DECEMBER 7,8,9, 2018

ROCKWELL KENT WILDERNESS CENTENNIAL JOURNAL

100 YEARS LATER

by Doug Capra © 2018

December 7, 8, 9, 2018

The three peaks of Fox Island lighted by the sun at 11:45 a.m. on Wednesday, December 12, 2018. Capra photo.

"Three AM is eternal. Three AM is infernal. It's the hour of the wolf. The time at which fear and sadness and regret rack up so that it becomes impossible to get to sleep. Insomnia and self-pity: it's a recipe for hysteria,  for wild, lunging desperation...The silent night amplifies the din in our skulls, returns us to a primal solitude."

      Sukhdev Sandhu in Night Haunts: A Journey Through the London Night.
      London: Verso Books, 2007.

Late evening, Saturday, December 7, 1918

         The Kathleen-Hildegarde Saga continues: Kent has already written one letter on this day to his wife which I discussed in the last entry. Now he writes another as midnight and the Hour of the Wolf arrives -- and it becomes…

Sunday, December 8th, early morning hours.

Kent has told Kathleen that he has ended his affair, which he did in a letter to Hildegarde from Seward on Dec. 2nd (See below). He often feels ashamed for his continued pleading for his wife’s love – but he’s reached his limits. “If you cannot love me as I want to be loved,” he writes, “if you cannot think it worthwhile to end by your love and faithfulness and consideration the misery that I endure now, you shall end it all, or I shall. I shall steal myself against all thought of you and find in the world someone that can replace you as an ideal to me. There you have it. I will not beg forever.” Without her love, he must square his shoulders and “pretend to pride” for his own survival. “You know how true a defense this has always been to me,” he admits. Despite his shame he wants her to know his love for her. “But now that I assert my pride and strength I must tell you this again. That more than God, more than my children, than my friends, than my art, more than my life I love you, my Kathleen. That no matter how far I have strayed from you -- you alone have offered to me the purist, holiest living being that I ever knew through life or art. That if to all the world I stand proud and erect before you I am in my heart humble and renewed. Oh Kathleen, beyond all belief I love you. God help me!”

Kent is obsessed with the romantic “ideal.” Kathleen must be perfectly faithful, perfectly pure, perfectly holy, the perfection of woman and motherhood. Kent was a perfectionist, as hard on himself as he was with others, and he expected everyone, including his wife and children, to strive toward the ideal. It is also true that there were double standards.

The storm still rages through the night along Resurrection Bay as Kent writes this letter. The frigid weather continues into morning but brings clear skies. “I’m about frozen, “Kent jokes. “Log cabins stuffed with moss should be wonderful in the tropics.” As the moss he inserted in the log cabin wall spaces dries out, it shrinks, allowing wind to penetrate. “On this work table,” he complains, “I must weight my papers down to keep them from flying around the room.” It’s an icy, biting wind. Olson tells them this cold is about as bad it gets during winters in this part of Alaska. After a quick breakfast and some chores, Kent and Rockie walk across the frozen lake and trek up the saddle between the island’s northern and middle peaks. They look northward toward the Fox Island spit and southeast at Cape Resurrection, Barwell Island and out into the North Pacific where the ocean boils as sea spray and mist rise to meet a blinding sun. They take many photographs that Kent will use for his work.

BELOW -- Upper left, a photograph of the Fox Island spit from close to the location Kent took his photo (upper right). Kent's painting of the spit at center. Hildegarde at lower left; Kathleen at lower right.

 “Rockwell was wonderful to look at,” Kent writes, “with cheeks so red and clear. He loved our little excursion.” They sprint down the trail to the lake with Rockie in the lead, Kent pretending he’s a bear in chase. Kent fells a tree, but the wind blows it against another tree where it hangs. A fierce north wind continues: “The night is beautiful,” Kent writes toward midnight, “even if it is terrible, and the young moon is near setting.”

Back in New York, Kathleen writes a letter to her husband. Keep in mind that it will be weeks before she gets the letter Kent wrote about, and it will be weeks before Kent gets this letter. There is no real communication between them. Kathleen has not been writing to him every day as she promised him, she admits. “I have seen Hilda four times this week,” she writes, “and every time I go over there and see her I get so wrought up that I am in no condition to write to you.” Like her husband, she has been having horrible dreams about Kent and Hilda. “Last night you had just returned {from Alaska} and the first evening you went to the opera with Hilda. I was wounded beyond measure and immediately went in search of a lawyer to get divorce papers.” Contemplating the dream later that day, Kathleen recalled that Kent had refused to end the affair with Hildegarde before leaving for Alaska. She wonders now whether he still feels that way. It will be weeks before she receives his letter saying he has ended the relationship with Hildegarde.

 “Please don’t ignore what I have asked of you,” she says, “but let me know as soon as possible what you decided.” She’s referring to her demanding that he end the affair, that it’s either her or Hilda. He must decide. Kathleen can’t get Hilda out of her mind, or the money Kent has spent on her. “I bought a large black velvet hat I wear with the red suit Hilda gave me. I don’t feel a bit uncomfortable in wearing the suit now, for I feel that you went a long way towards paying for it, and she has already had another one like it made to order.” Kent’s mother Sarah visited her recently and they talked about the mail situation. The Tarrytown post office had refused to send a package to Seward. They told Sara that navigation had shut down and mail couldn’t be delivered there. Navigation to Anchorage often shut down because Cook Inlet froze up. But Resurrection Bay is an ice-free harbor and never freezes. Even with Cook Inlet navigation closed. Anchorage mail was delivered to Seward via steamship and traveled north by rail and dogsled. Kathleen is enjoying her time in New York City. “I must get dressed now,” she ends the letter. She’s going to a dinner party with Bernice and Billy.

Sunday, December 9th

Olson lied. It’s colder today. “The bay seethes and smokes and huge breakers race across it,” Kent writes. “It is truly bitter weather.” Olson again tells them that this is the worst of it, but Kent says “I know Olson by now.”  Kent frees the tree that got hung up yesterday by cutting the one it’s learning against.  Then he breaks them down with his crosscut saw and turns the logs into firewood. But one can only work outside so long on days like this. Olson stops by and they listen to him tell of his days in Nome during the gold rush.

The old Swede’s account of early Nome as a ruthless, lawless frontier town matches the historical record. We can question some of his facts, but we hear from him the scuttlebutt and rumors. You can read Kent's summary of his story on pp. 103-6 in the 1997 edition of Wilderness with my foreword. A judge came and tried to untangle all the claim jumping, as Olson told Kent, but word spread that the best way to make money was to jump a claim because then your lawyers “would make more money for you than you could get out in gold. There was no use in a man without money trying to hold a claim.” There is, of course, the famous John Wayne film, North to Alaska, about the Nome gold strike. Someone broke into Olson’s new tent and stole everything, leaving him with nothing but a jack-knife. He borrowed ten dollars and labored for a dollar an hour. 

BELOW -- The beaches of Nome in 1900 at the time Olson was there.

Survival in Nome’s early frontier wasn’t easy,” Olson told Kent: “And the crowd that was there! Gamblers, sharps, actors, -- men and women of every kind – and they did act so foolish! – all out of their heads over the gold. The brothels were running wide open and robberies occurred in the town by daylight. Every man slept with his gun beside him and if he shot it was to kill. The robbers chloroformed men as they slept in their tents. There were thousands of people then and you could look out on the beach and see them swarming like flies. Everything was overturned for gold – the entire beach for ten miles both ways from Nome had been shoveled off into the sea. They dug under the Indian village till the houses fell in, and even under the graveyard.” Olson does appear in Nome in the 1900 U.S. Census.

BELOW -- The 1900 U.S. Census from Nome, Alaska. Lars. M. Olson appears third from the top.

Kent writes many letters to Hildegarde during August and September, with a few in October. There are none in November. He has received only a few from her. By December he knows where his wife stands regarding his affair. On Dec. 2nd while in Seward he writes several letters to Hildegarde. As with Kathleen’s letters, Kent has reread and analyzed all of Hildegarde’s to him. Knowing what he’s about to tell her, he admits he’s violated the image he made above the letter of “the man kneeling, hugging a deer.”

 

He hasn’t written her in weeks because he’s dreaded saying what he has to say. “Are you a strong brave girl?” he asks. “Out of my own heart, here where in loneliness I could see life in all its values I have made a choice – as the only possible solution of what is an inextricable and tragic tangle. I have chosen to go back to Kathleen and to the children.” This is an interesting way of wording his breakup. He has never “left” Kathleen and the children. His plan has been to have his wife, children and amour exist together as part of his life. He goes out of his way to claim that he’s doing this of his own free will, that Kathleen hasn’t urged or threatened him – which is not the truth. It’s ironic, he implies, that while he’s not certain anymore of his wife’s love -- he is certain of Hildegarde’s. In his loneliness on Fox Island, her letters have been his only comfort. “They’re wonderful in their truth and their unfeigned expression of your devoted love,” he writes. “Dear Hildegarde, don’t despise me,” he begs. “I do this with a terrible wrong and tortured spirit but with conviction that it is the right and the only way. God help me and you.”

BELOW -- Sketch from an Oct. 7, 1918 letter Kent wrote to Hildegarde from Fox Island. 

He makes it clear, though, that although the physical affair will end he wants to maintain the close connection. “There shall be no separation,” he writes. “I have loved you and I love you now too dearly to let you pass from me…I feel that with all the unhappiness, I have been a light in your life. And that I shall, if you will allow it, continue to be,” though, he cautions, “…there are thorny paths for us both ahead in this dreary world.”

BELOW -- The sun rises over the Resurrection Peninsula and Fox Island at 11:08 a.m. on Thursday, December 13, 2018. Capra photo.