Through the spring and summer of 1932, a cohort of four questing souls made its way north to Alaska aboard the thirty-three-foot cabin cruiser Grampus. Pioneering intertidal ecologist Ed Ricketts needed fifteen thousand tiny jellyfish Gonionemus for his biological supply lab; unemployed scholar Joseph Campbell sought philosophical direction and a clue to his future; early environmentalists Jack Calvin and his Russian-Tlingit partner Sasha Kashevaroff wanted to live free on a homestead in wild Alaska. That voyage—a science lab, a writing workshop, and a symposium that began in Ricketts’s laboratory on Monterey Bay—lives on as two classic books: Ricketts and Calvin’s Between Pacific Tides and Campbell’s The Hero’s Journey. But the deeper legacy lies in its breakthrough concepts of ecology and myth, the recognition of their essential unity, and the bioregional principle that place shapes life. Discovering the story of the Grampus voyage in essays collected by marine biologist Jan Straley, poet and writer Jerry Martien draws its collaborative lessons into a field he calls biopoetics. From his home on the shores of Humboldt Bay, Martien sees the roots of his own generation’s journey and a chart for future voyagers.
