Some more random Ricketts info

After being sick this weekend and spending way too much time laying on the couch cleaning off the DVR (savor that season finale of L&O: Criminal Intent--Jeff Goldblum is leaving), I am finally back to Beyond the Outer Shores. Parts of it are slow going. I know a LOT about the Western coast of Vancouver Island, from Victoria-right across the Juan de Fuca Strait from Washington-to the northern inlet factory town of Port Alice. I know a little too much. The author is from the village of Ucluelet on Vancouver Island so he is doubtless thrilled about his local connection to Ricketts. I understand and I think it's sweet. But pages and pages of Ricketts hopping on and off of freighters in every village on the island's coast and collecting sea slugs............zzz. I nodded off.  I appreciate the history of Pacific ecology (although I wonder if Tamm is so enamored of Ricketts that he overstates his role) but that is not the attraction of the book for me. Obviously, it's Ricketts and Steinbeck and, to a lesser extent, Joseph Campbell.

I did learn that Ricketts gave his bemused approval to Cannery Row before it was published but its success was a small disaster for him. He wasn't a celebrity. He was a modest thoughtful sort concerned with making the world a better place. In fact, he fretted over it. Having people drive by and gawk at him and, in one instance, having a stranger oafishly trespass into his living quarters and demand a tour and have to be forced out was hard on him and his by that point rocky relationship with his girlfriend, Toni. Even when on his collecting tours to remote Vancouver in 1945 and 46, he still found people who had read the book and were elated to meet the real Doc.

Completely unrelated but I learned that butterflies were once (at least in Restoration England) considered symbols of witchcraft. Whenever anyone tries to defend religion as this inerrant well of positivity, I think of goofy ass shit like this.

BTW, the Juan de Fuca Strait was named for a Greek navigator who supposedly found it on a Spanish expedition in the 16th century. Yeah, the name doesn't sound Greek. That is the Spanished up version of it. He named the Strait of Anian. It's questionable that he actually explored it. It marks the international boundary between the US and Canada and is the Pacific outlet for both the Puget Sound and the Strait of Georgia.