END OF SEPTEMBER -- EARLY OCTOBER 2018

ROCKWELL KENT WILDERNESS CENTENNIAL JOURNAL

100 YEARS LATER

End of Sept.-Early Oct. 2018

I write this on Oct. 1, 2018. The photos I took this morning and posted are mostly for those who have never been to Resurrection Bay for one of our sunrises on a clear Autumn day. A hundred years ago this day it was raining for Kent on Fox Island – but later that week the weather cleared. On Oct. 4, 1918 Kent wrote: “A glorious lovely day, a cloudless sky and the wind in the north. That puts life into men! Up at sunrise, we two.” That day Kent would probably have caught the pink on the mountains to the west. He had seen and commented on it earlier during September’s last days when the rain stopped and the skies cleared. One must understand that actual sunrise along Resurrection Bay is different from when the sun first peeks up above the mountains to the east. To catch the colors, one must rise before the sun actually appears. The photos I’ve posted show how the pink gradually appears, strengthens, and quickly disappears. The light changes quickly this time of year in Alaska.

On Sept. 30^th Kent wrote: “The morning brilliant, clear, and cold with the wind in the north. I promised Rockwell an excursion when we had cut six sections from a tree with the cross-cut saw. It went like the wind. Then with cheese, chocolate, and Swedish hard bread in my pocket we started for the lowest ridge of the island that overlooks the east.” I’ve done this climb and it’s not easy – it’s so steep that you have to grab on to fallen and standing spruce and hemlock, boulders, or anything on the ground to pull yourself up. Kent and Rockie had started this climb a while back thinking it would be a short trek just before supper. They gave up but learned they’d need to find a different route. When they reached the top Kent wrote: “Clouds wreathed the mountains, snow was on their tops, and in the clear atmosphere both the land and the sea were marvelous for beauty of their infinite detail. Tiny white crested wavelets patterned the water’s surface with the utmost precision and regularity; and the land invited one to its smooth and mossy slopes, its dark enchanted forests, its still coves and sheltered valleys, its nobly proportioned peaks. It was a rare hour for us two.”

They followed the ridge along porcupine trails traversing the saddle behind the lake to the peak between the two coves. I’ve done that. To the east (one’s left) a thick brush of alder, salmon berries, devil’s club and currents leads to a several-hundred-foot sheer drop to the El Dorado Narrows. When they sat down to rest, they noticed a “great old porcupine” that had been shadowing them. “I spoke to him in his own whiny-moany language,” Kent wrote, “and he was much pleased; he sat up and listened, and then came almost straight toward us. I continued talking to him until after several corrections of his course.” The porcupine came with a few feet of them and sat up. Rockie was delighted and the two laughed at how foolish he appeared. As the animal stared off Kent found it funny to annoy him, poking him with a stick while trying to collect some quills. Rockie became outraged, “shrieking and wailing” that he had to stop. His father apologized saying he meant no harm. “Rockie madly loves wild animals,” Kent wrote, “has not the slightest fear of them, and would really, I believe, try out his theory of calming the anger of a bear by kissing him.”

A few days earlier Rockie had captured a sea urchin and commandeered Kent’s bread pan for its home. The artist had convinced his son to be kind and return it to its home, so he could get his bread pan back. Now Rockie wanted a pet Black-Billed Magpie (“They’re plentiful here,” Kent wrote) so Olson used one of his box traps to catch one. No luck. Magpies are corvids, among the most intelligent birds known to us. “The magpies look into our trap, squint at the food, and then at once leave the neighborhood,” Kent observed.

After their hike on the last day of September, the two returned to their cabin and Kent cut more wood. Then -- finally – after a month on Fox Island, Kent wrote in all caps – I PAINTED. “It was a stupid sketch, but no matter, I’ve begun!” Apparently, he worked outside, even in the rain, for he noted that “A weasel came out and looked at me as I worked, then whisked off.” The rain continued, and as a last journal entry for that month Kent wrote: “Is it too much to hope for more than one fair day!” They were to come, and Kent would record them in his paintings.

A hundred years ago today, Oct. 1, 1918, Kent and Rockie cut wood with the cross-cut saw in the rain. Then they both painted, Rockie with watercolors and Kent with oils. The yeast they had made announced its readiness when the cork on its bottle popped. In Wilderness, Kent offers everyone on this day his recipe for Fox Island Corn Souffle:

“Take two cups of samp (whole hominy) and stew for an indefinite time in salted water (it should boil almost dry. Make of the remainder of the water and some milk two cups of cream sauce dissolving it in some cheese {probably goat cheese}. Mix with corn and pour into a baking dish. Spread cheese over the top and put into oven to brown. We offer this delicious discovery to the world on the condition only that ‘Fox Island Corn Souffle’ shall be printed on the menu wherever it is used.” Knowledgeable chefs tell me this isn’t a “real” soufflé. Is it more like a corn casserole? Considering the social circles Kent associated with and his upper-class Victorian upbringing – it’s most likely he knew what a real soufflé looked and tasted like. He probably did the best he could with what he had on Fox Island. You will find corn soufflé recipes on the web, and I’m curious to know how they work out. In her wonderful children’s book about Rockie’s experience on Fox Island, author Claudia McGehee prints her recipe for Kent’s Fox Island Corn Souffle. You’ll find it as the final photo I’ve published with this entry.

Kent had started reading A Literary History of Ireland: from Earliest Times to the Present Day by Douglas Hyde who in 1938 at age 78 would become the first President of Ireland. On this day a hundred years ago he read “The Deirdre Saga” and commented: “It must be one of the most beautiful and the most perfect stories in all the world. So little do we feel ourselves related, here in this place, to any other time or to any civilization that at a thought we and our world become whom and what we please. Rockwell has been a cave dweller hunting the primeval forest with stone hatchet and a bow of alder strung with a root. To me it is the heroic age in Ireland.”

Kent saw himself as the artist-hero, sluffing off the old, worn out cultural, moral, intellectual baggage and creating himself anew – returning to nature, to the primitive, to the elemental realities that wilderness provided. These ideas came from the English Romantics, Rousseau, William Blake, Emerson and certainly Nietszche. Kent was reading Thus Spoke Zarathustra while on Fox Island. Much of Nietzsche’s ideas probably came from his friend Carl Zigrosser. But it even went beyond Zigrosser. From the time Kent was a teenager, Nietszche’s influence began to permeate the intellectual atmosphere in the U.S. From the early academics who brought the German’s ideas back to America, to the editors of early anarchist newspapers who first translated his aphorisms for public consumption -- to popularizers like James Gibbons Huneker and H.L Mencken. By the time Kent was on Fox Island, the air American artists, writers and other intellectuals breathed was saturated with Nietzschian ideas. And both the far left and the far right saw him reflecting their agendas.

PHOTOS

One of Kent’s early paintings from Fox Island showing the early sunlight from behindFoxIsland reflecting on the mountains Kent saw everyday to the west across Resurrection Bay.

The following photos were taken from my house between 8:45 and 9 a.m. on Oct. 1, 2018.

They show the early pink clouds over Resurrection Bay and on Mount Marathon before the sun poked above the mountains. In this photo, you can see the early pink emerge above Mount Marathon with the moon at left.