Archives for July 2015

Childhood Memories Haunt Roy Bentley’s Poem about Animal Cruelty and Suicide

July 30, 2015 by 1 Comment

Image of Roy Bentley's cousin in a time with self- or gun-control

The Velocity of a Bullet Is Absolute

1

Before my cousin mentioned the puppies, I hadn’t thought
a mother would kill her young, and even after he mentioned it,

the deaths, I preferred to consider his dog to be one of a kind,
an anomaly. How else to account for torn up pup bodies?

It seemed natural, at 10, to blurt out, I’d shoot her.
A boy has nothing to do with contingencies. To him,

an in media res world is serial, undiscovered absolutes.
The solipsism of childhood is well-known. A child grows,

and before he or she does we expect less. Or stop all of that
by offering a loaded .22 pistol, saying, Go ahead. Take charge.

In this, he was like the fathers brothers uncles—mothers—
who walk us to deep water and toss us in, saying, Swim.

I hated him. Hated the heft and weight of the revolver.
Hated the State of Virginia and everyone named Billy.

I hated being told to squeeze, not jerk, the trigger.
He squatted in summer earth by his exhausted dog,

separating her away from the remainder of the litter.
She went, answering some fresh memory of kindness.

He motioned where I should put the round (or rounds).
Stepped back and a little away from the panting dog,

acting as if he had considered and believed I’d shoot.
I can say now, after 50 years, why I hated him then.

Because he took the gun. Before I could act. Raised
the blue-black barrel. Fired. Bent down. Fired again.

2

They lied he didn’t use a Christmas-gift Remington 12-gauge pump
and kept the casket closed. Both parents were the picture of grief—

both Bill and Blanche had to be sedated, both had to be kept away
from Banks & Craft Funeral Home where they took him. Neon

wasn’t dead in those days. You could sit down to a cheeseburger
and fries and a “Co-cola” at Tucker’s Drugstore & Soda Fountain.

You could rent a room at the Bentley Hotel, where Hazel Bentley
would fill you in on news and gossip from as far away as Frankfort.

There was D.V. Bentley’s brick Colonial mansion on Main Street
on the end of town by the A & P, the house Hazel lived in with her

crazy sister, Betty Ellen. You could buy a ticket to the Neon Theater
and watch Dennis Hopper and Peter Fonda murdered in Easy Rider.

You could haggle for a good price on a Mercury at Harlow Motors.
Top off the tank at Howard Collier’s Pure Oil. Banks & Craft was

still burying citizens of that much of eastern Kentucky, carting off
the wages of black lung in a Cadillac hearse with hand-painted logo.

Staggeringly drunk miners vanished from Saturday-night streets,
the War on Poverty had come and gone. To this Neon, we brought

Billy Barnett. A dying small town. Some paved streets drenched
in blood-letting and so could receive a body with a stalk of head

and almost no face. He went into the ground in Whitesburg—
on a day when what a man is or isn’t offers little impediment

to diggers on furlough from the mines, their dissatisfied wives,
men who’ll finish work under a sky too immense for memory.

Filed Under: Anthology Tagged With:

Stepdog: Steinbeck Parallels In New York Times Writer’s Storied Life and Latest Book

July 30, 2015 by 6 Comments

Image of New York Times writer Mia NavarroMia Navarro, a Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times journalist and author, recounts her remarkable career reporting on social issues raised by John Steinbeck in Stepdog, a domestic memoir all Steinbeck- and dog-lovers will appreciate. Like Travels with Charley, Mia’s dog-wags-woman tale reveals fault-lines, including blended-family fractures, in contemporary American culture. Steinbeck finally achieved marriage success with his third wife Elaine and her poodle Charley, despite daunting difficulties with his-and-hers children and a deeply resentful former spouse. Rather than focusing on kid or spouse issues, however, Mia lets her husband Jim’s jealous, un-Charley dog Eddie carry the theme: where divorce, finances, and careers are concerned, making marriage work is a labor of love.

Cover image of Stepdog, Mireya Navarro's new memoir

Though she looked elegant, beautiful, and perfectly poised, Mia was learning the truth about second marriages the hard way when I interviewed her in Denver five years ago about Green Wedding, her popular how-to book published in 2009 by Stewart, Tabori & Chang. During the interview she mentioned her recent wedding to Jim, a fellow journalist she met in Arizona before moving to California to report on West Coast style-trends for the Sunday New York Times. Like John Steinbeck and his first wife, Carol Henning, Mia and Jim had gotten married in Los Angeles as a matter of convenience. Unlike the Steinbecks—small-town Californians who grew up in conservative Protestant families—Mia and Jim came from different backgrounds but like John and Carol shared liberal social views. Steinbeck’s 1938 series on labor and housing conditions faced by Dust Bowl refugees in Depression-era California, written for the San Francisco News, became his 1939 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Grapes of Wrath. Mia—whose career included a stint with the San Francisco Examiner—was a member of the New York Times team that won a 2001 Pulitzer Prize for a series on race in America, a subject confronted by Steinbeck in Travels with Charley. Steinbeck also explored ecology and resource depletion in Sea of Cortez, written decades before Mia’s eco-friendly wedding guide. Like The Grapes of Wrath, Green Wedding has already achieved staying power: Backyard Garden Oasis Bed and Breakfast keeps copies of Mia’s book on hand for conscientious couples planning a green wedding in Robert Louis Stevenson country north of San Francisco.

Cover image of Green Wedding by New York Times author Mireya Navarro

Writing Stepdog was a risky departure for Mia, as East of Eden was for Steinbeck. Travels with Charley satisfied dog lovers, but East of Eden caused family problems for the author, who resisted autobiography in his earlier novels. As Mia observes, blended families are frequently mixed salads with ingredients that never quite agree. And career trajectories often collide when both partners are smart and successful. Steinbeck’s artistic first wife stifled her ambitions; when his second resisted, her resentment contributed to their divorce. Mia’s candor on this sensitive aspect of modern marriage is as remarkable as her career. When the New York Times offers a new job requiring her to leave Los Angeles for New York (she describes the Washington Heights apartment she kept just in case as located “in upstate Manhattan”), she accepts. Eventually Jim follows—with aging Eddie, Mia’s enemy, in tow. John and Elaine were both dog lovers, and Charley, unlike their blended-family children, was easy to manage in New York. Jim’s jealous mutt, by contrast, created problems for Mia only California dog lovers who move east can possibly comprehend. To her credit, Mia makes peace with Eddie following accidents and illness, though the treaty is on his terms. In the process she also makes the discovery that pets are projections of human problems and emotions, the kind that come with marriage. The chatty, colloquial style she employs in Stepdog eases the reader over painful potholes in the path to realization—a touch of humor, pathos, and joy reminiscent of Steinbeck’s early Cannery Row fiction. Unlike Pirate’s prayerful pooches in Tortilla Flat, however, Eddie is no saint. But he’s a survivor, and Mia stays the course, proving that amor vincit omnia, even when a possessive pet and blended family make married life a rocky road.

Filed Under: Books, Current Affairs Tagged With:

Why John Steinbeck Would Support Bernie Sanders Now

July 22, 2015 by 9 Comments

Composite image of Bernie Sanders, John Steinbeck, Franklin Roosevelt, and Adlai Stevenson

If John Steinbeck were alive today he would support Bernie Sanders for president.

Why? Because Bernie Sanders is the kind of outspoken progressive the author of The Grapes of Wrath enthusiastically embraced during his controversial career as a prize-winning writer of popular fiction. A passionate believer in fair play, Steinbeck endorsed presidential candidates committed to populist causes, actively campaigning for Franklin Roosevelt, who was elected four times, and Adlai Stevenson, who ran twice but lost both races. More than either man, Bernie Sanders talks straight in plain language about equality and integrity, Steinbeck’s core values—a New England character trait that Steinbeck both admired and inherited. The Sanders movement is about issues, not personality; Steinbeck wanted to be remembered for his books, not his life. But his life was public and political, and a little biography is needed to show why he’d be for Bernie Sanders today.

Why John Steinbeck and Bernie Sanders Would Get Along

Steinbeck was born in Salinas, California, in 1902, and grew up in the small town during the era of Theodore Roosevelt, the Republican President who busted the big business trusts and moved to curtail private exploitation of public lands by creating parks such as Yosemite. John’s mother was an ex-schoolteacher and tireless civic volunteer. His father was a failed small-businessman who became the elected Treasurer of Monterey County. His mother’s parents emigrated from Ireland, while his father’s people were New Englanders—half-English and half-German. Both parents were Party-of-Lincoln Republicans who believed in social improvement, access to education, and reforming government to make it work better. Steinbeck was proud of these roots, later writing that everybody in Salinas was a Republican back then, and that if he had stayed in Salinas he would have become one, too.

Steinbeck was proud of his roots, later writing that everybody in Salinas was a Republican back then, and that if he had stayed in Salinas he would have become one, too.

Like Bernie Sanders, John Steinbeck grew to distrust the corrupting influence of corporations and how working people were manipulated to vote against their economic self-interest—urban vs. rural, native- vs. foreign-born, small farmers and white laborers vs. Mexicans, Chinese, Filipinos, and refugees from the Dust Bowl. He hated the social snobbery he encountered as a student at Stanford University in the 1920s, working as a field hand and night watchman in summers and off-semesters to help pay his way but quitting before getting a degree. In 1925 he left for New York to find his own way. There, like Bernie Sanders, he failed at more than one job before returning to California to make ends meet as a caretaker-handyman on a rich man’s estate. The Great Depression that resulted from Wall Street’s collapse in 1929 gave Steinbeck the subject he needed to become a politically engaged writer: the brutal suppression of non-union workers by California’s big business interests. The state’s powerful industrial-agriculture complex became the target of his 1939 masterpiece, The Grapes of Wrath.

The Great Depression that resulted from Wall Street’s collapse in 1929 gave Steinbeck the subject he needed to become a politically engaged writer: the brutal suppression of non-union workers by California’s big business interests.

Also like Bernie Sanders today—and most Americans at the time—Steinbeck believed in gun-rights, but was too tenderhearted to hunt. Instead, he kept a gun for self-protection. Hired thugs threatened to break his legs or worse for what he was writing about workers’ rights, even before The Grapes of Wrath, and the sheriff warned him of a plot to set him up for a rape charge. Threats failed to change his mind, and the celebrity he achieved through his writing changed his behavior but not his character. Like Bernie Sanders, he remained pro-labor all his life and more at ease with working people than with billionaires. He refused to own a Ford because Henry Ford was an anti-union anti-Semite whose cars Steinbeck thought inferior. Steinbeck described another billionaire as so driven by avarice that late-life regret forced him to try buying his way into heaven through philanthropy.

Like Bernie Sanders, he remained pro-labor all his life and more at ease with working people than with billionaires. He refused to own a Ford because Henry Ford was an anti-union anti-Semite whose cars Steinbeck thought inferior.

The greatest influence on Steinbeck’s thinking about politics was probably his first wife, Carol Henning, a progressive activist who suggested the title of The Grapes of Wrath. Together they supported the New Deal programs of President Franklin Roosevelt, whose First Lady became Steinbeck’s friend and ally. Like Bernie Sanders, however, Steinbeck had a wise way of not rejecting those who disagreed with him about party affiliation. He remained loyal to his Republican sisters, though he deeply disliked their fellow Californian Richard Nixon, and he despised William Randolph Hearst, the father of yellow journalism—the Fox News of American politics at the time. Steinbeck died in New York the month after Nixon was elected president in 1968. If Steinbeck and Bernie Sanders had met in the ’60s, unlikely but conceivable, they would have agreed about the movement for desegregation and voting rights and disagreed about the war in Vietnam, an issue that eventually got Steinbeck in trouble with his friends.

John Steinbeck, Franklin Roosevelt, and Adlai Stevenson

When Steinbeck’s enemies accused him of being Jewish because of his surname and his sympathies, he replied that he would be pleased if it were so. In reality his religious roots were Protestant, and he grew up in the Episcopal Church—the church of Franklin Roosevelt, a New York aristocrat of Dutch descent whom detractors also accused of being a Jew. Just as Steinbeck’s parents had supported the progressive policies of Teddy Roosevelt, FDR’s Republican cousin, Steinbeck advocated Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal as a way out of the pain and suffering caused by Wall Street in the Great Depression. When world war broke out the year The Grapes of Wrath was published, Steinbeck found himself blackballed by military bureaucrats in Washington and abused by his local draft board. Despite his support for FDR and the fight against Fascism, he questioned the government’s internment of Japanese-Americans and criticized pro-war propaganda created by New York ad men and Hollywood studio warriors. After showing courage under fire as an embedded newspaper correspondent on the Italian front, he was refused the award for valor that many thought he deserved. When he returned to the United States he said the worst thing about war was its dishonesty.

Despite his support for FDR and the fight against Fascism, he questioned the government’s internment of Japanese-Americans and criticized pro-war propaganda created by New York ad men and Hollywood studio warriors.

Doubts about the Cold War, plus Eleanor Roosevelt’s endorsement, motivated John Steinbeck to support Adlai Stevenson over Dwight Eisenhower in 1952 and 1956. Stevenson’s cool intelligence and firm grip on fact-based reality appealed to Steinbeck’s intellect, which he developed by dialogue and research. The same traits made Stevenson a target of Cold Warriors from both parties connected to what Eisenhower later called out as the military-industrial complex in his last State of the Union address. Stevenson was an independent-minded politician with a consistent message, an activist following, and an aversion to the kind of character assassination used against him when he ran for president. Like Franklin Roosevelt and Bernie Sanders, he was John Steinbeck’s idea of an authentic progressive.

Adlai Stevenson was an independent-minded politician with a consistent message, an activist following, and an aversion to the kind of character assassination used against him when he ran for president. Like Franklin Roosevelt and Bernie Sanders, he was John Steinbeck’s idea of an authentic progressive.

Along with Eleanor Roosevelt, Steinbeck encouraged Stevenson to run again in 1960 before shifting his support to John Kennedy. After the election Stevenson and Steinbeck grew close, closer than Steinbeck ever was to Franklin Roosevelt. Like Bernie Sanders, Stevenson had a scientific, secular worldview that attracted Steinbeck but invited opponents to characterize Stevenson as an egghead who was unqualified to be president because he read books and liked culture. Steinbeck, who wrote long books, shared Stevenson’s enthusiasm for music and reading. Cool Bach was playing in the background as Steinbeck wrote The Grapes of Wrath. So was the edgy music of Igor Stravinsky, a Russian refugee with a wild, insistent sound more like Bernie Sanders than Bach or Adlai Stevenson.

But Couldn’t John Steinbeck Be for Hillary Clinton?

Answer: If Bernie Sanders weren’t running, yes, but with reservations. Here’s why.

John Steinbeck’s third wife was a Texas friend of Lady Bird Johnson, and the Steinbecks were White House guests when LBJ needed help with the intellectuals he thought Steinbeck, like Stevenson, represented. It’s easy enough to imagine Elaine Steinbeck, the first non-male stage manager in Broadway history, favoring a female candidate for president today. But the influence she exerted turned out badly for her husband in the 1960s. Steinbeck’s sense of loyalty to the Johnsons led him to get the Vietnam War very wrong, despite the lesson he learned in World War II. He kept his mouth shut in public after touring Southeast Asia at Johnson’s urging. In private he confessed that the government had no business interfering in the civil war of a country that hadn’t attacked America.

Today John Steinbeck would be for Bernie Sanders, the no-nonsense New Englander with a consistent record on everything that mattered most to Steinbeck: social justice, individual integrity, and saving the people and the planet Steinbeck celebrated in The Grapes of Wrath.

If he’d lived, Steinbeck would have opposed the Bush-Cheney wars for the same reason—plus the deceit and dishonesty used to justify the invasion of Iraq. At the time, Bernie Sanders joined Barack Obama in opposing the Iraq war from the floor of the U.S. Senate. Like a Cold War Democrat in the days of Lyndon Johnson, however, Senator Clinton went along with the crowd and voted yes. Steinbeck paid dearly, in reputation and in conscience, for following the White House line on Vietnam, despite his distrust of Wall Street and warmongering and his understanding of their connection. Given that experience, he’d distrust Clinton—for her Wall Street friends as much as for her flip-flopping on Iraq. In 2008 Steinbeck would have supported Obama—an egghead from Illinois, like Adlai Stevenson—and rejoiced in the result. Today he’d be for Bernie Sanders, the no-nonsense New Englander with a consistent record on everything that mattered most to Steinbeck: social justice, individual integrity, and saving the people and the planet Steinbeck celebrated in The Grapes of Wrath.

Filed Under: Featured, Justice, Politics & Religion Tagged With:

Robert Louis Stevenson Honeymooned Here, But John Steinbeck Still Sells

July 15, 2015 by 10 Comments

Image of Robert Louis Stevenson
John Steinbeck, a fan since childhood of Robert Louis Stevenson, wrote a short story featuring the Treasure Island author 75 years ago. Stevenson, a frail but fearless Scotsman, pursued the woman he loved—a married American mother he met in London—all the way to the Monterey Peninsula in the late 1870s, the background for Steinbeck’s 1941 magazine story, “How Edith McGillicudy Met Robert Louis Stevenson.” A month after her divorce in 1880, Fanny Osbourne married Robert Louis Stevenson, spending a two-month honeymoon with her young husband camped out on Mt. St. Helena in northern Napa County, where he wrote a book about their adventure called The Silverado Squatters. The couple later settled in the South Seas with Stevenson’s adopted family; fame, fortune, and the author’s early death soon followed. A museum in the Napa town of St. Helena, California, is dedicated to Stevenson and the book. The Mt. St. Helena peak where it all happened was named Robert Louis Stevenson State Park.

Image of Mt. St. Helena

What does this history have to do with John Steinbeck? A recent Fourth of July vacation spent at an isolated Lake County bed and breakfast inspired by images of Eden proved: quite a lot.

Image of map showing Lake County, CaliforniaUnlike Napa to the south and Sonoma and Mendocino counties to the west, Lake County, California, isn’t much of a tourist destination. Like Stevenson’s honeymoon, our bed-and-breakfast getaway was intended to, well, get away from it all. Mendocino was the original setting of John Steinbeck’s second novel, To a God Unknown, but the hot, dry valley at the heart of Lake County feels much more like the novel than its neighboring county. It’s a placid place, dominated by a large lazy lake, horse farms, and vineyards scattered among rolling hills not unlike those of the Salinas Valley. The roads from Sonoma, Mendocino, and Napa wine country to Lake County are sharp and steep, and Clear Lake is lower than usual due to California’s prolonged drought. Visitors to Lake County really want to be there. They always did. The legendary British beauty Lily Langtree, mistress of King Edward VII at the time Robert Louis Stevenson was pursuing Fannie Osbourne, came to Lake County in 1897 to divorce her husband-of-the-moment, a rich American who promptly died. Before she left she bought a winery that still bears her name, not far from Middletown (pop. 1,500), the closest community to the idyllic bed and breakfast where our John Steinbeck story began two weeks ago.

Image of Greta ZeitThe Backyard Garden Oasis Bed and Breakfast consists of three cottages on Mt. St. Helena farmland populated by grazing horses and the occasional coyote. Greta Zeit, a native of New York, bought the farm in 1995, built the comfortable cottages, and created an organic food lover’s dream in the garden for which her bed and breakfast is aptly named. Country quiet with the family dogs—not John Steinbeck—was the purpose of our getaway to Greta’s bed and breakfast. But surprise: John Steinbeck became the topic of conversation at breakfast each morning of our stay. Ed, a young green-energy consultant from San Francisco, exclaimed “I love John Steinbeck!” when first introduced. Another guest, a special education teacher visiting with her husband from Oklahoma, confirmed that Steinbeck has been forgiven and The Grapes of Wrath is now encouraged reading in the state’s schools. A third guest, from Berkeley, works as a sales rep for Penguin, the publisher of John Steinbeck’s books. She said business is very, very good. Greta, our warmhearted host, was reading East of Eden. She wondered if the Trasks were a real family, like the Hamiltons.

Image of bed-and-breakfast dogs Rosie and RustySo much coincidence in such a short space. I was curious. Could I find other John Steinbeck books in Lake County if I looked far enough? The answer was no, but the news was encouraging. The friendly folks at the dozen-plus thrift and vintage stores that dot Clear Lake all said the same thing: when we get a book by Steinbeck, it’s picked up faster than a lampshade by Tiffany. The nearest trade bookstore, across the Lake County line in Ukiah, featured a fat shelf of John Steinbeck Penguins—Of Mice and Men, The Grapes of Wrath, East of Eden—kept in stock to meet the required reading demands of Mendocino County’s schools. The helpful owner of Ukiah’s used bookshop admitted he couldn’t keep Steinbeck’s books in his store. The reason, he explained, was simple: John Steinbeck still sells, even in Robert Louis Stevenson country. That discovery gratified this Lake County traveler, and Charley would be pleased with accommodations. We’ll be back!

Filed Under: Life, Your Life Tagged With:

People Who Have Nothing: Poem by Roy Bentley

July 15, 2015 by 2 Comments

Image of Bentley brothers family photo from Eastern Kentucky

People Who Have Nothing

It’s like they’ve had an epidural to the heart,
those with less than what’s needed, those who
feel that awful ache to set want aside for a while
like someone struggling to speak only good
of the dead who has to search for a word
for selfish, a tactful adjective that shines;
and, in doing that bit of magic, confesses

that love, for any human, takes practice.
When we visited eastern Kentucky, drove
from Ohio to the row houses of our family
who had chosen not to follow the exodus north,
I saw less as the house without a furnace
or serviceable linoleum in the kitchen.
I watched those with nothing make biscuits

of flour and what’s at hand. Tasted
how their occultations melted in the mouth.
In winter, a sorrowful splendor of coal smoke
storied the air above row houses in a town where
no one was christened White and yet the place
was named Whitesburg or mud-shiny Neon
which repaid no radiance. In all weather,

want shuffled to a metal folding table
to fashion a hand-rolled cigarette
and smoke and lean back and laugh—
as if life is good if there’s enough tobacco
and talk of Reds baseball or a Mason jar
delivered from hand to hand to adulterate
most, if not all, of the smaller infelicities.

Family photo of the poet’s father Roy Bentley, Sr., and his uncle Bill Potter courtesy of the author.

Filed Under: Anthology Tagged With:

A Second Wind for John Steinbeck’s Sea of Cortez Vessel: Michael Hemp Reviews Kevin Bailey’s Book The Western Flyer

July 7, 2015 by 3 Comments

 

Cover image of The Western Flyer, Kevin M. Bailey's book

How can I begin a review of The Western Flyer: Steinbeck’s Boat, the Sea of Cortez, and the Saga of Pacific Fisheries without stating upfront that I have rarely marked or underlined a book so much as this little volume? A historian’s habit, perhaps, but this book demanded more focus and rereading than almost anything in my recollection. As you may glean from its dust jacket and cover flap, the author has utilized for the basis of the book the storied accounts of a boat—The Western Flyer—arising from its famed 1940 voyage of science and leisure to Baja California’s Sea of Cortez. Chartered by author John Steinbeck and accompanied by his friend and collaborator, the marine biologist Ed Ricketts—the “Doc” of Steinbeck’s Cannery Row and Sweet Thursday—its timing also removed Steinbeck from the vitriolic and dangerous reception by agricultural interests of his recently published novel The Grapes of Wrath, which exposed the hardships of the Dust Bowl Migration.

This book demanded more focus and rereading than almost anything in my recollection.

Kevin Bailey’s craft, however, is in the artifice of using the widely recognized popularity of the John Steinbeck-Ed Ricketts voyage as the vehicle for his personal and professional quest. Like Ricketts, a marine biologist, Bailey astutely chose The Western Flyer for its literary and ecological celebrity. But more to his purpose, the irony of the vessel’s guilty participation during subsequent decades in the devastating collapse of four major fisheries of the Pacific Northwest is concisely and poignantly documented. The account of ecological alarms unheeded merges with a fascinating new exposition of an aspect of John Steinbeck and Sea of Cortez only now gaining the appreciation it deserves: Steinbeck’s collaboration with America’s most important marine biologist, Edward F. Ricketts, and the role of The Western Flyer.

Image of The Western Flyer in 1937

For the first time in popular print, Bailey details the saga of this classic American fishing vessel, designed and built with perfectionist expertise by the Croatian boat builders of the Tacoma, Washington, area in the late 1930s. His account of the Western Flyer’s timeline begins with construction at Western Boat Building by the boatyard’s Dalmatian owners (shown here, from right): Martin A. Petrich, Frank Berry, and Tony Berry, Frank’s son and the skipper of the boat when it launched in May of 1937. Here’s where Bob Enea, a personal friend and a source for Bailey’s research, comes in: Tony Berry married into Enea’s family, enabling Berry to become a member of the Monterey, California, sardine purse-seine fleet, even though he wasn’t Sicilian. Bob Enea’s intimate family familiarity with this topic enabled Bailey to explain how John Steinbeck was ultimately successful in chartering the last available boat in the Monterey fleet for the Baja expedition. Virtually all the Sicilian boat owners were leery of Steinbeck’s pro-union sympathy, and many probably considered him a Communist, as his critics among California’s corporate elite claimed. And then there was the conundrum of a chartering all the way to the Gulf of California—not to fish!

Image of Tony Berry, Frank Berry, and Martin Petrich

Bob’s contribution to this powerful little book did not end there, however. Tony Berry, the owner and skipper of The Western Flyer, and the colorful deckhand Horace “Sparky” Enea were both his uncles, making possible a level of informed appreciation of life aboard ship absent from even the most informed readings of Sea of Cortez and its reissue with Steinbeck’s essay “About Ed Ricketts“ as Log from the Sea of Cortez in 1951. I am not going to dwell on the voyage for those readers already familiar with John Steinbeck’s classic account of the serious collecting and crazy escapades aboard and ashore in Baja—except to say that Bailey’s work presents another charming and informative dimension of the story for neophytes venturing into the pages of Sea of Cortez for the first time.

Bailey quotes some of the best of the John Steinbeck who described in Sea of Cortez the relationship he experienced with The Western Flyer as a form of man’s communion with boats for millennia:

The sight of a boat riding in the water clenches a fist of emotion in a man’s chest. A horse, a beautiful dog, arouses sometimes a quick emotion, but of inanimate things only a boat can do it.

* * * * *

A boat, above all other inanimate things, is personified in a man’s mind. . .  . Some have said they have felt a boat shudder before she struck a rock, or cry when she beached and the surf poured into her. This is not mysticism, but identification; man, building this greatest and most personal of all tools, has in turn received a boat-shaped mind, and the boat, a man-shaped soul.

Image of The Western Flyer in Port Townsend dry dock

One facet of Kevin Bailey’s excellent story does, however, require a re-write: the ending. At the time of publication it appeared that the fate of The Western Flyer was sealed, relegating her to a truncated or deconstructed future as part of a hotel-restaurant attraction in Old Town Salinas. Now one man with a boat-shaped mind and the will and means to save The Western Flyer has done just that. In January, marine geologist John Gregg negotiated a deal to buy the boat and remove her death by slow decomposition after two sinkings and years of exposure in a Port Townsend, Washington, boatyard. Today she resides in a boat-barn at the Port Townsend Shipwrights Co-op, where restoration by world-class wooden-boat restorers will recover her former glory.

One facet of Kevin Bailey’s excellent story does, however, require a re-write: the ending.

The fate of a valiant wooden boat, threatened with destruction both natural and unnatural—as in becoming a restaurant motif—propels Bailey’s highly readable text tracing The Western Flyer’s timeline. Bailey’s clear and concise account of her complicity in the serial destruction of crucial fisheries in the Pacific Northwest after her role in the romantic, literary, philosophical, and ecological immersion of Sea of Cortez cannot help but drive a conscientious reader toward Bailey’s goal: to understand, as Ricketts and Steinbeck did, that the oceans and their fisheries must survive or we do not. Thus the Western Flyer story, so full of irony, will have a happy ending after all. A player in the mindless, greedy, irresponsible damage of untold natural fishery resources, so near death from neglect that some said it couldn’t be done, The Western Flyer rises again, this time as an icon of ocean-life preservation: a seagoing classroom for students of ecology and the marine sciences.

The fate of a valiant wooden boat, threatened with destruction both natural and unnatural—as in becoming a restaurant motif—propels Bailey’s highly readable text.

Kevin Bailey’s little book has the tight, complete, joyful feeling of John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row. Yet it’s so packed with helpful information and remarkable detail that my copy was well marked up, underlined, and highlighted when I finished. Yours will be, too.

Photo of The Western Flyer after launch from Western Boat Builders (Tacoma, Washington) in 1937 courtesy Petrich Families Collection.

Photo of Tony Berry, Frank Berry (his father), and Martin Petrich, builder-owners of The Western Flyer, courtesy Petrich Families Collection.

 Photo of The Western Flyer in Port Townsend, Washington’s Boat Haven Yard by Anne Shaffer, courtesy Coastal Watershed Institute.

Filed Under: Books, Current Affairs Tagged With: