Ed looked into these pools and discovered the complex interactions that lived there. And the rules were intricate. Species did not form a simple food chain where snail eats algae, fish eats snail, and heron eats fish. Instead they told a thousand stories of the way animals and plants live and die. Life was affected by the environment: when and where the waves rolled in. It was affected by the other species present. And it was affected by chance events and unlikely contingencies. Ed’s peculiar gift was to be able to see these connections. His mission was to try to chart and understand them and to explain them to others.
It is also not well known that Ed Ricketts seems to have had a profound influence on not only John Steinbeck, but also on Joseph Campbell. In the early stages of the relationship between the three, Campbell was becoming something of an expert on mythology, including the psychology of Carl Jung. In a very comprehensive and readable biography about Ricketts, author Eric Tamm wrote that Campbell once said about Ricketts, “(A)nything from Ed’s lab has fetish value in my life.” By 1946 the work of both Campbell and Ricketts was gaining momentum and results. Campbell was planning a visit to Ricketts and wrote in a letter proceeding this visit, “…I am sure that the laws of mythology are the laws of ‘spiritual biology,’ and that a good confab with yourself will make this quite clear to me.” (Tamm, 2004). The three men became good friends at a pivotal time in their respective personal and professional development. The intricate and complex interactions in Ed’s tide pools seems to have inspired both Campbell and Steinbeck in their philosophy and writing about mythology and human interactions.
Ricketts had developed his own philosophy drawn from a variety of sources, including Jungian psychology. He wrote about his philosophy he called, “breaking through,” in several essays. “Breaking through,” came to an individual only after a person endured hardship and suffering, according to Ricketts. This meant that after such hardship experiences, a person may have an increased ability for seeing the “whole,” and the greater connectedness of all things. Ricketts wrote, “For the more you suffer the deeper grows your character, and with deepening of your character you read the more penetrating into the secrets of life.”
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