OCTOBER 28-30, 2018

ROCKWELL KENT WILDERNESS CENTENNIAL JOURNAL

100 YEARS LATER

by Doug Capra © 2018

Oct. 28-30, 2018

            It’s Monday, Oct., 28, 1918 on Fox Island. The weather is mild, and Rockie is running around with bare knees because he needs woolen socks. Kent has written home asking Kathleen and his mother to make some for him. Olson has been aching to get to Seward but he missed his window today so he’ll try tomorrow. Kent is not inspired by what he has painted today. He and Rockie devoured Robinson Crusoe a while back and finished Treasure Island two days ago. Kent has now started on The Water Babies, A Fairy Tale for a Land Baby by (1863) by Charles Kingsley. Born in 1882, Kent is still very much a Victorian in many ways and, like some of the other books he’s reading to Rockie, this one too probably brings back his own childhood reading memories. He enjoys them as much as his son. Water Babies is a moral fable and, though containing a theme of Christian redemption, it also advocates for the poor and against child labor. As a socialist, Kent has a strong sense of social justice -- although he can't always connect that to the way he sometimes treats his women. A product of its time, the book does express prejudice against Jews, Catholics, Blacks and especially the Irish. This is not Kent, though. He’s more into the romanticism of the fable and the beautiful illustrations. Kent later becomes famous with his book illustrations. While reading Homer on Fox Island he dreams of illustrating the Odyssey.

Olson makes it to Seward the next day, Oct. 29^th, -- after once being driven back to the island by the wind and rain. Kent is now stuck with caring for the fox and goats. Before leaving Olson shots a grouse for the Kents, which brings Rockie to tears. Still a vegetarian, Kent writes: “It’s a shame that for the sake of a few paltry mouthfuls the wild woods should be robbed of one of its people.” He doesn’t blame Olson because “he never kills wantonly,” but he considers the practice “barbarism.” Rainy, cloudy, overcast days depress Kent. “On a dark day in this dark walled cabin,” he writes, “with the woods about and the sun itself, wherever it may be, behind the clouds, still in certainty somewhere behind the mountains, there is hardly light to read by except close to the windows." That lack of light also hinders his painting. Kent milks the goat and reviews Olson’s directions for feeding the fox. Rockie sleeps every night hugging the stuffed animal he has brought from – Squirlie. To the youngster he’s a real squirrel. “I almost begin to believe in him myself,” Kent writes.

Olson is still in Seward on Oct. 30^th – another storm has arrived from the northwest and it looks like it may last days. The two Fox Island residents still don’t know what time it is. They have no clock or watch. They can’t even live by the rising and setting sun for they have no idea where it is. Darkness envelopes them. They eat when they’re hungry – reading their books at table -- and sleep when they’re tired. Kent paints, cuts firewood when he can, reads to Rockie, takes care of Olson’s animals. He enjoys watching his son play with Olson’s goats as the ram, Billy, “dances threateningly on his hind legs before him to Rockwell’s immense delight.” As long as he can keep busy and distracted, Kent is fine. He writes bundles of letters – very personal ones to Kathleen and Hldegarde. More philosophical ones to Carl Zigrosser. He can’t just write a letter and mail it. He has to wait sometimes weeks to gather a thick stack of letters and row them to Seward and dispatch them on a steamer. On those trips to Seward he receives bundles of letters, reads them and responds. There is no real communication going on. Both ends of the correspondence are separated by too much time and space. On Fox Island, Kent keeps up with his illustrated journal which details the “Quiet Adventure” he later subtitles his book. The “Not-So-Quiet Adventure” is found in the letters to Kathleen. He writes these late at night when Rockie’s asleep hugging Squirlie. This is when Kent’s demons arrive. This is when he experiences the down side of solitude. For a man who needs constant challenges and needs to be in control – the gloomy nights make it clear to him how little control he has over his personal life -- Kathleen and Hildegarde. He’s never experienced this kind of isolation. Sometimes to him it appears more like an exile.

            NOTE – Parts of the article below appeared in the Fall 1985 issue of The Kent Collector.

It’s the end of August -- late in the season. I’m the Kenai Fjords National Park ranger-naturalist aboard the Star of the Northwest traveling south in Resurrection Bay. The weather is as bad as it gets this time of year – sideways rain, fierce winds, four to five-foot seas, little visibility. Five-foot seas might not seem like much to some – but this is in the bay, in protected waters. Out past the islands at Cape Resurrection there could be 10 to 15-foot seas.

In Alaska you’re always playing the odds when it comes to weather. We can have wonderful days, too. This isn’t one of them.

We’ve just passed Hat Island as the Fox Island Spit looms up ahead with the El Dorado Narrows just beyond. I’m an outside naturalist, on deck in all kinds of weather as I do my narration and encourage visitors to join me. “It’s only water,” I tell them. “If you visit Alaska and you don’t get wet, it doesn’t count. You’ve have to come back again to see what our weather is really like.” For those who still decide to stay inside at their tables I say, “Join me outside or else I’ll come back in and drip all over you.”

But today’s different. Everybody’s inside, including me. I’ve already been through two sets of rain gear and several pair of gloves, and I’m still wet down to my skivvies. Usually I enjoy riding out on the bow. It’s a great view. But the wind-driven rain from the southeast is too harsh.

I struggle up to the wheelhouse with the captain. “Any news on the marine radio?” I ask him. “Not a thing,” he responds. These days, near the end of the season, it sometimes becomes a real challenge to find wildlife, especially on days like this. The puffins have headed to their home -- several hundred miles south in the Gulf of Alaska where they’ll sit on the open water for the winter. Those new born this season won’t come back to land for a few years, until they’re ready to breed. Most of the other migrating species have left as well, including the Humpback Whales. On days like today we’ll be lucky if we find some Dall’s Porpoise or mountain goats or bald eagles.

I stand beside the captain in the pilot house watching what old Lars Matt Olson,  called the “wollys” – the sea-spray -- funnels of sea water picked up by the wind. They look like little tornados as they meander this way and that, finally dissolving and disappearing into nothingness. “What’s the wind speed?” I ask the captain. “We’re heading into 80 knot gusts,” he tells me. I hardly feel it. The Star of the Northwest is slow, but it’s tank.

I’ve been out in Resurrection Bay in all seasons in all kinds of weather – in large vessels, fishing boats and sailboats. Today I’m thankful to be aboard a vessel like this one. It’s on days like this that I often think of Rockwell and young Rocky rowing their small dory between Fox Island and Seward – in the winter. Their boat did have a “little patched-up three and one-half horse-power Evinrude motor,” as Kent describes it, but it rarely worked, and Kent chronicles the agonies and ecstasies associated with that undependable motor.

The Kents arrived in Seward aboard the Admiral Farragut shortly after six o’clock on Saturday morning, August 24, 1918. They are listed in the Seward Gateway along with four other Seward-bound passengers and eleven steerage. The newspaper noted that the steamer had a “fair” cargo for town and “75 tons for Anchorage. Under the section Seward Snapshots we find “Rockwell Kent, artist of New York, accompanied by his son, is registered at the hotel Sexton.” George Sexton owned the hotel and his daughter Sylvia had a curio shop in the lobby. One of Alaska’s early female photographers, she partnered briefly with John E. Thwaites in Seward during the time Kent was on Fox Island. She and Thwaites became friends with the artist and aided him when they could.

            Three days after he arrived, Kent and his son overloaded their recently purchased dory on the Seward beach leaving “little room for ourselves,” and headed for Fox Island “with the little motor running beautifully.” The journal entry continues: “It lasted for three miles when at once, with a bang and a whir, the motor raced, and the boat stood motionless on the clam gray waters” They rowed to a nearby fisherman’s cabin by Caines Head where they unloaded “our useless motor” before starting to row to Fox Island.

            Thus begins Kent’s ambivalent relationship with the motor that had been “thrown in” with the purchase of the dory “as of no value.” On Oct. 11, Olson offered to tow the Kents with his boat and engine to Caines Head for the pickup. That venture failed when Olson’s engine died and Kent rowed him back to the island in his boat while Rockie rowed their boat back. Two days later Olson tested his engine after repairing it. On Oct. 15, he towed the Kents to Caines Head where they finally picked up (what Kent was calling by this time) “our broken-down engine.” They did retrieve it, but it still wasn’t working, so they rowed to Seward where they most likely had it repaired.

            On Sept. 18 the two rowed to Seward from the island, attempting to pick up the motor at Caines Head along the way – but the surf was too high for a landing. By Sept. 24, the Kents still hadn’t picked up their motor, for they again rowed back to Fox Island and were nearly swamped. Kent tells that harrowing tale in Wilderness. It’s a wonder they survived.   

            By October winter has arrived in parts of Alaska, though usually not along coastal areas like Seward. Still, the prevailing winds have started to shift (from south to north) and venturing onto Resurrection Bay in small boats can be treacherous. Olson had warned him with little success but Kent thought the locals were too timid about the seas. After the Sept. 24 near-death experience on the bay with this son, however, Kent took Olson’s advice more seriously.

            In Seward with the engine repaired, Kent wrote: “I know nothing about an engine but I have eight miles to learn in before the only hazardous part of the voyage begins.” Kent usually hugged the western shore of Resurrection Bay for about eight miles until he got to Caines Head. He then carefully headed across the bay shooting for Humpy Cove, depending upon the north wind. He had learned on Sept. 24^th that if he played his cards wrong, the wind might carry him out into the Gulf of Alaska before he could make his turn into the northwest harbor of Fox Island.

            The Oct. 15 engine fix didn’t last long. On Nov. 8 Kent refers to the “fussing of installing our motor and the launching of our cumbersome boat.” He spent the rest of that day working on the motor, “first to find out why should wouldn’t run, then, having found and fixed that, to put other parts in still better order, and then, by far the longest time and still to continue to-morrow, to mend what in the course of our fixing we had broken.”

            Again, on Nov. 28, he spent the day “tinkering” with the engine and wrote: “It goes now – in a water barrel. The trouble with these little motors is that the moment they get wet they stop, and they are attached at such an exposed place, on the stern, that they will get wet if there’s much of a sea. Then you’re in a bad fix for it’s impossible to make any headway rowing with the engine – or rather the propeller – dragging. Most of the engines are hung right on the stern and can be readily detached and drawn into the boat. But mine fits into a sort of pocket built in the stern and is difficult even on land to lift out. It weighs decidedly over a hundred pounds. So I don’t relish getting caught with such an equipment.”

            On their way from Fox Island to Seward on Friday, Feb. 21, “the flywheel came loose six times, the muffler four, and the valve spring fell off and stayed off,” Kent recorded. They stayed in Seward a few days reading their mail and writing letters.  On Feb. 25, with a light load, with the little Evinrude engine puttering away, and a brisk north wind driving them into a “splendid white-crested chop,” the two headed back to Fox Island. The next day Kent wrote in his journal: “Midway across it was about all the engine could have stood. The propeller is not set at enough depth in our boat and in yesterday’s sea it was most of the time out of the water, racing at a furious pace. Then the boat would naturally lose steerage way and we’d swing far out of our course. But it was great sport. Into it we could have made no headway; before it nothing could stop us. And the engine kept on going! – only as usual it was continually falling apart.”

            All went well until they reached the roughest seas – probably as they crossed from Caines Head toward Fox Island.  “Then the muffler came loose,” Kent wrote. “Not wanting to stop the engine in that sea I spent half the time on my knees holding the tiller in one hand and the muffler nut with a pair of pliers in the other. Rockwell bailed most of the time. The boat leaks like a sieve.” By some miracle, they made it to Fox Island.

            As Kent got ready to leave Alaska in March 1919, he had to get rid of a “broken-down Evinrude engine” and a boat that “leaks like a sieve.” Before departing Seward, he demonstrated his understanding of how to survive in a capitalist society with poetic justice – caveat emptor. His ad in the March 19, 1919 Seward Gateway read:

            “FOR SALE – Dory and Evinrude motor. Perfect running order. A bargain. Rockwell Kent, Sexton Hotel.”

PHOTOS

Looking out over Seward into Resurrection Bay during sunrise on Oct. 30, 2018. Photo take from the loft of the Resurrection Art Coffee House -- built in 1917 as a Methodist Church -- one of the historic buildings that would have been in Seward when Kent here in 1918. Capra photo.

Scene from The Water Babies -- "Mrs. Bedonebyasyoudid” -- Illustration by Jessie Willcox Smith (c 1916) Charcoal, water, and oil. Digitally restored. (Photo from Wikipedia)

"Oh, don't hurt me!" cried Tom. "I only want to look at you; you are so handsome." Illustration by Jessie Willcox Smith (c. 1916). Charcoal, water, and oil. Digitally restored. (Photo from Wikipedia)

The next two photos are the only ones I've been able to find of Kent's dory and engine. The one below was probably taken by Olson for Kent, since it is burry. It was taken just off the Fox Island beach. Notice the evinrude engine in the stern. The second is from a personal Kent family album. Special thanks to Jake Milgram Wien for sending me this second photo.

Hunter Hollingsworth, age 10 in 2014 when he played little Rockie in my play, And Now the World Again. At right his his mother, Nita, who played Kent's wife, Kathleen. Notice that Hunter is hold a prop -- Squirlie -- Rockie's pet Squirrel.