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.

Beyond the outer shores part the first

So far I am loving this book about Ed Ricketts and his friendship with John Steinbeck (and to a lesser but also important extent, Joseph Campbell.) Some things I have learned thus far:

• Steinbeck was very traumatized by the success and controversy surrounding The Grapes of Wrath. 
• He and Joseph Campbell never became friends due to an attraction between Steinbeck's wife at the time (Carol) and Campbell. They never had an affair exactly but they did make out. Campbell, btw, was quite the look evidently back in his day. 
• Ricketts' book Between Pacific Tides was looked down upon by the academic mainstream and it took years for him to get published. It was one of the first biology books (for the Pacific anyways) that grouped fauna according to ecosystem instead of taxonomy. It is one of Stanford U Press's best selling titles.
• In regard to the success of Grapes and the War, Steinbeck wrote in a letter to a friend "There is so much confusion now-emotional hysteria which passes for thought and blind faith which passes for analysis." Relevant? And totally worth stealing? Affirmative times two.