OCTOBER 18, 2018 -- RESURRECTION BAY RAINBOWS

ROCKWELL KENT WILDERNESS CENTENNIAL JOURNAL

100 YEARS LATER

October18, 2018

In the Hebrew Bible a rainbow came after the Great Flood as a promise.

The last several days has brought heavy rains and flooding to Seward. Fierce squalls sweep in off the North Pacific Gulf of Alaska followed by interludes of partial clearing and even a little sun. That's when the rainbows appear. Today was one of those days.

Rain is not uncommon in September and October here, but it's only every several years that we have severe floods. As I wrote in an earlier entry, in mid-September Kent describes these storms on Fox Island. The tempest had ended and the sun came out briefly by the time he and Rockie rowed to Seward on Sept. 18th. He may have seen a rainbow that day. If not, he saw plenty of them that fall of 1918. It's no accident that the dust jacket of the 1920 edition of Wilderness has a rainbow on it. Beneath all the charm and inspiration in Kent's Alaska book, a great storm raged through his personal life. How and when would it end? Would he receive the grace of a rainbow?

The letters he received from his wife, Kathleen on that mid-September trip to Seward disturbed him greatly. He even considered leaving Alaska. His letters responding to her taunting rambled and ranted, showing his anxiety, stress and depression. He even expressed the desire to end his life. I did an entry here about that, and as we get into late October, November and December we'll see in the letters between Kathleen and Kent that both again question their relationship. I say “again” because this was nothing new. Early in their marriage, Kent's affair with Janet and the child she bore him was an event Kathleen could never forget, especially since other affairs followed. Kent's current amour with Hildegarde renewed Kathleen’s distrust, anger and disappointment. Their correspondence during 1917 and 1918, just before Kent left for

Alaska, attests to that.

Kent can put all this behind him on Fox Island if he keeps busy with his axe and cross-cut saw. Survival in the wild takes time. He rises early, gets the two stoves going, makes breakfast for himself and Rockie, deals with essential chores. The walls may still need some chinking. He needs to make some yeast for bread. Then he bakes bread. What will they have for supper? What’s the weather like? Can he work outside? Some space between his and Olson’s cabin still needs clearing. Rockie needs time to play, but he also has to do his reading and writing. And yes, he must paint and sketch and draw. And, damn – as of Oct. 15 he still hasn’t received his canvases – so he’ll paint on plywood. When he paints or sketches he’s in flow. There’s no time, no past, no future. Just the art. Olson drops in, lonely and wanting conversation. Kent drops his work and listens to the old Swede. Letters to write not just to Kathleen but to Carl Zigrosser and Hildegarde and his mother and…but the illustrated journal needs work, too. He’ll send it to Kathleen and ask her to send it around to family and friends. He eventually plans to have it bound as a memento for Rockie.

But now it gets dark early. He and Rockie have supper and he reads Robinson Crusoe to his son. A page for every page the boy reads in his books. But Kent doesn’t like that punishment because if Rockie doesn’t do his reading his father is the one who gets punished. He loves the adventures of Robinson Crusoe and Friday more than the boy. He needs it. Like all his chores and his art, that reading to Rockie each evening helps him escape the tempest in his soul. It takes him off into another world of adventure. But then Rockie is asleep and Kent is alone. Ah, that wonderful solitude. The “quiet” adventure. Kathleen. The draft. Money. The Influenza. Kathleen writes that the children have been sick. What if he got sick? Those dangerous trips to Seward. Yes, now he knows what Resurrection Bay can be like in winter. He doesn’t care so much about his own risks, but with Rockie with him…what would become of his son if something happened to him? Silence and the solitude waken his demons. He can’t sleep, and when he does he has terrible nightmares. Not only his world, but the whole world is in chaos.

The poem wouldn’t be published until 1919 but it emerged from a world that was dying.

The Second Coming

William Butler Yeats

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;

Surely the Second Coming is at hand.

The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out

When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi

Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert

A shape with lion body and the head of a man,

A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,

Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it

Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.

The darkness drops again; but now I know

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

After the Great Flood a rainbow appeared as a promise. Would this wilderness sojourn, this venture into self, this soul flight – end with a rainbow for Rockwell Kent as he teetered on the edge of his abyss?

PHOTOS

The dust jacket for the 1920 first edition of Wilderness: A Journal of Quiet Adventure in Alaska.