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. 14^th, just waiting for an opening in the weather. Their boat is right side up and ready. On Nov. 17^th 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. 18^th 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. 19^th 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

Kent's friend Carl Zigrosser became editor of The Modern School. 

 Kent is reading Rockie the Hans Cristian Andersen story, Big Claus Little Claus. I don't know which edition he is using, but one of more popular illustrators of the time was Arthur Rackham. In later years Kent became one of this country's most popular and respected book illustrators. While on Fox Island he occasionally while reading Homer's Iliad, he expresses a desire to illustrate that book.

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