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Saturday, Jul 11, 2009
Andromeda Romano-Lax set out to retrace the writer's path to the Sea of Cortez. But while Steinbeck's book bears little mention of his wife, Romano-Lax's is driven by the presence of her own family.
Aug 30, 2002 | Andromeda Romano-Lax's first reaction to the explosion of life in the sparkling Sea of Cortez -- what she calls "a glittering soup" -- was to fall in love. On a heart-healing visit with her sister, she waded into the seemingly hallucinatory waters that separate Baja California from the rest of mainland Mexico and was, as she puts it, smitten. On her next trip, she brought along the man who would become her husband -- and over the next decade, Romano-Lax returned again and again: writing a guidebook ("Adventure Kayaking Baja"), doing research and paddling for miles along Baja's shores.
The desert landscapes and intense blue waters of Baja's midsection are remote and compelling, with a magnetic pull for adventurers and escapists. The peninsula also held a particular allure for John Steinbeck: In 1940, he and close friend Ed Ricketts, the biologist immortalized as "Doc" in Steinbeck's "Cannery Row," fled the success of "Grapes of Wrath" and the looming threat of war to go collect marine organisms in the Sea of Cortez.
Steinbeck, already celebrated as a writer, didn't keep a journal of the odyssey -- the resulting book, "The Log From the Sea of Cortez," borrowed heavily from Ricketts' notebook -- and he never returned. But the trip wound up coloring much of the writer's later work, from the Hitchcock thriller "Lifeboat," whose story Steinbeck wrote, to "The Pearl," based on a folk tale the writer heard during his journey.
In 2000, Romano-Lax packed up her husband, Brian, and two children -- Aryeh, 5, and Tziporah, 2 -- and set off to retrace the voyage made by Steinbeck and Ricketts. It was Romano-Lax's fifth trip; she and Brian have logged close to a year traveling there. This time, however, they set out to revisit Steinbeck and Ricketts' journey, and to assess the state of Baja's marine life.
In just over two months, the family traveled by undersize sailboat and oversize sea kayak, as well as by foot and by thumb. They tangled with questionable conservationists and biting scorpions; Doug, the captain of their tiny sailboat -- who also happened to be Romano-Lax's brother-in-law -- developed a nasty, passive-aggressive case of cabin fever.
Romano-Lax's book about the trip, "Searching for Steinbeck's Sea of Cortez," comes out in September. By phone from her home in Anchorage, she spoke about travels with children, Steinbeck's personality shift and the questionable health of the Sea of Cortez.
At one point you quote Aldo Leopold: "To return not only spoils a trip, but tarnishes a memory." But you've returned over and over again. What is it about the Sea of Cortez that keeps pulling you back?
It's the incredible life there. When I first went, in '89, I was amazed enough -- I knew nothing about the ocean, had never kayaked, and I walked into the water and saw all this alien, glittering life. I hadn't traveled enough to know that was unique in the world. Now I've traveled enough that I know how rich the Baja water is, how miraculously startling it is.
What was the impetus for this trip?
We really were going to re-create John Steinbeck's trip. Brian and I had read aloud to each other from "The Log From the Sea of Cortez" before our first trip. Back then I wasn't a Steinbeck fan at all, but "The Log" is really an incredible book. It's everything mixed together: philosophy and science and travel. For 10 years we dreamed of re-creating that trip. I got off on a tangent writing guidebooks, doing the turn-right, turn-left stuff -- but all along what I really wanted to do was connect to this place that Steinbeck had written about.
There's always that fear with Baja; there's an urgency to get down there and see what's there before it's gone.
