PART I - JANUARY 2 TO FEBRUARY 11, 1919

ROCKWELL KENT WILDERNESS CENTENNIAL JOURNAL

100 YEARS LATER

by Doug Capra © 2018

Part I – Jan. 2 – Feb. 11, 1918

ABOVE – A bald eagle devours a coastal mountain goat that has fallen off the cliffs along Resurrection Bay near Caines Head. I took this photo on May 29, 2008 – about the time of year the kids are born. The kids scamper around only hours after birth, but are not too steady on their feet. The females usually give birth lower down on the mountains and remain there until the kids learn to maneuver the cliffs. Meanwhile the black bears are coming out of dormancy and go after the young goats, and the bald eagles dive on them trying to make them lose their balance and fall.  Capra photo.

This period of Kent and Rockie’s stay on Fox Island – between Jan. 2^nd and Feb. 11^th – deserves a separate section to itself for many reasons.

Lars Olson leaves Fox Island for Seward on January 2, 1919. His main mission is to pick up his territorial pension check and probably stock up on supplies. As far as Kent is concerned, Olson’s main job is to pick up his (Kent’s) mail and return as soon as possible. The Christmas mail boat hasn’t arrived in time for the holiday celebration, so Kent and young Rocky are anxious to get their presents, hear from home, and send out batches of new letters.

ABOVE - This is a sketch within Kent’s Dec. 24, 1918 letter to Kathleen of the mail box Kent made and attached to the inside cabin wall.

More important – Kent desperately needs to know how Kathleen reacts to those two sincere and heartfelt New Year’s Eve letters delivered by George Chappell and Carl Zigrosser, with the flowers and sketches and gifts. Kent believes he is a changed man, fully understanding how cruel and hurtful he has been to Kathleen -- and has told her so in those letters.  He’s determined to make things right. When he returns, he tells Kathleen they will leave New York City forever and move into the country somewhere in New England far from cities and crowds. His experience in Alaska has reinforced his need for solitude – not the kind of isolation he’s experiencing on Fox Island. Not loneliness – but his own Walden Pond with his family and visits from close friends. A place away from the masses, separated from the herd’s influences, especially upon his children. By January 1919, Kent knows that Fox Island may be his metaphoric Northern Paradise – and the art he produces  may give him the success he craves – but Fox Island is no place to live.

We see this in his letters, especially in an extremely revealing one to Kathleen on Dec. 12^th: “To-day has been a fine working day for me and my mind is fairly straight about you. So I guess there’ll be no sadness in this letter – although it is always with deep relief that I finish a letter to you without mishap. So often my mood slides downhill and I wind {up} with yourself, myself, and the letter all in the deepest pit of dejection.” Kent knows his tendencies and admits as much to his wife. And – until his sincere anniversary letters, it is difficult to find a letter of his to Kathleen that doesn’t at some point descend into despair and criticism.

ABOVE - A worn Sitka spruce along the Fox Island beach. Capra photo taken on June 19, 2008.

“I’ve had an idea for you in answering my letters. Answer them one at a time. When I have written you pages about our future you devote a few of your little pages to just that. It will give you subject matters for your letters. You know I care less for ten pages of chat about your daily doings than for a few words of love, though I want both.” Kent is obsessive about Kathleen’s letters to him. They are not detailed enough, long enough, loving and admiring enough. Later, as we’ll see, he is asking his friend George Chappell to coach Kathleen in the kind of letter writing Kent wants. To him, his letters are a form of art. He throws all his energy into them – both positive and negative - the same dynamism he puts into his paintings and sketches. He expects Kathleen to do the same for him.

ABOVE - An American Black Oyster Catcher searches for limpets, snails and barnacles along the intertidal zone at the northern end of Kent’s Fox Island cove. Capra photo taken on May 26, 2015.

“Rockwell and I have been playing cards every evening a little while. It helps to keeps my mind normal. It was his idea. He’s my physician. Mother dear – he is so (lonely) now and he loves you so dearly. Every night I read to him and he cuddles close to me. And on cold nights I take him in my arms for comfort and sleep dreaming of you. When he told Kathleen before leaving for Alaska that he needed to take Rockie because he could not bear the loneliness, he was serous. From a nine-year-old’s point of view, Rockie probably knew more about Kent’s depression on Fox Island than has been previously discussed. Here we see that playing cards may have been Rockies suggestion to help his father get back to normal.

 “Here is news for you – I don’t think I can by any chance stay late into the spring. I cannot endure it… I wish would you were coming here so that we could return together. Well, I mustn’t talk of that but just be glad that I cannot keep away much longer.” The story as previously published about Kent’s Alaska trip tells us that he leaves early to save his marriage. That’s part of the truth. The other part is that Kent is driven back to his wife by the wilderness itself. He can’t face real wildness the real dangers, the severe isolation, the harsh weather, the deep darkness of an Alaska winter, and the unforgiving seas. In his memoir, Carl Zigrosser wrote: “Whatever he could not meet and overcome – he was very competitive – he would obliterate and act as if it had never existed. Had he lost his faith, the whole structure of his life would have crumbled.”

At first Kent is enthralled at the pioneer experience of clearing the land, repairing the cabin, chinking the spaces between the logs, cutting firewood – the romance of wilderness living. But after his near-death experience with Rockie returning to Fox Island from Seward on Sept. 24 in the 18-foot overloaded dory – he begins to face the reality of life on an island in Alaska during the winter 12 miles from the nearest town. This is the sublime wilderness – what Thoreau experienced when he briefly left his abode at Walden Pond and trekked through Maine and attempted to scale Mount Kadahan. In The Maine Woods, Thoreau writes of “Vast, Titanic, inhuman Nature {that} has got him at a disadvantage, caught him alone and pilfers him of some of his divine faculty. She does not smile on him as in the plains. She seems to say sternly, Why came ye here before your time. This ground is not prepared for you. Is it not enough that I smile in the valleys? I have never made this soil for thy feet, this air for thy breathing, these rocks for thy neighbors. I cannot pity nor fondle thee here, but forever relentlessly drive thee hence to where I am kind. Why seek me where I have not called thee, and then complain because you find me but a stepmother? Shouldst thou freeze or starve, or shudder thy life away, here is no shrine, nor altar, nor any access to my ear…This was that Earth of which we have heard, made out of Chaos and Old Night. Here was no man's garden…It was not lawn, nor pasture, nor mead, nor woodland, nor lea, nor arable, nor wasteland…Man was not to be associated with it. It was Matter, vast, terrific…rocks, trees, wind on our cheeks! the solid earth! the actual world!”

ABOVE - Dead and worn spruce trees along the Fox Island beach. Capra photo taken on July 31, 2006.

In Alaska Kent faces that great abyss -- authentic wildness. Its sublime beauty offers him wonder, inspiration and content for his art. But there's also the sublime terror -- the darkness, the seas, that north wind -- how nature’s forces have isolated him on his little island. This is no Monhegan Island, nor Brigus, Newfoundland. He can’t get his mail. Hildegarde won’t join him and neither will Kathleen. Wilderness is both his enemy and his friend. Perhaps that’s why Kent didn’t surrender to the wild in later years. After Alaska he ventured to Tierra del Fuego and tried to make it around the cape. Later he would make several trips to Greenland. He refused to let the wilderness defeat him. As Zigrosser observed, Kent is extremely competitive. He must control his wild friend, use it, defeat its attack on him. Perhaps if he follows Nietzsche and can will himself to victory -- even with Kathleen.  She will not join him for many reasons, but mostly for financial reasons. But Kent refuses to give up on her. In that Dec. 12^th letter to Kathleen he writes: “Mother, darling, I am at last sure of your coming. To-morrow, maybe I’ll write you all details of it. To-night I love you. Oh Mother, how dearly you cannot know…Here now in Alaska together you and I would find in a few days a recompense for (our) life of suffering – and we would build in those few days the foundation of a greater love than we have ever dreamed of.” If he has a woman with him in the wilderness – Kathleen or Hildegarde – perhaps he can defeat it. But he can’t do this alone.

ABOVE - A lone Steller’s Jay sits on a Sitka Spruce snag. To the left is the southern headland of Kent’s cove. Behind the snag is Callisto Head with Bear Glacier hidden behind it in the fog. Capra photo taken on June 5, 2008.

But now it’s early January. Olson is gone. Kent hasn’t had any mail for three weeks. He doesn’t know how Kathleen will respond to his genuine change of heart expressed in those two New Year’s Eve anniversary letters. For about the first week of Olson’s absence Kent is anxious, irritated, and depressed. But he eventually settles down and gets to work on his illustrated journal and art. The old Swede’s absence is only supposed last a few days. The weather is good enough for Olson to have returned on January 12^th and 13^th, but he doesn’t. Kent and Rockie are constantly hiking to the south end of their beach where they can see Seward around Fox Island’s northern headland – hoping to spy a small boat heading their direction with an old man at the helm. They observe at least one steamship pass the island, so there could be mail. Meanwhile, Kent and Rockie write more letters than the little mailbox they have nailed to the cabin wall can hold.

TO BE CONTINUED