a standard book in the field. Steinbeck, who had taken summer courses in marine biology at the Hopkins Marine Station in Pacific Grove in Monterey, had published The Grapes of Wrath (1939), his third novel on the harsh work and life of farm workers in California. Steinbeck received the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1939 for the novel, which is still considered one of his best works.

Steinbeck and Ricketts published a book together about their expedition, Sea of Cortez: A Leisurely Journal of Travel and Research ([1941] 2009), which is a mix of natural history, taxonomic descriptions of the collected marine specimens, and a travelogue (Christiansen 2004, 151). Ten years later Steinbeck published the travelogue part of this book, which he had predominantly written, as The Log from the Sea of Cortez (1951). Hence, it is not a log book in a conventional sense, which would record the departure and arrival time of a leg of a sea journey, distance travelled, wind and weather conditions, sails and motor used, and much technical data and important incidents. Rather, this text is a narrative based much on Ricketts’s journal of the expedition and two of his essays (Astro 1971, 116, 118) and mixes narrative accounts, descriptions of nature, scientific data on the studied marine life, anecdotes about the crew, accounts of ship routines, and philosophical discussions (cf. MacDonald 2009, 83). The Log is now considered a standard book for naturalists and marine biologists, a book with mythical status among naturalists (Gladstein and Gladstein 1997, 172).

2 Doing Science

During the expedition the crew stopped in many little bays, harbors, and close to barren, often rocky coasts “to collect and preserve the marine invertebrates of the littoral” (Steinbeck 1960, 69). The objective of the expedition was, as The Log states, “to observe the distribution of invertebrates, to see and record their kinds and numbers, how they lived together, what they ate, and how they reproduced” (Steinbeck 1960, 70). Ricketts’s and Steinbeck’s role models were famous scientists, mainly Charles Darwin and his voyage to the Galapagos Islands, which brought insights he used to develop the origin of species theory. The Log states:

We were curious. Our curiosity was not limited, but was as wide and horizonless as that of Darwin, or Agassiz or Linnaeus or Pliny. We wanted to see everything our eyes would accommodate, to think what we could, and, out of our seeing and thinking, to build some kind of structure in modeled imitation of the observed reality. (Steinbeck 1960, 70)

As will become obvious in Steinbeck’s later philosophical discussions, his and Ricketts’s approach was an open one, starting from scratch and observing what is there to see, not bringing prefabricated ideas, categories, or hypotheses to their study that could influence their thought. Before their expedition started, they self-reflexively deliberated possible future results:

We knew that what we would see and record and construct would be warped, as all knowledge patterns are warped, first, by the collective pressure and stream of our time and race, second by the thrust of our individual personalities. But knowing this, we might not fall into too many holes – we might maintain some balance between our warp and the separate thing, the external reality. (Steinbeck 1960, 70)

They doubt the objectivity of their findings and future report; their self-reflexivity undermines scientific claims to objective truth that are often part and parcel of scientific research and presentation of results. With the notion of their own subjectivity that they bring to the study, they allow some small niche for doubt and the notion that external reality could be different from what they understand it to be. This is also the approach they bring to the texts and maps of the Gulf that they have studied in preparation for their expedition:

We had read what books were available about the Gulf and they were few and in many cases confused. The Coast Pilot had not been adequately corrected for some years. A few naturalists with specialties had gone into the Gulf and, in the way of specialists, had seen nothing they hadn’t wanted to. […] The maps of the region were self-possessed and confident about headlands, coastlines, and depth, but at the edge of the Coast they became apologetic – laid in lagoons with dotted lines, supposed and presumed their boundaries. (Steinbeck 1960, 74)

Apparently, Steinbeck and Ricketts did not have much trust in the existing studies and the standard US nautical guide used still today. This notion mirrors their approach of not trusting preconceived ideas about anything, but trusting only what they see, what is (their Is-thinking).

Collecting species always happens in a similar scheme: the boat anchors in the desired waters, the crew waits for the tide to go down, gets their gear, goes to the shore in the dinghy and starts collecting. The following text passage is similar to many others:

We collected down the littoral as the water went down. We didn’t seem to have time enough. We took samples of everything that came to hand. The uppermost rocks swarmed with Sally Lightfoots, those beautiful and fast and sensitive crabs. With them were white periwinkle snails. Below that, barnacles and Purpura snails; more crabs and many limpets. Below that many serpulids – attached worms in calcareous tubes with beautiful purple floriate heads. Below that, the multi-rayed starfish, Heliaster kubiniji of Xanthus. With Heliaster were a few urchins, but not many, and they were so placed in crevices as to be hard to dislodge. Several resisted the steel bar to the extent of breaking – the mouth remaining tight to the rock while the shell fell away. Lower still there were to be seen swaying in the water under the reefs the dark gorgonians, or sea-fans. In the lowest surf-levels there was a brilliant gathering of the moss animals known as bryozoa; flatworms; flat crabs; the large sea-cucumber (Holothuria lubrica); some anemones; many sponges of two types, a smooth, encrusting purple one, the other erect, white, and calcareous. There were great colonies of tunicates, clusters of tiny individuals joined by a common tunic and looking so like the sponges that even a trained worker must await the specialist’s determination to know whether his find is sponge or tunicate. This is annoying, for the sponge being one step above the protozoa, at the bottom of the evolutionary ladder, and the tunicate near the top, bordering the vertebrates, your trained worker is likely to feel that a dirty trick has been played upon him by an entirely too democratic Providence.

We took many snails, including cones and murexes; a small red tectibranch (of a group to which the sea-hares belong); hydroids; many annelid worms; and a red pentagonal starfish (Oreaster). There were the usual hordes of hermit crabs, but oddly enough we saw no chitons (sea-cradles), although the region seemed ideally suited to them.

We collected in haste. As the tide went down we kept a little ahead of it, wading in rubber boots, and as it came up again it drove us back. The time seemed very short. The incredible beauty of the tide pools, the brilliant colors, the swarming species ate up the time. And when at last the afternoon surf began to beat on the littoral and covered it over again, we seemed barely to have started. But the buckets and jars and tubes were full, and when we stopped we discovered that we were very tired. (Steinbeck 1960, 121–2; emphasis added)

This is not the usual fare of scientific reports, as the text specifically points to problems, weaknesses, and difficulties (time, tide, resistance of animals, possible confusion). It is a mix of scientific and literary language, with the specific Latin names of marine animals not always provided. The text allows the subjective feelings of the marine biologist to enter the picture (sublimity, annoyance, anxiety about time, tiredness) and reveals its connection to literary aesthetic qualities as it employs similes, images, colors, and anthropomorphism. The rhetorical device of anthropomorphism (here, for example, the notion of a democratic society of marine animals), Sarah Perrault argues, can be useful for scientists when they want to present scientific material not exclusively in technical terminology and further to avoid anthropocentrism; for example, Rachel Carson, Aldo Leopold, and Loren Eiseley have extensively used anthropomorphic metaphors to show scientific principles. And yet, scientists’ credibility may suffer from their use of anthropomorphism and ‘non-objective’ language, as both are viewed with suspicion, specifically in the biological sciences (Perrault 2009, 92, 94). But such mix of scientific language, which is usually assumed to be objective, and literary language is precisely Steinbeck’s intent that helps him destabilize notions of human domination of nature and scientific claims to objectivity, authority, and truth.

What becomes clear in the course of the text is the method of study: all collected animals die. They are collected in containers and preserved in formaldehyde to be studied later. Killing and preserving live specimens was the established scientific practice of the 1940s and until much later. It was made possible by the invention of fixing tissue through formaldehyde by Ferdinand Blum in Frankfurt in the late 1890s. Formaldehyde causes only little shrinkage and distortion of tissue, it was and is a “cheap readily available fixative that is very forgiving, that is, it works under a broad variety of conditions, is stable, functions effectively over a fivefold or more range of concentration and is usable with almost any tissue,” it does not cause coagulation or over-fixation (Fox et al. 1985, 845–46),^[1] which makes it an ideal histopathological technology for expeditions. Already David Starr Jordan, the well-known ichthyologist and founding president of Stanford University, who discovered and named around one thousand new fishes, used ethanol and later formaldehyde for preservation during his collecting expeditions in the 1880s (Miller 2020, 51, 57–8). And yet, the chemicals are not a universal remedy. The crew of the Western Flyer has to be very careful with sensitive and fragile animals:

These tubes are invaluable for small and delicate animals: the chance of bringing them back uninjured is greatly increased if each individual, or at least only a few of like species, are kept in separate containers. We filled our pockets with these tubes. The soft animals must never be put in the same container with any of the livelier crabs, for these, when restrained or inhibited in any way, go into paroxysms of rage and pinch everything at random, even each other; sometimes even themselves. (Steinbeck 1960, 120–1; emphasis added)

Again, the text uses literary devices such as metaphor (“filled our pockets”) and anthropomorphism (“paroxysms of rage”), connecting the scientists to the sea and marine life. As stated, the best caution and preserving method does not keep the animal as it is. When they collected langustina The Log says:

We put them in white porcelain pans and took some color moving pictures of them – some of the few good moving pictures, incidentally, made during the whole trip. […] Finally, we immersed them in fresh water and when they were dead, preserved them in alcohol, which promptly removed their brilliant color. (Steinbeck 1960, 112; emphasis added)

This problem leads the scientists to draw conclusions at the spot while observing animals:

The exposed rocks had looked rich with life under the lowering tide, but they were more than that: they were ferocious with life. There was an exuberant fierceness in the littoral here, a vital competition for existence. Everything seemed speeded-up; starfish and urchins were more strongly attached than in other places, and many of the univalves were so tightly fixed that the shells broke before the animals would let go their hold. Perhaps the force of the great surf which beats on this shore has much to do with the tenacity of the animals here. It is noteworthy that the animals, rather than deserting such beaten shores for the safe cove and protected pools, simply increase their toughness and fight back at the sea with a kind of joyful survival. This ferocious survival quotient excites us and makes us feel good, and from the crawling, fighting, resisting qualities of the animals, it almost seems that they are excited too. (Steinbeck 1960, 121; emphasis added)

As before, the manner of speaking is not authoritative, offers insights but no final conclusions with claim to truth (“looked,” “seemed,” “perhaps,” “noteworthy”). The text almost gets carried away with the enthusiasm of the observing scientist, allowing the scientist’s feelings to enter the narrative (“ferocious with life,” “exuberant fierceness,” “fight back,” “joyful survival”). Again, the marine animals are anthropomorphized when the text suggests that they are joyful and as excited as the scientists in their quest for survival which parallels the scientists’ quest for knowledge.

Steinbeck repeatedly admits to their very inability to take proper moving images with the 20 mm movie camera he had borrowed, as they have problems putting the images in proper focus and getting light and exposure correct:

We did take some of our usual moving pictures of Sail Rock, and they were even a little worse than usual, for there was laundry drying on a string and the camera was set up behind it. When developed, the film showed only an occasional glimpse of Sail Rock, but a very lively set of scenes of a pair of Tiny’s blue and white shorts snapping into the breeze. It is impossible to say how bad our moving pictures were – one film laboratory has been eager to have a copy of the film, for it embodies in a few thousand feet, so they say, every single thing one should not do with a camera. (Steinbeck 1960, 265)

What appears like a humorous self-ridicule to contemporary readers was a failure on the part of the scientist cum writer that Sparky bitterly complained about later. He expected images of the beautiful landscape and sea they experienced and yet had nothing to show at the fishermen’s union meeting (MacDonald 2009, 91). It seems almost self-destructive to state one’s mistakes and inabilities in a report or travelogue of a scientific expedition, which mirrors Ricketts’s and Steinbeck’s self-reflexivity. Despite this being the narrative part of their book (a scientific description of all found marine life is published in Sea of Cortez ([1941] 2009)), the self-deprecating tone and metatext is rather remarkable. This text as a cross-over between scientific report, travel account, and creative writing quite often leans towards making full use of aesthetic tools and elements. Gladstein and Gladstein hold that “Steinbeck blends the colorful and image-filled language of the creative writer with the observations of a scientist to make a clear and direct statement about his attitudes toward the natural world” (1997, 163). It appears that Steinbeck, with his open approach to what is, at times willingly reduces his voice and gives room for the sea and marine animals to speak, acting as a ventriloquist for them, specifically in moments when he anthropomorphizes marine life and relates the scientists’ to the animals’ feelings.

3 Understanding Ecology

The expedition was not interested in specific marine species, but in understanding the whole system of tidewater life in any given spot. The Log says:

Our collecting ends were different from those ordinarily entertained. In most cases at the present time, collecting is done by men who specialize in one or more groups. Thus, one man interested in hydroids will move out on a reef, and if his interest is sharp enough, he will not even see other life forms about him. For him, the sponge is something in the way of his hydroids. Collecting large numbers of animals presents an entirely different aspect and makes one see an entirely different picture. Being more interested in distribution than in individuals, we saw dominant species and changing sizes, groups which thrive and those which recede under varying conditions. In a way, ours is the older method, somewhat like that of Darwin on the Beagle. He was called a ‘naturalist.’ He wanted to see everything, rocks and flora and fauna; marine and terrestrial. (Steinbeck 1960, 122–3; emphasis added)

Again Steinbeck writes their expedition into the naturalist legacy of Darwin, trying to understand the whole picture, doing almost sociological studies of tidewater creatures, and he distinguishes their method from the one of contemporary scientists, who isolate animals they want to study. While their holistic approach is truly innovative, their scientific practices of collecting and preserving were similar to those of their fellow scientists. As well, a scientific quest for knowledge, as important as it is for mankind, emerges as colonial practice from a non-anthropocentric perspective. Scientists have the power to come in with a boat, collect, preserve, and study marine animals for the benefit of humanity. The notion of taking specimens (the text repeatedly uses the phrase we took) and taking their lives could be seen in analogy to the colonial taking of land for the benefit of European settlers.^[2]

Steinbeck and Ricketts were interested in finding new ways of thinking about animals and human beings in their environment and their relationships with each other. Both were influenced by thinkers who spearheaded what we would now call ecological studies: William Emerson Ritter and Warder Clyde Allee, who wrote on ‘superorganism’ (ecosystem) and on group behavior among animals. Steinbeck and Ricketts rigorously employed what they called non-teleological Is-thinking: observing and studying what is and not what could be or why this is so, not being influenced by established ideas, and not drawing cause-and-effect conclusions to fit some existing system (Gaither 1992, 46). Gloria Gaither argues:

What Steinbeck opposed was static systems – be they scientific, political, or religious – into which everything must be artificially forced and categorized. Instead, he felt it was even more intellectual (and spiritual) what is, remaining open to the possibility that contradictions are, instead, profound paradoxes of a much larger, truer design beyond our present knowledge. (Gaither 1992, 50; original emphasis)

Especially Ricketts was interested in the “toto picture” – “the kind of holistic, synthetic thinking that is essential in ecology” (Hedgepeth 1978 qtd. in Kelley and Steinbeck 1997, 30; original emphasis). Two levels of understanding are followed by Ricketts and Steinbeck: 1. the empirical scientific understanding what is, derived from studying the natural world, and 2. a transcendent understanding of the world achieved by seeing the larger, the toto picture (Kelley and Steinbeck 1997, 33). The Phalanx concept is the “notion that the collection of individuals in an ecosystem, a group, or as a superorganism, exhibits a purpose, a personality, and an energy transcending that of the individuals who make up the superorganism” (Kelley and Steinbeck 1997, 36). Steinbeck writes:

Our interest lay in relationships of animal to animal. If one observes in this relational sense, it seems apparent that species are only commas in a sentence, that each species is at once the point and the base of a pyramid, that all life is relational. […] 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. (Steinbeck 1960, 267)

This leads them to ‘breaking through’ to an understanding of the global ecosystem as a whole, an interconnected system, “the whole is more than the sum of its parts” (Ricketts qtd. in Astro 1971, 112). This ‘breaking through’ requires three steps: 1. developing an awareness of the ‘connectedness’ and ‘all-embracingness’ of all living and non-living things, all cells and organisms function in a larger whole; 2. finding a new way of thinking outside of established systems, theories, and categories, which has room for contradictions and deviations from preheld beliefs; and 3. “‘breaking through the crust’ (a term borrowed from Robinson Jeffers) of what is to a realization of a grand and paradoxical Big Picture” (Gaither 1992, 43–4; emphasis added). Science was to them an essential step in the development of a holistic understanding of humanity (Kelley 1997, 39, 41) and of the “systemic nature of the environment” (Gladstein and Gladstein 1997, 163).

Ricketts was a trained marine biologist and Steinbeck a writer, and yet, the amateur scientist Steinbeck with his limited training was attributed “a firm grasp on the subject matter at hand” (MacDonald 2009, 87), which shows in his artful and quasi-scientific description of tidal zone life. While one might assume that they developed many ideas together, the initial thinking large through tide pools must have come from Ricketts who studied marine life, sought the toto picture, and had written the two essays “The Philosophy of Breaking Through” and “Non-Teleological Thinking” (Astro 1971, 111). Richard Astro explains: “the scientific and philosophical theorizing (values of the holistic and ecological approach, etc.) as well as the collecting notes are taken almost directly from Ricketts’ log” (1971, 120). Steinbeck no doubt shared Ricketts’s thought and contextualized his ideas of interconnectedness of all things in The Log and in his novels (cf. Gaither 1992, 44–9). But their relationship was perhaps rather that of a symbiotic mentor and mentee, which Norbert Schaffeld explains as a narrative technique in science novels. The scientist as a character explains his theory to mentee characters, which facilitates a narrative transmission of this knowledge and the readers’ understanding and sympathies (Schaffeld 2016, 185). Such constellation could have worked quite similarly here: Ricketts the scientist needs Steinbeck the writer to clad his theories in understandable language and publicize, or better, popularize it (the situation is not exactly the same as this is a travelogue with Steinbeck’s narrative voice that does not imitate Ricketts’s).^[3] In hindsight, this worked out very well, as the publication of The Log raised their expedition and work to mythic status. John Janovy, Jr. says that the book is a “parable” which is “now a part of the scriptures of marine biology” and the Sea of Cortez a “place made sacred by a book published in 1941” (qtd. in Gladstein and Gladstein 1997, 172).

Ricketts and Steinbeck were not alone in their holistic thinking; they further developed ideas espoused by the Romantic transcendentalists Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson, who insisted that there was a bigger picture than what we see (Gaither 1992, 49), that there is a unity of all creation, and that immersing oneself in nature and its observation would bring some larger ‘truth’ or insight. As well, Ricketts’s and Steinbeck’s thoughts prefigured what was later to be developed into the Gaia hypothesis – the idea that

Earth and its biological systems behave as a huge single entity. This entity has closely controlled self-regulatory negative feedback loops that keep the conditions on the planet within boundaries that are favorable to life. (Boston 2008, 1727; cf. Gladstein and Gladstein 1997, 165)

The chemist James E. Lovelock and biologist Lynn Margulis developed this idea in the early 1970s as a new way of looking at global ecology, suggesting the co-evolution of the biological and physical environment (Boston 2008, 1727).

Both Ricketts and Steinbeck, in this sense, are part of the development of modern environmentalism in the US, writing after nineteenth century transcendentalism, conservationism, and preservationism, and exhibiting their notion of the systemic nature of the environment roughly at the same time as Rachel Carson and Aldo Leopold forwarded their ideas of marine ecological systems and land ethics (cf. Gladstein and Gladstein 1997, 162–3).^[4] They say that what is important

is really the understanding and the attempt to say that man is related to the whole thing, related inextricably to all reality, known and unknowable. […] Each of them [Jesus, Darwin, Einstein] in his own tempo and with his own voice discovered and reaffirmed with astonishment the knowledge that all things are one thing and that one thing is all things – plankton, a shimmering phosphorescence on the sea and the spinning planets and an expanding universe, all bound together by the elastic string of time. It is advisable to look from the tide pool to the stars and then back to the tide pool again. (Steinbeck 1960, 267; emphasis added)

The holistic idea of all things related and bound together in a string of time recalls traditional Indigenous understandings of relationality of all beings. Such an idea is explained by Nuu-chah-nulth philosopher Richard Atleo (Umeek) with the concept of tsawalk – all is one (2004; 2011). The Okanagan scholar Jeannette Armstrong has discussed the concept of tmix ^w centrism in relation to Western ecological discourse. According to the Okanagan [Syilx] world view, humans are “intricately woven into the very fabric of the life force of the land” (Armstrong 2007, 31; cf. Knopf 2018). The Syilx word for ‘land’ illustrates this view; tmxwulaxw is translated as “from nothing, the life force spreading outward, is here in continuous circles. […], spreading outward in many individual strands” (Armstrong 2007, 30). The Syilx people see themselves as one of those strands, “which are continuously being bound with others to form one strong thread coiling year after year into the future as the life force of the land” (Armstrong 2007, 31; cf. also Armstrong 2009). While Steinbeck and Ricketts might have had a vague notion of Indigenous environmental ethics, they certainly were not aware of these Nuu-chah-nulth and Syilx concepts. It is rather extraordinary how Steinbeck and Ricketts developed a similar idea of all beings bound together by a woven string that is a function of time.

4 Going with the Tides

Steinbeck and Ricketts are very much aware of the tides’ influence on marine life:

The moon-pull must have been the most important single environmental factor of littoral animals. Displacement and body weight then must certainly have decreased and increased tremendously with the rotation and phases of the moon, particularly if the orbit was at that time elliptic. […] Consider, then, the effect of a decrease in pressure on gonads turgid with eggs or sperm, already almost bursting and awaiting the slight extra pull to discharge. […] Now if we admit for the moment the potency of this tidal effect, we have only to add the concept of inherited psychic pattern we call ‘instinct’ to get an inkling of the force of the lunar rhythm so deeply rooted in marine animals and even in higher animals than in man. […] Tidal effects are mysterious and dark in the soul, and it may well be noted that even today the effect of the tides is more valid and strong and widespread than is generally supposed. (Steinbeck 1960, 98–9)

They surmise that many marine creatures have adapted to a tidal environment, to different water levels and strengths of the surge so that some animals are larger than others or have different behaviours in different tidal waters. Only their holistic approach could bring such results, as they studied the profile of different tidal areas and compared them to each other. They also believe that marine animals have some sort of body memory of tides and their own response to them. Likewise, the expedition is completely influenced by the tides. The crew’s daily routine was going to a new anchoring spot, waiting for the tide to fall, or getting up very early when the tide falls, going out to the coast, collecting for a few hours, going back to the boat, processing the collected animals, cooking food, drinking beer, talking and philosophizing, and repeating this routine the next day. Missing a tide means fewer research results; hence they structured their day according to the tides.

Also, most text passages have a repetitive structure. The chapters are assigned a specific day and tell readers where the crew goes and anchors and how they collect; the chapters usually give a profile of the tidal area and tell readers what was collected. They then narrate little incidents and often offer philosophical insights. The repetitiveness of the work, dependent on the tides, is reflected in the repetitiveness of the text; hence the tides influence the text’s structure and content. The text could be seen, in this sense, as a tidalectic text.

Tidalectics as developed by Kamau Brathwaite is the notion of Caribbean ontology and epistemology being influenced by the tides. For this approach of understanding the sea, islands, and people from an ocean-centered perspective, he draws an image of an old Black woman sweeping her yard every morning, while from a certain vantage point she appears as hovering over the water surface. This image of the Caribbean invokes life by the sea as well as enslavement and the middle passage. Tidalectic is an ‘alter/native’ mode of thinking beyond Western and colonial notions of linear time and linear movement that is based on the rhytmical movement of the ocean, resists Eurocentric dialectic, and provides ‘alter/native’ historiographies and epistemologies to colonialism and capitalism, as Elisabeth DeLoughrey (2010, 2) explains. Beatriz Llenín-Figueroa adds that the concept of tidalectic rearranges time and space and offers “a different perspective on light, the coast, and the sea” (2012, 7–8). She holds:

Tidalectics signals, simultaneously, the materiality of the sea, the waves, the coast, the woman, and the immateriality of their movement. In other words, the concept incorporates, at the same time, the physical phenomena and our imagination of it, as well as the history and the myth or metaphor that might be produced from it. (Llenín-Figueroa 2012, 7–8; original emphasis)

With a focused understanding of tidalectics as undermining linearity (that for this purpose brackets off Steinbeck’s and Ricketts’s settler coloniality and their invasive collecting methods), we can read Steinbeck’s text as a tidalectic text that is influenced by the repetitive time and movement of the sea. It reflects the ocean’s rhythmic movement, the endless ebb and flow of water, and the ocean’s and tide’s influence on marine animals and humans, on humans’ routine and understanding, and on the text itself. With this text, the otherwise land-based writing of Steinbeck has moved out onto and into the ocean. It gives readers a view into an ocean world closed to most people, or unimportant to a negligent industrialized world. As Steinbeck says: “It is advisable to look from the tide pool to the stars and then back to the tide pool again” (1960, 267).