The Log from the Sea of Cortez by John Steinbeck, Richard Astro Page B

was the greasy mess where a school of sardines had been milling, and on it the feathers of gulls which had come to join the sardines and, having fed hugely, had sat on the water and combed themselves in comfort. A Japanese liner passed us, slipping quickly through the smooth water, and for a long time we rocked in her wake. It was a long lazy day, and when the night came we passed the lights of Los Angeles with its many little dangling towns. The searchlights of the fleet at San Pedro combed the sea constantly, and one powerful glaring beam crept several miles and lay on us so brightly that it threw our shadows on the exhaust stack.

    In the early morning before daylight we came into the harbor at San Diego, in through the narrow passage, and we followed the lights on a changing course to the pier. All about us war bustled, although we had no war; steel and thunder, powder and men—the men preparing thoughtlessly, like dead men, to destroy things. The planes roared over in formation and the submarines were quiet and ominous. There is no playfulness in a submarine. The military mind must limit its thinking to be able to perform its function at all. Thus, in talking with a naval officer who had won a target competition with big naval guns, we asked, “Have you thought what happens in a little street when one of your shells explodes, of the families torn to pieces, a thousand generations influenced when you signaled Fire?” “Of course not,” he said. “Those shells travel so far that you couldn’t possibly see where they land.” And he was quite correct. If he could really see where they land and what they do, if he could really feel the power in his dropped hand and the waves radiating out from his gun, he would not be able to perform his function. He himself would be the weak point of his gun. But by not seeing, by insisting that it be a problem of ballistics and trajectory, he is a good gunnery officer. And he is too humble to take the responsibility for thinking. The whole structure of his world would be endangered if he permitted himself to think. The pieces must stick within their pattern or the whole thing collapses and the design is gone. We wonder whether in the present pattern the pieces are not straining to fall out of line; whether the paradoxes of our times are not finally mounting to a conclusion of ridiculousness that will make the whole structure collapse. For the paradoxes are becoming so great that leaders of people must be less and less intelligent to stand their own leadership.

    The port of San Diego in that year was loaded with explosives and the means of transporting and depositing them on some enemy as yet undetermined. The men who directed this mechanism were true realists. They krew an enemy would emerge, and when one did, they had explosives to deposit on him.

    In San Diego we filled the fuel tanks and the water tanks. We filled the icebox and took on the last perishable foods, bread and eggs and fresh meat. These would not last long, for when the ice was gone only the canned goods and the foods we could take from the sea would be available. We tied up to the pier all day and a night; got our last haircuts and ate broiled steaks.

    This little expedition had become tremendously important to us; we felt a little as though we were dying. Strangers came to the pier and stared at us and small boys dropped on our deck like monkeys. Those quiet men who always stand on piers asked where we were going and when we said, “To the Gulf of California,” their eyes melted with longing, they wanted to go so badly. They were like the men and women who stand about airports and railroad stations; they want to go away, and most of all they want to go away from themselves. For they do not know that they would carry their globes of boredom with them wherever they went. One man on the pier who wanted to participate made sure he would be allowed to cast us off, and he waited at the bow line for a long time.