SEARCHING FOR STEINBECK’S SEA OF CORTEZ: A Makeshift Expedition Along Baja’s Desert Coast. By Andormeda Romano-Lax. Published by Sasquatch Books, Seattle, 2002, 254 pages, Paperback

 Andormeda Romano-Lax, an Alaskan journalist, spent cold winters dreaming  of warm waters, places like Baja California where she frequently travels with her biologist husband, Brian. Ongoing research about Baja developed their fascination with John Steinbeck’s “The Log from the Sea of Cortez” and Ed Ricketts’ (Steinbeck’s friend and collaborator) classic book, “Between Pacific Tides.”

 Having consulted those volumes many times, Andormeda and Brian envisioned a trip (with their small children) following the wake of Steinbeck’s and Rickett’s 1940 voyage that produced “The Log from the Sea of Cortez.” They hoped to poke in the same tidepools and discover more about Steinbeck and Ricketts as people. Also, they wanted to compare the “state” of the Cortez sea some 60 years later as well as have their own adventures in the Steinbeck traveling style of: “. . . let it form itself: its boundaries a boat and a sea; its duration a six weeks’ charter time; its subject everything we could see and think and even imagine; its limits - our own without reservation. And so,” - following Ricketts and Steinbeck - “we went.”

 Went aboard the Zuiva, a 24’ Columbia sailboat - with a very moody brother-in-law as “captain.” Three adults, two children, one large kayack, food, water, gear, books and all the other stuff mounding up in a tiny, airless aging boat to sail through the hot winds of the Sea of Cortez. Not, we seasoned cruisers can see, the ideal charter vessel.

 But it was cheap (free actually), a loan from a friend. Only later would they discover that Zuiva was perhaps an Indian word for luck. “Would that be good luck, or bad” Andormeda asked. The answer - “I don’t know.” However, we know - without reading another word. The voyage has all the makings of a trip to hell.

 The brother-in-law captain, who had sailed a bit on California’s Humbolt Bay telephoned just 10 days prior to the sailing day to say “I can’t do this.” And while he soon called back saying “okay,” in truth he couldn’t do the trip, breaking down repeatedly in his ability to relate to his fellow sailors. (Is this starting to sound like yet another terror filled mis-voyage of fools?) Well, fortunately, the Romano-Laxs’ travel savvy, combined with their considerable grit and her facility with the Spanish language get them through the tough moments, most of which have to do more with human drama than natural threats.

 Arriving by bus at Ecomundo on Baja’s eastern coast, they begin the long process of sorting, ferrying, stocking (cramming!) the boat. Their four year old son Aryeh flourishes in the strange new world while the two year old daughter, Tziporah collapses into a “dripping, clingy mess.” Captain Doug reveals that he is taking his own food. He looks at their stores with “the look of a guy who finds comfort in fasting, deprivation and hallucination. Why didn’t I want to know this private fact about the man who would pilot us along a desert coast?”

 Finally they are off, southbound, taking time to explore coves and bays and trying to revisit every tidepool mentioned by Steinbeck and Ricketts. Most often they find less life than their guides had, but, surprisingly, find health and marine life when they least expect it. “Doomsday scenarios aside, the Cortez is not like Europe’s North Sea, or the Mediterranean, or any other sea plagued by the double whammy of costal development and . . . too many boats and too few fish. Isolation has achieved what federal management usually cannot. Some fisheries have been heavily tapped, but other problems common to coastal zones, like pollution, are remarkably absent. Except in the far north delta, wholesale habitat destruction is practically unknown.”

 At first, they labor to carefully record everything they spy in the tidepools, to identify and list it all. With over 5,000 species, they are soon overwhelmed and find themselves drawn to the zen-like words of Ed Ricketts who quoted Lao Tsu: “Give up learning, and put an end to your troubles.” Andormeda writes that she came to feel “. . . like I wasn’t learning so much as being. The harder we tried to know, the harder the knowing became . . . But the most frustrating aspect of our quest was not simply naming (species). It was judging.”

 She continues: “We had begun our trip simply wanting to see and know some small and rather strange invertebrates. But the more we traveled, the more we began to think as environmentalists instead of as naturalists. . .” “Sometime in the last few weeks, our simple fascination for tidal life had turned into a missionary zeal for diagnosing the gulf’s health and predicting its prospects.” This changing view develops slowly in and around the small boat’s drama. Captain Doug stopped talking and slept on deck wrapped in the jib. The pressures of so many in such a small space finally forced them to confront Doug and prepare for their own land journey while he delivered the boat back North.

 Andormeda writes: “. . . we wished we were on shore, instead of aboard a gringo boat. It was okay, I thought, if the sailing part of our trip ended here. And maybe it was more than okay. It was a relief. A blessing. We had felt something missing all trip, and perhaps it was caused by this distance from shore, by the fact we had traveled thousands of miles from our home to Baja only to find ourselves, every day and every night, a few thousand feet farther away from the tidepools and the villages and the towns that we would have liked. How nice it would be to travel by land.”

 And so they did, by rental car, by hitchhiking (with kids, gear and folding kayak), by bus and even by foot. It was not necessarily better than travel by boat, but it was different and “it was the contrast - scorching, seemingly lifeless desert next to cool, frenetic sea - that we love most about the Sea of Cortez. It made us feel small and plain, and also immensely lucky. . . We felt less like intrepid explorers than like children at a peephole. It was all there and we only had to look.”

 They travel to Pulmo Reef, the Sea of Cortez’ only true coral reef to meet Pepe, the reef’s “sheriff,” a paid (very little) official Mexican protector of a natural wonder. While Pepe is one small deterrent against tourists, fishermen and pollution, he’s made progress. Depleted fish stocks have increased. Yachts no longer drop anchors on the reef. Andormeda is astounded by the diversity of the Pulmo tropical fish. It is like nowhere else they visit in Baja. They long for scuba outfits, but even with snorkels they recognize that they are seeing much more than Steinbeck and Ricketts ever did.

 On down the Sea’s east coast, they visit Loreto national park, meet the chief ranger and learn about a fairly successful governmental effort to balance and regulate commercial fishing and ecotourism. Andormeda came to doubt the “eco” part when she learned that 3,000 kayakers visit one small beach every year.

 The trip ends on the island of Tiburon, the home of the Seri indians. Their Seri guide, Humberto, proves to be more than a door to the island’s sea life, for Humberto is something of a Seri guru, a near silent man who enables Andormeda to finally get past her invertebrate cataloging. Sorting through tiny beach shells one day, Humberto names them as she listens and lets “. . . the Seri words wash over me. Just listened to each one and let it go. . . (In them) were thousands of years of Seri wisdom that made our two months in Baja seem like a joke.”

 “I would never feel more content in my absolute ignorance than I had while sitting next to our Seri guide . . . When I had stopped trying to figure and know and judge. I had broken through.”

 So ends an intriguing journey, one where Alaska bred plans melt in the Baja sun, producing not lists of sea life, but a soul shifting kind of enlightenment. The family leaves Baja fundamentally changed, the kids confident, curious, even bold in embracing the world and Andormeda and Brian wiser, softer, more accepting with something like enlightenment hovering around them.

 In the end, this seemed to me a dense and layered story, one that sometimes lost it’s focus. The spiritual changes she works to explain are not always clear to the reader. Then there is the main story - that of travel and family dynamics mixed up with their explorations and interaction with Mexican peoples. One moment we’re pondering Zen and Seri wisdom and the next, we’re sharing her desperate fears as her son wilts from a scorpion bite. But hey, that’s travel isn’t it, and Andormeda’s succinct descriptions of places, peoples, ecologies and the Cortez Sea make for both an entertaining read and a considerable education about a wild and beautiful region.

 “It is advisable to look from the tide pool to the stars and then back to the tide pool again” John Steinbeck and Ed Ricketts wrote in “The Log from the Sea of Cortez,” which is exactly what the Romano-Lax family learns to do.