7 minute read
Ricketts & Hood Canal Connections to Cannary Row
Stella Wenstob | freelance historical contributor
Historians thrill at tracking the movements of pioneering marine biologist Ed Ricketts. Most notably following him on his journey to the Sea of Cortez with close friend, writer John Steinbeck. Although it is wel-documented that Ricketts visited Washington and made multiple trips to the British Columbia coast, it has recently come to light that he spent six weeks near Hoodsport on Hood Canal and the hunt is on to find the location of his lab.
Edward F. Ricketts, (1937) In his laboratory
Early History
Ed Ricketts, pioneering marine biologist and ecologist, is famous as the inspiration for Steinbeck’s literary immortalization as the hard-drinking philosophizing “Doc” in his novel Cannery Row. Ricketts’s stimulating intellect and philosophies made his laboratory in Monterey Bay a sort of intellectual haven attracting Henry Miller, James Fitzgerald, Joseph Campbell, along with John Steinbeck.
Steinbeck’s depiction of his friend has led to an overshadowing of the very real scientific contributions Ricketts made to marine biology of the West Coast, but Ricketts’ 1939 Between Pacific Tides (written with Jack Calvin) is a seminal work on the intertidal ecology of the Pacific coast from Mexico to Alaska, inspiring generations of marine biologists. It is now in its fifth printing.
Hood Canal Connections
Although Ricketts’ research is primarily associated with outer coast marine landscapes, new research is coming to light that demonstrates the Olympic Peninsula was also studied by Ricketts. Prompted by the 1930 photograph of Ricketts examining seaweed under the gaze of the Port Townsend lighthouse, historian Michael Kenneth Hemp traced Ricketts time spent on the Olympic Peninsula in a revised edition of Cannery Row: The History of John Steinbeck’s Old Ocean View Avenue was published in July of 2019.
In 1942, while the Second World War denuded the area of able-bodied men, Ricketts and his companion Toni Jackson spent six weeks in Hoodsport collecting sea creatures for Pacific Biological Laboratories – a lab Ricketts ran out of Monterey Bay providing marine specimens to museums and universities around the world.
Ricketts described Hoodsport unmercifully in a letter to a friend as “a sweet dead town” populated by Douglas Firs and habituated by damp weather (quoted in Renaissance Man of Cannery Row: The Life and Letters of Edward F. Ricketts, edited by Katharine A. Rodger 2002).
Ricketts in his lab
Salinas Public Library
Hemp’s research tracks down the general location of Ricketts’ cabin and provides details from oral history research that had before been lost.
The Western Flyer
Hemp’s revised edition also includes a history of the iconic Western Flyer. Built in Tacoma as a purse seiner in 1937 byMartin Petrich, Sr. of the Western Boat Building Company, she was worked out of Monterey Bay as a sardine boat.
Ricketts & Steinbeck pilot the Baby Flyer to the mother ship, Western Flyer
Photo credit: Joel Hedgpeth, The Outer Shores, Part 2, courtesy Mrs. William H. Brown.
In 1940, Steinbeck hired the boat and crew for a six-week voyage to the Gulf of California (the inland waters between the Baja Peninsula and Mexico). The voyage was a new project, an exploratory expedition conducted by Ricketts and Steinbeck with the goal to produce a book of the voyage .
Western Flyer
Photo credit: Joel Hedgpeth, The Outer Shores, Part 2, courtesy Mrs. William H. Brown.
Steinbeck had just published the controversial Grapes of Wrath (1939) and was suffering the pangs of fame and angry critics. He wanted an escape. The prospect of a sea voyage and a turn to non-fiction writing appealed to him. Ricketts was hungry for new adventure. During the voyage, six hundred specimens were collected and stored in the ships’ capacious hold. Sixty of the specimens were discoveries to marine science.
Ricketts boasted to Steinbeck that, “it would be an understatement for me to say that this little trip of ours is growing to be an important expedition and that out of it are coming some fairly significant contributions to invertebrate zoology, to marine sociology and even – I wouldn’t be surprised – to human thought”(quoted in Eric Enno Tamm’s 2004 Beyond the Outer Shores: The Untold Story of Ed Ricketts, the Pioneering ecologist who inspired John Steinbeck and Joseph Campbell).
The Sea of Cortez: A Leisurely Journal of Travel and Research (1941) written in collaboration between Ricketts and Steinbeck is a testament to their deep friendship. Although it was not an overnight success, the royalties barely covering the cost of voyage itself, the book has had a slow and steady influence on the development of marine biology putting forward a holistic theory of ecology documenting the interconnectedness of humans, biology and the environment that has ignited many a scientific mind. The Western Flyer served as a functional floating research station and a metaphorical hub for Steinbeck and Ricketts – almost a character in the book herself – as Steinbeck and Ricketts considered: “Apparently the builder of a boat acts under a compulsion greater than himself. Ribs are strong by definition and feeling. Keels are sound, planking truly chosen and set. A man builds the best of himself into a boat—builds many of the unconscious memories of his ancestors.”
With the tragic death of Ricketts by train crash, much of the romance in the story of his life was accentuated and the heroic qualities of his character has bred a cult-like following among literary and scientific academics – who are loving known as ‘Ed Heads’.
These fans undertake pilgrimages to Cannery Row and the site of Rickett’s Pacific Biological Laboratories.
Since 2015 restoration work has been underway at the Shipwrights co-op in Port Townsend of the elderly Western Flyer providing another mecca for Rickett and Steinbeck junkies.
Like most old wooden fishing boats, the Western Flyer has led a storied life of refits for different fisheries from sardines, perch, black cod, salmon, king crab, and shrimp. She was bought and sold and worked from Monterey Bay right up to Alaska. Along the way her name was changed to Gemini throwing history buffs off her trail for a while. In 1986, Bob Enea, the nephew of the boats’ first captain and owner Tony Berry (who was also part of the crew on the voyage to the Sea of Cortez), recognized the boat in Anacortes by its sign WB4044. He partnered with Hemp of the Cannery Row Foundation to buy the working boat from its owner Ole Knudson. At first, they were refused. When she was retired from sea work the negotiations were reopened, but Hemp and Enea’s finances fell short.
Western Flyer prior to restoration
Tom Banse, knkx.org
The boat was sold in 2011 to the real estate developer Gerry Kehoe who had unpopular plans of incorporating her into a restaurant. In 2012, the boat sank at her anchorage under the Anacortes Bridge. She was risen successfully, only to have her sink again in 2013. This time she stayed under for six months. When raised she looked like a gray ghost, shrouded in the strange algae and sponges Ricketts would have delighted in cataloging. Her hold was once again home to creeping invertebrates (but now outside of their collection jars) with her sides encrusted in barnacles and her decking rotted with tube worms.
She was purchased in 2015 by the Californian businessman and marine geologist John Gregg for $1M. Gregg is quoted to have said that the boat “is arguably worth nothing,” but this project is a labor of love and a homage to the inspiration the Sea of Cortez has had on Gregg’s life. Gregg’s vision was to refurbish the Western Flyer into a working research vessel that will act as a floating classroom and a continued inspiration to budding marine students.
Since 2015 this dream has raised $5 M through grants and donations and become unified under the Western Flyer Foundation (westernflyer.org). The restoration work led by Chris Chase is halfway done with a potential finish date in 2020 and sea trials proposed for the Spring of 2021 with a Pacific Northwest tour later that year. In 2022, she will return to her home port of Monterey Bay and will retrace the Sea of Cortez voyage.
Although on the surface Ricketts and Steinbeck had little to do with the history and shaping of the Olympic Peninsula, it is demonstrated by the research of Hemp and the Western Flyer Foundation that the connections are not only historical. These connections are actively being reworked and enlivened as restorations and pursued oral histories work to rebuild our understanding of the past. Individuals inspired by the writings and lives of Steinbeck and Ricketts pay homage through pilgrimages to the Shipwrights co-op in Port Townsend to touch the boat which carried and stimulated those great minds. A boat of hallowed literary and scientific ground, or as John Gregg says, “a place where lightning struck.”
