A Tidal Odyssey: Ed Ricketts and the Making of Between Pacific Tides, by Richard Astro and Donald Kohrs. Oregon State University Press, Corvallis, Oregon 2021.
Between Pacific Tides, by Edward F. Ricketts and Jack Calvin, is a guide to the ecology of the Pacific coast intertidal zone, first published in 1939. This remarkable book is still in print, and A Tidal Odyssey is a well researched and richly illustrated biography of author Ed Ricketts and the story of how the bookcame to be.
A Tidal Odyssey is a fond and uncritical portrait of Ricketts, which is its weakness but also its charm. In addition to his contribution to ecology, Ricketts influenced a wide group of writers, artists, scientists, and intellectuals, especially novelist John Steinbeck. This book also aims to correct the picture of who Ricketts was beyond Steinbeck’s character Doc in Cannery Row.
Ed Ricketts crossed over between art and science. This was encouraged at the University of Chicago, which at the time he attended had a “sociological orientation to ecological investigation.” He moved to the central California coastal community of Monterey in 1923, supporting himself and his family with a biological supply business. Nearby Stanford University Hopkins Marine Station was part of Ricketts’ scientific world, while neighboring Carmel, an artist’s colony, nourished his creative side.
The co-author and photographer of Between Pacific Tides was Jack Calvin, who was to live most of his life in Sitka. Ritchie Lovejoy, who made the line drawings, was a writer and artist. Calvin’s wife Sasha Kashevaroff Calvin and her sisters, from Sitka, were also creative and intellectual. Tal Kashevaroff was married to Ritchie Lovejoy, and Xenia Kashevaroff, a book artist, sculptor and performance artist, married John Cage, who was to become famous as an avant-garde composer. Another Sitka connection is Ricketts’ talented daughter Nancy, long a Sitka resident.
Stanford University Press accepted Between Pacific Tides in 1931 but it was not until 1939 that the book appeared in print. The main obstacles were that a similar guide was already in print, and that the Great Depression was under way. After 1935, the delays were related to the massive effort required to compile and edit the book, especially the detailed list of species, complete with an up-to-date bibliography on each. In November 1936 Ricketts lost his lab, which was also his home, in a fire. It was a huge emotional setback and took a lot of his time and energy to rebuild.
Some authorities on Ricketts and his times attributed the publishing delay to resistance by Walter K. Fisher, the head of Stanford’s Hopkins Marine Station, because Ricketts was not an academically qualified biologist. However, Astro and Kohrs show that Fisher always respected Ricketts as a “collector of considerable experience,” and that his concern was over who the audience would be, and whether they’d be more interested in a straight identification guide to marine life.
A Tidal Odyssey discusses the battle over whether or not to “popularize” science, but the examples given, such as the description, by Ricketts and Calvin, of hermit crabs as the “the clowns of the sea shore” haven’t aged well and are not what help connect the reader to the magic of nature. Between Pacific Tides was to have been one part of a comprehensive guide to the coastal ecology of the entire Pacific Coast, but Ricketts did not live to see this project accomplished. He died in 1948 when his car was hit by a train.
Ricketts was passionately interested in meaning, and in bringing art, literature, nature, and experience together into a “unified theory” of existence, but his philosophical writings are hard going and were consistently rejected for publication. His friend Joseph Campbell did manage to bring world myth into a single framework, but he had to pick and choose myths to fit his theory. Maybe that’s why Ricketts’s letters and other writings are still interesting today, because his approach did not allow simplifying his ideas into one theory.
Between Pacific Tides is famous for its ecological approach, unusual for its time, in which creatures and their evolution are an integral part of the environment, and of communities of other creatures. Astro and Kohrs quote Ricketts that “everything is an index of everything else . . . and that to understand nature means to discern the relationship of its constituent parts.” But reading it today, what stands out is how Ricketts and Calvin didn’t talk down to their readers. It isn’t dry and hard to read, like many scientific papers, but it isn’t dumbed down or oversimplified, either. Ricketts and Calvin invited readers to make their own connections to nature and to life, not just to get new information, but to generate insights and to experience joy.
A Tidal Odyssey is a portrait of perseverance and curiosity, and an engaging view into a time and place when people wrote novels with insights from biology and studied biology with insights from philosophy. This is relevant today because then, as now, scientists sometimes lose sight of the interconnections of nature as they pursue ever more specialized work and technical methods.
Scientists can forget that science is inherently cultural. Humanities scholars, too, can lose sight of the way human societies depend on the non-human world. By taking us into the world where Between Pacific Tides was created, A Tidal Odyssey reminds us that rigorous science is essential for understanding society, and that the humanities are a necessary foundation for the practice of science.
This approach could be wonderfully productive for us now, as the humanities continue to lose ground in education, and the sciences are the lesser for it.
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