Cannery Row, Steinbeck, and Doc Ricketts
Near Monterey, California
The street beneath you was once called Ocean View Avenue, and the air here reeked of fish. This was Cannery Row, the beating heart of the largest sardine fishery the Pacific coast had ever seen. At its peak in the nineteen forties, more than a dozen canneries and reduction plants lined this waterfront, their whistles calling workers to gut and pack sardines by the ton.
In the year nineteen forty six alone, the Monterey fleet landed more than one hundred forty thousand tons of fish. Then the sardines vanished. The very next year the catch collapsed to fewer than twenty seven thousand tons.
Scientists still debate why. Some point to relentless overfishing. Others, studying nitrogen locked in old seaweed, argue that natural cycles of ocean upwelling had turned against the fish.
Most agree it was both, and that the nets had left the population too thin to recover. One by one the canneries fell silent. The last of them, the Hovden plant, held on by canning squid until nineteen seventy three.
Into this world of grease and salt walked a marine biologist named Edward Ricketts. In nineteen twenty three he opened Pacific Biological Laboratories, collecting starfish, anemones, and octopuses from the tide pools to sell to schools and universities. His lab became a gathering place for artists, drifters, and thinkers.
Among them was a young, unknown writer named John Steinbeck, who met Ricketts in nineteen thirty and found in him the closest friend of his life. When Steinbeck published his novel Cannery Row in nineteen forty five, he made Ricketts immortal as the character called Doc, a man he described as half Christ and half satyr. Ricketts thought in whole ecosystems, seeing how every creature depended on every other, decades before ecology became a household word.
On the eighth of May, nineteen forty eight, a passenger train struck his car at the crossing just up the hill. He died three days later, days before his fifty first birthday. Steinbeck wrote that the town felt hollow without him.
Today the canneries are gone, but the name Ricketts gave to this ordinary street has outlived them all.
