EARLY TO LATE SEPTEMBER 2018

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

Early to Mid-September 2018

I’m writing this on Sept. 8, 2018. We’ve had late summer weather during the last two weeks – temperatures in the high 60’s and up to 70 degrees -- with only a few cloudy days and hardly any rain. That wasn’t the case back in 1918. After that magic August 25^th day when Kent met Olson and discovered Fox Island, it started raining and storming. That September Lowell Creek – which flowed down from between Bear and Marathon Mountains into Resurrection Bay – went on a destructive rampage almost as damaging as it had in the fall of 1917. In 1926-27, the town finally contained the creek within a wooden flume. But the flooding continued. Finally, after a 1935 flood damaged much government property owned by the Alaska Railroad, a bill went through congress to divert the stream by drilling a tunnel through Bear Mountain. That work happened during 1939-40, and today Lowell Creek emerges from a waterfall near Mile Zero of the Seward Highway where the road turns to gravel and heads out to Lowell Point. 

Kent describes what he and Rockie found on Sept. 18, 1918 when they ventured to Seward from Fox Island. They pulled up onto a beach that was “strewn with damaged and demolished boats…in the town the glacial stream was swollen to a torrent.” Barriers had been swept away, a bridge was taken out and the railroad tracks were flooded. “And we saw the next day, when it again poured rain, the black-robed sisters of charity, booted to the thighs, fleeing through the water to a safer place.”

Kent was referring to the Sisters of St. Joseph of Peace who ran the new Seward Community Hospital the town had built with the assistance of the Alaska Railroad (ARR). Construction on the ARR had begun just as the Panama Canal – a huge federal project -- opened for marine traffic. If the government had learned anything from that endeavor it was that if your workers weren’t healthy the construction wouldn’t get done. Many of the experts and workers who built the canal and much of the equipment came to Alaska for that new government project, the ARR. Early on the Alaska Engineering Commission recognized the need for hospitals and medical personnel. Unfortunately, between the constant flooding and the influenza epidemic, the Sisters became ill and the hospital eventually closed and was converted into a boarding house. Seward wasn’t to get another modern hospital building until 1930. 

Kent and Rockie had come to Seward on Sept. 18^th to check on the mail. One of their main tasks on Fox Island was to watch for incoming steamships. That indicated not only the possibility of mail but also a chance to send letters out. The ships usually remained in port for several hours only but they were usually followed by two or three others over the next few days. Kent usually spent some time in Seward waiting for the other ships, socializing, and writing letters. Rockie played with the local boys and often was a guest student at the school.

Kent was hoping that this Seward trip would result in many letters from home, and the canvases he had asked Hildegarde to send him. The whole Seward trip would be a devastating disappointment. His canvases did not arrive, and the letter(s) he received from Kathleen drove him into an angry, depressive state resulting in a series of ranting letters back to his wife. What did Kathleen say to him in that letter? We don’t know for sure. In the last entry I wrote about two letters Kathleen wrote, one on Sept. 12^th, the other on Sept. 15^th with stories about Mr. Walker that no doubt disturbed her husband. It is possible that those letters got to Alaska by Sept. 18-23 when Kent is writing back. In his response, Kent refers to Kathleen’s “brazen cold-heartedness,” saying her words “hurt him deeply.” In parenthesis after that he writes “That letter I returned to you; it’s a thing to be ashamed of.” Kathleen saved all the letters Kent wrote to her – even his unkind rants. It’s possible he received Kathleen’s letter of Sept. 12^th or 15th and sent back one of those. Or, there is a missing letter. Was a letter destroyed? We may never know.

Based upon Kent’s response to the letter, I don’t believe its contents would have been any more shocking than the ones Kathleen wrote on Sept. 12^th and 15^th. While waiting in flood-damaged Seward in pouring rain, Kent’s Sept. 19^th response to his wife clearly shows his despondency and depression -- not only in the words, but also the syntax as well as the pressure of ink on paper. Just like a rant when we go on and on in anger, Kent’s sentences seem to never end. As my wife and I read them and I transcribe them, we both parsed them, taking phrases apart and reordering them to extract the meaning. He’s been anxiously waiting and looking forward to reading her letters and hearing of her love for him. No matter what I’ve done to you in the past, he says, “my love for you is greater now than ever in our lives together. If you love me you cannot in all your life lose me or my love. I know it from the loneliness of my heart. But, my Kathleen, I’m desperate about what you’ve written.”

I can imagine Kent taking a deep breath after that last sentence. After pouring out his heart to Kathleen it’s now his turn to get even. “I sent word straight off to Hildegarde to come if she possibly could,” he wrote, but added quickly that he hasn’t heard from her and knows nothing about what she’s doing, where she is, or what her plans are. He is so depressed that even Fox Island no longer appears attractive to him. “My first thought when I read your letter was that I could not now endure the loneliness of that island again.” With one blow, he says, “I’ve been cut off from what is my exile here.” Kent writes all this on Sept. 19, 1918. His cabin on Fox Island isn’t even ready, the land around it isn’t completely cleared, he still needs a sufficient supply of wood for the winter, and he’s still hauling necessary supplies from Seward. The adventure hasn’t even begun.

Scholars have written about this part of Kent’s life, referring to his darkness and depression. But few if any have looked deep enough into these letters. “Kathleen, my darling wife, if your love has turned to what I have read in your letters, you will never see me again. I will never go to the east again but will try what I can {to}make of life here. I am almost afraid to hear from you again but I have decided to stay here until another letter comes – one later than this one. But Kathleen dear, you be calm. When this reaches you know, KNOW, dear wife, that I love you. Know it is as if it were written blazing in the heavens – and without your deepest truest love, I want for me an end to all things, -- forgetfulness, failure and death.”

For Rockwell Kent, the freedom, isolation and splendor of Fox Island and Olson are twelve miles south. Now even that place seems uninviting to the artist. It’s pouring rain and the streets are muddy; no one has seen the sun for almost two weeks; when the sun finally comes out, the nearly six minutes a day that has been lost will be quite noticeable; the glacial stream rampages toward the bay carrying silt and boulders, destroying everything in its path; and the Catholic nuns have exhausted themselves hauling patients and medical equipment across the torrent to safety. Soon termination dust will appear on the mountains and winter will arrive. At least the people in Seward are friendly, and Kent is impressed that most mind their own business. It’s a rule of the frontier, he learns. Don’t ask personal questions of strangers. Alaska is a place where one can come to start over and reinvent oneself. The past is nobody’s business. Kent respects that attitude.

But Seward is still just another Alaska town – and Kent wants nothing to do with towns, especially with the Great War still raging and the same thoughtless patriotism he had confronted in Newfoundland. But he can’t escape the war. He’s of age and is expected to register with the selective service for the military draft. He’s been around town long enough to know that it’s expected of him. Alaska is not like Newfoundland. That was Canada. Now he’s in the U.S. and a citizen. He could be arrested if he refuses to register. There is no sympathy for slackers, as they are called.

Meanwhile, Kent ends his Sept. 19, 1918 letter to Kathleen: “God Bless you my darling wife, and make you happy, now, -- doubly when you get this word from me; and God give me your love forever. Now I shall put this in the mail and try for a little peace. Ever lovingly, your Rockwell.

PHOTOS

     Fox Island textures. Capra photos

 By 1927 Seward had contained the flow of Lowell Creek within a flume to protect the town

from floods. It may have solved the problem if the issue was water. But that water carried silt and

boulders and other debris that ripped apart structures and bridges and created dams that pushed

the water into town. U.S. Corps of Engineers photo.

The same view as photo 2 but as Seward looks today. During 1939-40 the U.S. Corps of Engineers diverted Lower Creek by drilling a tunnel through Bear Mountain. Now Jefferson Street sits over the old route of Lowell Creek.

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As you travel south to Seward and reach the very end of the Seward Highway, you turn right

onto a gravel road that leads to Lowell Point. As you cross a bridge, you’ll see Lowell Creek

emerging from its tunnel.

The year before Kent arrived a wet fall produced another flood and Lowell Creek rampaged

again. This is some of the damage from a 1917 photo. Capra collection.

This is the Seward General Hospital with the Sisters the artist and his son saw “booted to the

thighs, fleeing through the water to a safer place.”  Photo courtesy of Sacred Heart Catholic

Church in Seward which sits on the site of the old hospital.