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

Pauline Carey is an actor, playwright, and fiction writer. She is the
author of Magic and What’s in a Name?

Ed Ricketts was a marine biologist and college dropout in 1930 when he
moved his biological supply business to Monterey, California, and
solidified a lifelong friendship with John Steinbeck and Joseph
Campbell. Steinbeck went on to write novels that are still read,
including Cannery Row with its character named Doc based on Ed Ricketts;
the mythologist Campbell wrote The Hero with a Thousand Faces, which is
still in print; Ed Ricketts spent his life collecting, classifying,
discovering, and distributing specimens of marine life, much of it on
the west coast of Vancouver Island, but his large dream of a populist
trilogy on marine invertebrates was never completed. Ricketts died after
a collision with a train in 1948. He was one of the first ecologists at
a time when the word was seldom used, and his first book, Between
Pacific Tides, on the lively life in tide pools, has now become a
classic.

The next book, Sea of Cortez, was co-written with Steinbeck, who had
voiced his own ecological concerns in The Grapes of Wrath. Steinbeck
financed a boat expedition to the Baja Peninsula, where the two men
collected specimens and wrote about the “world under a rock.” For
what he hoped would be the final trilogy book, Ricketts set out in 1945
to explore the outer shores of Vancouver Island and later the Queen
Charlottes. Toni Jackson was his companion on this trip but, as the
author tells it, the spirits of Steinbeck and Campbell went along for
the ride.

Eric Enno Tamm, a journalist raised in the fishing community of
Ucluelet, has written an engrossing story overflowing with information
on marine life, with many side trips into history, literature,
philosophy, music, art, zoology, geology, and of course ecology, which
Ricketts termed the science of relationships. His personal relationships
are also there, somewhat chaotic, never in the foreground. It’s a
dense but fascinating read.

The book is attractively designed. Each chapter is headed by a drawing
of a species often discovered by Ricketts, together with a provocative
quotation; the text is supported with clear maps and many photographs.