Beyond the Outer Shores: The Untold Odyssey of Ed Ricketts, the Pioneering Ecologist Who Inspired John Steinbeck and Joseph Campbell

  • Eric Enno Tamm
Four Walls Eight Windows: 2004. 384 pp. $26 1568582986 | ISBN: 1-568-58298-6
Novel research: Ed Ricketts was immortalized as the character Doc in John Steinbeck's Cannery Row. Credit: STANFORD UNIV. PRESS

Ed Ricketts is a hero among marine biologists — mention his name and their faces light up. His 1939 field guide, Between Pacific Tides, is still in print and is often one of the first books a fledgling marine biologist takes into the field. Outside marine biology, however, few people recognize his name. But Doc from John Steinbeck's novel Cannery Row, that's another story. Almost everyone knows Doc.

“It is nearly impossible to separate the man from the myth, Ed Ricketts from Doc,” writes Eric Enno Tamm in Beyond the Outer Shores. But Tamm does rescue Ricketts from the myth and gives us an account of Ricketts' heroic journey as a scientist who had his finger on the pulse of ecology through his intimate knowledge of the Pacific coast. Ricketts went to the University of Chicago, but did not graduate, before coming west to Monterey, California, to set up shop as a freelance scientist and purveyor of tidal-pool specimens. But he was a doctor of sorts. He diagnosed the environment and humanity, and offered humbling advice that his contemporaries failed to heed and that we are only now beginning to hear. He warned of the dire consequences of overfishing sardines, and realized that even his “slight bit of collecting” in the Great Tide Pool in Monterey probably contributed to the disappearance of some rare brittle stars.

Beyond the Outer Shores is the first biography of Ricketts. Tamm wisely focuses on the collecting trips that Ricketts took north and south along the Pacific coast, and on his friendships with Steinbeck and the great mythologist Joseph Campbell. The quest to understand the Pacific coast was central to Ricketts' life and work. By following that story, Tamm's book is likely to be the best biography of Ricketts for some time, even if others come along to provide more salacious tidbits from the party atmosphere that pervaded Ricketts' Pacific Biological Laboratories, both in Steinbeck's fiction and in real life.

Tamm has a personal interest in this story. He grew up in Canada on the remote western shore of Vancouver Island. In high-school biology class, Tamm surveyed the same beach in his village that, he would later discover, Ricketts had studied on his expeditions north to the outer shores. Tamm worked in the fishing industry and became a journalist and an environmental activist. He writes with an impassioned but sure hand. His book is meticulously researched and he has a firm grasp of the material.

It is easy to become lost in Ricketts' own obtuse scientific and philosophical writings, much of it never published in his lifetime. As Tamm puts it, Ricketts' “grammar and sentence structure were as tangled as a kelp bed”. And Tamm could easily have gone overboard in siding with scholars who have overplayed Ricketts' profound influence on Steinbeck. But Tamm confidently sets a steady course through these shoals and brings readers along with him on the fascinating journey.

I know what it's like trying to follow Ricketts. This spring I set out from Monterey with a group of scientists from Stanford University's Hopkins Marine Station to retrace an expedition that Ricketts and Steinbeck took to the Gulf of California in 1940 to explore the intertidal zone; the duo collected more than 600 species, some 60 of which were previously undescribed. We went to see how things have changed.

In the book that resulted from their journey, The Sea of Cortez, Steinbeck and Ricketts noted that, in addition to sea stars, brittle-stars and urchins, they had taken “2,160 individuals of two species of beer”. Try as we might to match their enthusiasm, we only managed 1,200 individuals of six species of beer. But we found the gulf profoundly changed. In “this region of the sea turtle and flying fish”, we saw plenty of flying fish, but no turtles. We saw no great schools of tuna and big sharks, as our predecessors had. Instead, we found a new top predator, the jumbo Humboldt squid, Dosidicus gigas. And although the invertebrate diversity in the tide pools is still astonishing, it is lacking in species that people eat and collect, such as scallops and Murex, which one crew member of Steinbeck and Ricketts' expedition collected by the bushel for girlfriends back home.

“There is more of the whole man, John Steinbeck, in The Sea of Cortez than in any of his novels,” wrote one critic in a review of the book that is still in print as The Log from the Sea of Cortez (although without the species catalogue that made up half the original book and shamefully with only Steinbeck's name on the cover now). “This is at once the record of a serious biological expedition and of the impact of a biologist and a novelist upon each other's minds... The best of Steinbeck is in it.”

And the best of Ricketts, I would invariably have added before I read Beyond the Outer Shores. Now the best of Ricketts is in Tamm's biography. I read the book when I couldn't sleep for thinking of all the preparations still to be done before our departure to the Sea of Cortez. The thrilling sense of discovery on each page kept me up even longer. I read it again when we returned; it seemed even better the second time around.

Between Pacific Tides, Ricketts' guide to the “good, kind, sane little animals” of the California coast, remains his greatest individual achievement — with help from friends and followers who cleaned up his prose and kept it updated through five editions. He never finished the grand survey that he dreamed of writing about the entire Pacific Coast, from Baja California to British Columbia. On 8 May 1948, a train hit Ricketts at a crossing near Cannery Row, as he was preparing for an expedition north to the outer shores with Steinbeck. He died three days later.

Ricketts' work was never published in scientific journals. His prescient analysis of the crash of the California sardine fishery was published in a local paper. His best ideas about ecology and humanity found voice in the writings of his friends, Steinbeck and Campbell. Now the whole life and work of Ed Ricketts can be found between the covers of Beyond the Outer Shores.