NOVEMBER 17 - 19, 2018
ROCKWELL
KENT WILDERNESS CENTENNIAL JOURNAL
100
YEARS LATER
by Doug
Capra © 2018
Nov. 17-19, 2018
The last few days the East Coast got slammed with an early
season snowstorm. It appears that we along the Gulf Coast of Alaska may have
yet another mild early winter. The last decade or so that’s been the case
whenever the East Coast gets hit hard this time of year. We have no snow on the
ground in Seward itself. There is snow on the mountains, and the Harding
Icefield on the Kenai Mountains is probably getting quite a bit. As
low-pressure systems in the Gulf of Alaska move counter-clockwise along our
coast, we get rain at lower elevations which turns to snow in the mountains as
that warm air rises. A 100 years ago Kent and Rockie on Fox Island had quite a
bit of snow with cold temperatures and fierce north winds. Let’s go back to
1918.
The two adventurers have been packed and ready to go to
Seward since Nov. 14th, just waiting for an opening in the weather. Their
boat is right side up and ready. On Nov. 17th they again rise early
with hopes of leaving since the seas in their cove look calm. On the outside,
though, it looks questionable. Within a few hours the wind picks up and a heavy
snow begins to fall. The day is cold and dark. “We hardly put the lamp out
after breakfast, before we lighted it again for late dinner. They cut some
firewood as usual, paint and draw. Rockie skates and later helps his father
turn their boat upside down and secure it so it doesn’t get filled with snow.
Later the skies clear briefly and the moon comes out. That evening Kent tries
his hand at an article for The Modern
School magazine edited by his friend Carl Zigrosser. The Modern School
movement (also called Ferrer Schools) was an important element of the anarchist
and socialist labor movement. It provided progressive education for the working
class, both children and adults. In an earlier entry I briefly discussed how
Kent was educating Rockie on Fox Island based upon Modern School principles.
On Nov. 18th the storm continues. “It blows like
a fury,” Kent writes. Yet another day stuck on Fox Island. Still without a
clock, real time has no meaning for them. They eat breakfast by lamplight, do
routine chores, paint, draw, write, and nap. Kent reads to Rockie and the boy
goes to bed early, rising again for dinner and dishes, then back to bed. Kent
visits Olson until ten o’clock then back to his cabin to work until the early
morning hours. “What a strangely arranged day,” he writes.
Nov. 19th is another “dreary, dreary…weary day.”
Kent stretches and primes four canvases “in an effort to conquer repugnance.”
Understanding how the mail works now, Kent has written all his Christmas
letters and is anxious to put them on the steamships at Seward. “And as
Christmas draws near,” he writes, “it seems more and more impossible without
home and the children. It will be a huge-make believe for one of our family
here!” A huge storm at sea brings them wind and rain. The cabin roof has a
paper cover and it rattles. Drops from the trees “fall like stones” beating the
roof to pieces. Water drips into their cabin. “But we are comfortable,” Kent
writes, “so what of it all.”
Kent reads Christmas stories to Rocking beginning with Hans
Christian Andersen’s Big Claus and LittleClaus. “That’s a great story and we roared over it.” Rockie doesn’t like tales
about Kings and Queens. The boy complains, “They’re always marrying and that
kind of stuff.” Despite that, Rockie knows what he wants in a woman. He’ll find
his wife in Seattle, not in Alaska, he tells is father – and certainly not in
Seward because the women “don’t look nice enough.” Then the youth will spend
the rest of his life in Alaska and will invite his father to join him, if he
isn’t dead by then. Kent has finished reading, the life of William Blake. Hequotes the artist in Wilderness: “The human mind cannot go beyond the gift of
God, the Holy Ghost. To suppose that Art can go beyond the finest specimens of
Art that are now in the world is not knowing what Art is; it is being blind to
the gifts of the Spirit.” Kent adds his own thoughts: “Here in the supreme
simplicity of life amid these mountains the spirit laughs at man’s concern with
the form of Art, with new expressions because the old is outworn! It is man’s
own poverty of vision yielding him nothing, so that to save himself he must
trick out in new garb the old, old commonplaces, or exalt to be material for
art the hitherto discarded trivialities of the mind.” Now he’s reading Ananda K. Coomaraswamy’s essays. This is Kent
mystic and symbolic period, a continuation of his Newfoundland years. He’s not
a realist at this time as many have claimed. He’s experimenting with modernism.
For a better understanding of this, check out Jake Wien’s excellent book, Rockwell Kent: The Mythic and the Modern.
PHOTOS
Resurrection Bay, with Fox Island at the center, take at 1:45 p.m. on Nov. 17, 2018. Capra photo
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