August 2-4, 2018

ROCKWELL KENT WILDERNESS CENTENNIAL JOURNAL
100 YEARS LATER
by Doug Capra © 2018

"I crave snow-topped mountains, dreary wastes, and the cruel Northern sea with it's hard horizons at the edge of the world where infinite space begins. Here skies are clearer and deeper and, for the greater wonders they reveal, a thousand times more eloquent of the eternal mystery than those of softer lands. I love this Northern nature, and I what love I must possess.”
Letter to Dr. Christian Brinton in "Wilderness," p. xxxi

Kent and his son overnighted in Seattle on Aug. 2, 1918. Rocky wasn't feeling too well, it was raining, and Kent wasn't impressed with the city. He wrote another long letter to Hildegarde: 

"Rockie {sic} is here in the room with me, in bed, recovering from a little upset he has had. I must nurse him quietly back into shape for tomorrow night we start for the north. I’m under the weather, too just so much irregularity. Well my Sweetheart, there’s little to tell about. This city is typical of America. It might be Yonkers or any other place of the size – all hustle, much dirt, business from end to end and no sign anywhere of anything done for the sake of doing that thing well. It’s in contrast to the Canadian cities where one discusses civic pride and a general delight in doing things in a splendid way. The C.P.R. {Canadian Pacific Railway} is an example. I’ve never seen so efficient organization and I can’t conceive of travel being made more comfortable." 

Kent had heard about Yakutat, a small cannery town and Alaska native village along the coast, and that “possibly the wildest and grandest scenery of the whole Alaska coast” could be found there. “And so it proved to be,” he later wrote. While in Seattle he tried to get permission from Swift and Company to stay at their cannery there. The encounter wasn't pleasant, as he wrote to Hildegarde: 

"Well – I’m disgusted with Seattle. Yonkers is every so much more interesting. And the open handed westerners! First the company that controls Yakutat refused to recommend me to their local manager there – saying that since they had a monopoly of the business there they wanted no one else prospecting around. Not that they exactly doubted me being an artist, but! And, they added, the natives there would be inclined to look upon one who claimed to be an artist with some suspicion. Well – we’re going there anyhow so don’t let’s talk about it."

Kent's letter to Hildegarde wasn't only about his doings in Seattle. He had other things on his mind: "Little sweetheart, I think of you very very much and I miss you as much as you would have me. I miss you in the daytime to go about with and talk with and look in the store windows with. And at night I miss your soft white body to love and your legs to twist mine into and you shoulder to sleep upon. Oh sweetheart can’t you imagine how I want you?"

He somehow obtained a “letter of introduction” from the Seattle headquarters to the head of the Yakutat cannery and decided to make that his settlement. The letter wasn’t a guarantee, but it was the best he could do. Kent changed his plans to go to Skagway and rebook to Yakukat and instead got a stateroom aboard the Admiral Schley. Kent and Rocky left for Alaska on the evening of August 3, 1918.

As with the train trip, the two spent most of the time outside on the upper deck. To sooth his “tired body and rather stupefied soul,” Kent played his flute while absorbing the scenery. Rocky sped around the deck playing racing games. “It was very exciting to me,” Rocky recalled years later, “the islands amongst which we sailed, the great stretches of wilderness on the mainland, the mining towns, the fishing towns and salmon canneries, the fogs and alternating storms and doldrums.”

Kent was mesmerized by Alaska's beauty. "It's quite beyond anything I've ever heard of," he wrote to Zigrosser. "There are inlets that seem to go straight to the front of lofty ranges and islands in them or points of land that seem to have been made for poets or romantic painters to live on." Kent had developed a distinct preference for harsh, northern, windswept coasts and fjords like those of Monhegan Island, Burin and Brigus in Newfoundland. He craved solitude, but his vision of that included special companions. "If I could have a very few wishes one would be for an island here and you and three or four others to come and make a paradise." Ideally, that would have included both his wife, Kathleen and his lover, Hildegarde Hirsch, but both had given him firm refusals. Living in a harmonious relationship with both of them would be the ideal, but he’d be satisfied with at least one of them. Perhaps he could still convince his lover. “How is Hildegarde?” he wrote Zigrosser. “I wish she was along. She’d love it and be the best sport in the world in tackling the hardships.”

Instead, he took his only son and oldest child because he wanted to toughen him up. Rocky was intelligent, gentle and kind, but perhaps too soft for his father's taste. Several months in the Alaskan wild would change that . He certainly wouldn't get that lesson staying back east with Kathleen and the two girls, Kent may have thought. His wife had fought him. She had experienced the dangers of Newfoundland with him and the children and feared for Rocky's safety. She knew the kinds of risks her husband took. What if something happened to Kent? What would become of Rocky in that harsh wilderness all alone? And what if Kent angered the authorities with his radical notions? What if they put him in jail? What would happen to Rocky?

But Kent had persisted. He would take his son and that would be that. There may have been another reason, too -- one more personal and perhaps subconscious. Rocky was his lifeline to his Kathleen and his family. He would be Kent's connection to a life he knew was in jeopardy. At this point his marriage was in trouble. Kathleen had always known of and resented Kent's infidelities. She knew about Hildegarde. Kent didn't hide it. During the last year in her letters, Kathleen had tried to be positive, but it was clear that she was reaching her limit. Perhaps Kent was running away from a problem he couldn't face and taking something that would keep things intact at least until he returned.

Before he left New York, his friend Carl Zigrosser, editor of The Modern School, had intended to give Kent a “train-letter, a little message of good will” for the first leg of the trip. But he didn’t get around to it. On August 10th he wrote with some encouraging comments about mysticism. There are two kinds of mysticism, he wrote – the “moonshine and the light of day kind,” warning Kent to beware of the moonshine type, “silly and vague Hermione twaddle.” The second brings out “one’s intuition of the unknown into the light of day, into the brilliant sunshine.” The real stuff makes “the essence of the intangible and universal as fixed and definite and tactile as a real object.” 

The intangible and universal is what Kent was seeking, that “infinite and unfathomable thing,” the wilderness with its freedom and solitude.

Zigrosser assumed his friend got the letter while aboard the steamer heading toward Yakutat, but mail service to Alaska was slow and unreliable that summer. Kent may not have received it until he reached Seward. But it contained just the kind admiration and praise the artist needed at this time in his life and from someone whose opinion he trusted. “You are the only mystic I know who is a strong man,” Zigrosser wrote. “And that is why your work is so significant in the art of today. You have strength and power. You have vision. Combine them and make masterpieces. Keep the well-springs of creation undefiled. I have great hopes in what you will do to the North and the North do to you. You remember what Blake said: “Great things are done when men and mountains meet; These are not done by jostling in the street.”

Steamer stops were brief, but the Kent took advantage of limited excursions. After exploring Petersburg, Kent wrote to Kathleen on August 7th his disappointment with Alaska’s towns. As a trained architect, he was disgusted with “the most utterly squalid and hideous collection of ramshackle wooden shacks that one can conceive of.” The contrast between “These noble mountains and primeval woods and what man has brought to it” dismayed him. “But I’ve come to see that even this extreme of human wretchedness and commonplaceness can serve me,” he wrote. As he disembarked at other stops along the way, he knew he wanted to stay as far away from towns as possible. 

PHOTOS

1. . "There are inlets that seem to go straight to the front of lofty ranges and islands in them or points of land that seem to have been made for poets or romantic painters to live on." Ideally, Kent wanted to settle on an island off the Alaska coast.
2. A shot I took of Sumdum Glacier at the entrance to Tracy Arm about 40 miles south of Juneau.
3. A photo I took while at Auke Bay near Juneau.
4. A photo I took while hiking the temperate rainforest at Betton Island near Ketchikan.
5. The steamship Admiral Schley docked at Vancouver.