PART 1 OF 2 - EARLY JANUARY 1918

ROCKWELL KENT WILDERNESS CENTENNIAL JOURNAL

100 YEARS LATER

by Doug Capra © 2018

Part 1 of 2 - Early January 1918

Lars Matt Olson with his goats in his Fox Island cabin. Kent photo.

Since just before Christmas it has rained and melted all the snow. It is unseasonably warm, almost like autumn.

Why are we staying up so late on December 31st, Rockie asks Olson and his father? What’s going to happen at one minute after midnight. The two men make up “all sort of yarns about explosions and rumblings” but Rockie won’t fall for their tall tales. “He might have said,” Kent jokes, “How can anything happen here where nothing ever comes from the sky except rain?” Olson joins Kent and Rockie on January 1st. They toast to the new year and relax a bit, but Kent gets right to work with his art. Olson expects more celebration. “Still,” Kent writes, “he understands pretty well the strange madness that possesses me, and is not at all unsympathetic. I explained to him one day the difference between working to suit yourself and working to suit other people.” Olson understands that idea well. “He’d defy the world at any time he chose,” Kent writes, “no matter how poor his fortunes.”

Lars Matt Olson, from his U.S. Government Railroad Identification Card (Courtesy of the Resurrection Bay Historical Society)

At 11:30 p.m. on January 1st, Kent spots a steamship entering the bay and heading toward Seward. It is the Admiral Watson, scheduled to arrive in Seward at 3 a.m. Jan. 2nd. In has 250 tons of freight which, includes the mail which now comes only by freight since the contract dispute between he federal government and the steamship companies. It stayed in port 19 hours before sailing to the westward -- perhaps Kodiak, the Alaska Peninsula, Dutch Harbor and the Aleutians. Kent wakes Rockie and they write last minute letters, tie up parcels, and make lists until 2 a.m. No use disturbing Olson so early, Kent decides, though  he does awaken him by 8 a.m. In his memoirs, Rockie fondly recalled these steamship arrivals. {See the Rockwell Kent Review, Fall 2014}As the steamships arrived in port they blew their loud whistle. “It was heard and answered by the hundreds of dogs who lived there,” he recalled. “Their voices escalated to such a volume that we could hear them on the island. From the beach we had a good view of the steamer as she passed probably a half-mile away. She was a beautiful sight against the background of snow-capped mountains and glacier bathed in sunlight.”

A steamship approaching the Seward dock on April 19, 1906. Photo courtesy of the Resurrection Bay Historical Society. Notice how all the town is heading to meet the ship. That was still the case when the Kents' were in Seward.

Kent is extremely impatient. The rain has stopped and the sea is relatively calm, but it’s cooling down and it looks like snow is on the way. He wants his mail on that steamship collected, and the dozens of letters he’s written during the last month sent out.  After a quick breakfast, Kent and Rockie walk to Olson's cabin to wake him up. “Old men are hard to move fast,” Kent complains. They threaten, beg and order him to get going on his way to Seward. Olson is in no rush. “He shaves standing up there in his cabin with the door wide open,” Kent writes, with “the goats playing about him. I let him have a bit of breakfast, but not too much.” It took them all working together to untie Olson’s dory from the ground, turn it over, and load it. They launch it, but to Kent’s frustration it takes half an hour to get the engine started. It starts snowing and Kent is frantic for Olson to get underway. The old man just “laughs at our eagerness to get him off for the mail.” Olson leaves for Seward mid-morning on January 2, 1919. As his dory disappears around Fox Island’s northern headland, it disappears into the falling snow. Later that day Kent and his son hike to the south end of their beach for a view, but “All the bay was shrouded in mist and snow,” and Seward is hidden.

Kent expects Olson’s trip to be a short one, but that depends upon the weather. The Jan. 1st Seward Gateway reported that "The barometer indicates that there's going to be a blow form the north in the next few days" -- but Kent have access to the newspaper. Today the blow was from the south." On Jan. 3rd it clears up, but the day he is supposed to return – January 4th – brings a heavy snow storm. On January 5th a strong wind blows and Kent knows Olson can’t make it back. He writes: “Olson is still away. It is wearing to wait this way in hope, --for we will hope even if the wind blows and the snow falls. And so it has done.” Throughout the day he and Rockie hike back and forth to the southern end of their cove with a pair of binoculars. Kent writes that “up to dark I looked continually for the little boat to be rounding the headland.” Kent wants his mail, and he isn't the only one frustrated. On Jan. 3rd, the Seward Gateway reported, "Alaska is having great mail service. In the mail from Anchorage on New Year's Day was nearly a sack of first class Seward matter which had been routed to Anchorage at Seattle. Oh, hum. It was only about three weeks late in arriving."

It’s delightful to finally have snow instead of rain. “Rockwell and I played bear and hunter today,” Kent writes, “tracking each other in the woods,” With Olson gone, Kent is in charge of the fox and goats. He has no particular love for these animals, especially the goats, and mostly Billy -- but he looks after them for his love and respect for Olson. On January 4th Billy burst into Olson’s cabin and manages to shut the door behind him. Kent hears banging coming from that direction and investigates. The goat hadn’t done any serious damage, but Olson’s cabin was a mess. “Boxes, pails, sacks of gain, cans, rope, tools,” Kent observes, “all lie piled in confusion about the floor.” Billy can be so aggressive that Kent often wanders about with a club. But – “It does no good to beat the creature,” he writes, “He will learn nothing.” Rockie helps his father care for the animals. “I don’t think Father had much respect for intelligence of animals of the nonhuman type,” Rockie recalled in his memoirs.

“I was never much interested in the foxes,” he remembered. “They were an unhappy, timid group behind the high wire fence enclosing their corral and the barn. Father disliked them too. I think he was offended because they didn’t trust him and glared at him with fear in their eyes and noses twitching. On the other hand, the goats were my friends, with one exception, the ram, some of the time.” There were a half-dozen goats including Billy, and Nanny the milk goat. “They wandered freely,” Rockie wrote, “through the woods and up the mountainside nibbling on the landscape. Often I wandered with them on all fours imagining I, too, was a goat, believing they accepted me as such. I believe it still.”

Rockie with Olson and two of his goats at Olson's cabin on Fox Island. Kent photo.

It is probably about this time that, during Olson’s January trip to Seward, Rockie and one of the rams named Gus have a confrontation. The boy is doing some chores around Olson’s cabin when Gus apparently suspects he is up to mischief. “He lowered his head and charged me,” Rockie reminisced. “I jumped into Olson’s cabin and slammed the door behind me. Gus…crashed into the door, starting a crack half its length.” Wondering how to get out, Rockie scampersto the other door, but Gus is waiting for him there. So the youngster darts back to the first door, but Gus beats him to it. Back and forth they go. “I was trapped and frightened,” he wrote. Rockie peeks out the window and Gus stares back at him. 

Rockie on Fox Island during the winter of 1918-19. Kent photo.

The boy peers through one of door keyholes, and there is Gus pawing the ground. Time passes and Rockie doesn't know how to get out to obtain help from his father. After a while he checks for Gus and the goat is gone. “I slipped past the battered door,” Rockie recalled, “and sneaked back to our cabin, all the time keeping an eye on Gus. When I told Father what had kept me at Mr. Olson’s cabin so long, he laughed and said ‘Gus has been over here all morning.’ I felt pretty foolish trying to explain that I had not been dreaming. He did not believe me until sometime later when he saw the badly splintered door on Mr. Olson’s cabin.”

Lars Matt Olson feeding his goats on Fox Island. Photo courtesy of Virginia Darling, daughter Thomas Hawkins. Brown an Hawkins photo album.

A heavy snow continues on January 6th, but it is so mild that Kent and his son wander outside “hatless, coatless, mittenless." While hiking south along the beach to watch for Olson’s return, Kent observes a head poking out of the water. “It was a seal,” he writes. “He looked all about him for the greatest while, went under, reappeared again nearby once more, and then was gone.” By now, Kent probably believes Rockie’s story about his confrontation with Gus, for he writes: “Billy burst open that shed of Olson’s again. Someday I shall murder a goat!” Tomorrow he plans to take his son snowshoeing. Rockie fondly recalled those winter excursions: “Father and I often hiked…on snowshoes, explored the mountainsides, followed animal trails, studied shallow caves or the turned-up roots of great fallen trees. Sometimes while sitting on a log or rock at the top of one of the mountains where we could look down at the eastern shore and the island’s little peninsula {We call it the Fox Island Spit, at northern entrance to the El Dorado Narrows.}, or breathe in the beauty of the rugged mountains reaching up from the mainland shore, we shared a loaf of Father’s oatmeal or cornmeal bread and a chocolate bar. On going home, if the snow was tightly packed, we slid on the snowshoes, as on sleds, at least part of the way down the mountain, dodging the trees and bushes that rushed into our paths and alarming the magpies who screamed after us.”

But where is Olson? January 7th is a perfect day on the water with no sign of the old man. Kent and his son probably hike often -- south along the beach to watch for his arrival. Kent is furious. Olson should have returned to Fox Island today. Kent wants his mail – especially letters from Kathleen. Will she agree to join him on Fox Island? Has she forgiven him for his transgressions? Does she even believe him anymore? He’s ended the affair with Hildegarde but still wants her to write him. He loves Kathleen and the children and has vowed to rekindle his marriage. He considers himself a changed man. But what if Kathleen still rejects him? He may be hedging his bets by keeping up a correspondence with Hildegarde.