“One thing impressed us deeply on this little voyage: the great world dropped away very quickly. We lost the fear and fierceness and contagion of war and economic uncertainty. The matters of great importance we had left were not important.”

– John Steinbeck,
Sea of Cortez, p. 210, (1941)

Steinbeck, on the right, prior to setting sail with his best friend,
the marine biologist Ed Ricketts on the Sea of Cortez in The Western Flyer.