OCT. 31 -- NOV. 4, 2018

ROCKWELL KENT WILDERNESS CENTENNIAL JOURNAL

100 YEARS LATER

by Doug Capra © 2018

Oct. 31 – through Nov. 4, 2018

Winter is here, and Rockwell Kent says as much about this time 100 years ago. This last week in 2018, morning temperatures hover between 10 and 20 degrees and rise to perhaps 30 by the afternoon. It’s been clear – beautiful sun rises and sun sets – with a light to sometimes brisk northwest wind.

As the month ends for Kent on Oct. 31, 1918, there is a mix of rain and snow on Fox Island. Olson is in Seward so less interruptions with his tall tales – which the Kents actually enjoy. It breaks up their day and acquaints them with what Kent considers the true Alaska character connecting him with the freedom and liberty of the wilderness. Rockie spends the day reading, writing and drawing. Kent paints, and works on a two-inch square woodblock, his first, fabricating a new tool out of a file. After supper the evening ends with Kent’s flute playing, some singing. and more reading of The Water Babies to Rockwell before his bedtime. Then Kent begins what he calls his “night session of work.” With Rockie asleep and Olson gone, he experiences real solitude. He’s truly alone. This is when his demons arrive and he writes many letters in his fine hand – to Kathleen and Hildegarde – late into the early morning hours.

Friday, Nov. 1^st – The father and son fall into a routine. The weather is mild with snow off and on. Kent finishes his woodblock but can’t judge its quality. He has no way to reproduce it. Rockie spends his time with the goats. “He came in this morning in great glee to tell me that they thought he was a goat,” Kent writes. The youngster climbs the slopes with them on all fours and bleats at them. They respond. Rockie’s relationship with the goats is special – both pleasurable and bellicose. Kent tolerates the goats at best. He feeds the fox and milks a goat today.

With the “Winter” chapter of Wilderness (IV) that begins on Nov. 2, 1918 we see a more reflective, philosophical Kent. Up to this point he has been settling in and preparing. Now they have a routine that reflects “the will of the mighty forces of the sky...” The cabin is pretty much set for the cold weather; he’s established menus; he’s keeping up with the wood supply; and he’s started painting. Kent and Rockie write many letters every day and put them in a little mailbox on the wall to await the next trip to Seward for their journey east aboard a steamer. Rockie is busy with his reading and writing and art. There are always chores, even in the rain on this Nov. 2^nd day – firewood, caulking the cabin eaves and repairing the roof -- but Kent has more time now.

Kent observes and reflects upon Rockie:

n   “How in the world can anyone lay plans for a youngster’s life?”

n  “A child can make a paradise on earth.”

n  “We live in many worlds, Rockwell and I, -- the world of the books we read – an always changing one…Rockwell’s own world of fancy, kingdom of beasts, the world he dreams about and draws, -- and my created land of striding heroes and poor fate bound men…and then all round about our common daily, island-world, itself more wonderful than we have half a notion of it.”

n  “Children have their own fine literary taste that we know quite too little about. They love all real, authentic happenings, and they love pure fairy tale. But to them fiction in the guise of truth is wrong, and fairy romance, unconvincing in its details, is ridiculous. Action they like, the deed – not thoughts about it.”

Kent understands the treasure that can lurk beneath what some consider “dreary monotony” – if one only is aware of it. He’s read Henry David Thoreau’s Walden, or Life in the Woods and knows how it ends– “The light which puts out our eyes is darkness to us. Only that day dawns to which we are awake. There is more day to dawn. The sun is but a morning star.” Kent has time now to reflect. “As for adventure,” he writes, “that is relative. Where little happens and the gamut of expression is narrow, life is still full of joy and sorrow. You’re stirred by simple happenings in a quiet world.”

The thrilling joys and battles and sorrows of life.

First the joys: Kent writes: “The killer-whales that early in September played in the shoal water of our cove not thirty feet from land, rolled their huge, shining bodies into view, plunged, raced where we still could follow their gleaming white patch under water, -- there’s a thrill.”

            “The resident Orca pods still rub their bellies on the beach of that Fox Island cove today. In the early 1980’s when I met and interviewed the adult Rockie, he told me of walking the beach with his make-believe knight’s lance. A few times the Orcas came so close that he could touch their dorsal fins with the lance.

Next life’s struggles: Kent writes: “The battles that occurred that month between huge fish out in the bay, their terrible, mysterious, black arms that beat the water with a sound like cannon, the plunge into the depths of the poor frantic, wounded whale, and his return again for air; again, the thunder sound and flying foam and spray as the dread black arm is beating on the sea; then calm. You shudder at the huge death. That was a drama for the Fox Islanders.” In his September 1918 illustrated letter to Kathleen he writes: “This afternoon the whales have been in a rampage. Olsen declares it is big whales being attacked by killers and swordfish. Anyhow there has been the boom of the whales blowing and the report of a great fin like thing that stands high up in the water and spanks it. It’s a most amazing sight… It seems to be twenty or thirty feet long and you can imagine the noise it makes striking the water. Sometimes there are two at work together.”

            Olson tells him he’s observing the Orca attacking the Humpback whales. That could be, but it wouldn’t have been swordfish attacking. The transient Orca pods – the meat eaters as opposed to the resident fish-eating Orca – do go after the Gray and Humpback Whales. Humpbacks can get to forty feet or longer and weigh one ton pound per foot in Alaska. Most of the stock Kent observed migrate from Hawaiian waters where they spend the winter, mate, fast, and give birth. They frantically feed in the plankton-rich spring and summer waters along the Alaskan coast. It’s more likely that Kent observed a group of Humpbacks who found a school of small bait fish and were either bubble netting and/or thrashing their long pectoral fins around to stun their prey. Humpbacks have the largest pectoral fins of all the whales – about a third of their body length. A forty-five Humpback’s pectoral fins can be fifteen feet long. They use them for, steering, thermal regulation, stunning prey and as weapons.

Finally – life’s simple yet profound sorrows: Kent writes of the demise of Rockie’s pet in its cage on the north cabin wall: “And later the poor magpie’s death. Real tears were shed from a poor boy’s half-broken heart.”

The days go by. The rain and snow comes and goes. Rockie has a new pet – a porcupine wandered near the house and they captured it. They confine him but he doesn’t like it. “He twines himself about our hearts,” Kent writes. They pasture him freely and are able to follow his tracks in the show to retrieve him – but the goats trample the tracks and the porcupine escapes. Kent and Rockie often hike to the south end of the beach where they can see Caines Head as the watch for Olson’s return. They begin the trek hopefully and return gloomily.

Nov. 3^rd is “gloriously bright and clear with a strong northwest wind.” After days of clouds and rain and snow and gloom we in the Seward of 2018 know what it’s like on early winter days when the skies are clear – even if there’s a brisk northwest wind. “It is no little thing to have one’s work on a day like this out under such a blue sky, by the foaming green sea and the fairy mountains,” Kent writes. He and Rocky ply the cross-cut saw for a while, but Kent spends most of the day painting. They go for a walk along the goat paths and Rockie plays with the them – but they’re still more than a nuisance to Kent. They left their cabin door open and all the goats invaded. “Goats need rough language and hard blows to make them heed you,” Kent writes. “Billy ate two mouthfuls out of our broom this morning before I caught him at it…I threw a heavy armful of kindling wood into his face as he stood in the doorway and he merely sneezed.”

Kent has to always be on watch for the goats. In his September 1918 illustrated letter to Kathleen he described what happened when left the the cabin with the door open to watch the Orcas playing along the beach. “Billy, the Angora ram, entered the house and quickly hauled a great bag of dried lima beans down from the shelf. They covered the floor. These goats are trained to come right into the house and make themselves at home. Nothing you can do to them hurts their feelings in the least. Billy’s favorite exercise is to butt anything left standing about: he does it on the run too. Once he took a flying butt at Olsen’s door when it was shut. He burst off the lock and sailed right along in.” Sometimes the magpies come into the house, but that’s okay. Kent would like to capture another one for Rockie. Olson is still in Seward. “How long this wind will continue no one can tell,” Kent laments. “It would take a well-manned dory to be out on such a day.” He has learned his lesson and not merely respects the dangers of Resurrection Bay but is now extremely anxious during each trip to Seward with Rockie in the boat.

The magic and inspiring “Quiet Adventure” continues.  Beneath it, the “Not-So-Quiet Adventure” lurks after Rockie is asleep as Kent’s demons haunt him. He rereads his letters from Kathleen and Hildegarde and neatly pens dozens of pages back to them into the early morning hours.

PHOTOS -- Letters from the Archives of American Art, Washington, D.C.

This photo, taken Nov. 5, 2018, is the kind of day on Resurrection Bay that Kent describes on Nov. 3, 1918. Days like this, after rain and clouds uplift the spirit and encourage the soul even today for those of us who living along the Gulf of Alaska. Fox Island is at center, just to the left of Caines Head. Capra photo.

 Kent embedded this sketch of a map of Fox Island within his September 1918 illustrated letter to his wife, Kathleen.

Lars Matt Olson, top row right. This photo was probably taken in 1916 with the Pioneers of Alaska had a picnic in Seward. These men, according to the photo label, were the oldest Alaska pioneers in 1916. According to Olson's story as retold by Kent, the Swede came to Alaska first in the 1880's. 

At left, Humpback Whales slap their pectoral fins. At upper right, Humpbacks bubble-net just outside of Seward. Within his September 1918 illustrated letter to his wife, Kathleen -- Kent embedded this sketch of a Humpback whale's pectoral fin.

At top, a pod of Orca in Resurrection Bay. At bottom, the sketch of a pod of Orca rubbing their bellies along the Fox Island beach. Kent embedded this sketch within his long September 1918 illustrated letter to his wife. Orca still do this at the same spot at Fox Island.

Kent took this photo of the interior of his Fox Island cabin which was built to house goats. He installed that large south-facing window to give me more light. Note the sketch by the window, the snowshoes, and the hanging frames. There is a small window on the wall to the right. Their small door and a stove is directly opposite this large window. . Kent was not a small man, yet he often bumped his head when he entered the cabin. On the wall left of the window is another stove.