PART 1 - FEBRUARY 3 - 11, 1919

ROCKWELL KENT WILDERNESS CENTENNIAL JOURNAL

100 YEARS LATER

by Doug Capra © 2018

Part 1 - Feb. 3 through 11, 1919

ABOVE -- This is the kind of weather Rockwell Kent experienced on Fox Island in January 1919 while Olson was in Seward picking up the mail. Temperatures below zero with fierce north winds as the sea smoke rises above Resurrection Bay. I took this sunrise photo in January or February 1999 -- twenty years ago. Capra photo.

On Feb. 3, 1919 it’s been a month and a day since Olson left Fox Island to pick up the mail in Seward. Heavy, blinding snow today. No visibility in the bay. Kent and Rockie hear the whistle of a departing steamer but can’t see it – a concealed reminder that there’s mail waiting for them in town, and that the letters they have stacked up are not on that outgoing ship. By afternoon a thunder and lightning show – not common but an occasional event along Resurrection Bay – followed by rain and huge hailstones. “This lasts a few seconds,” Kent writes, “there’s a fierce gust of wind showering ice and snow from the tree tops down upon us, again calm and silence -- and the performance is ready to begin again.” They snowshoe south along the beach. “There lay the bay calm and beautiful – and spotless,” Kent writer. No Olson. But, Kent reflects, the scale of things in Alaska is so great that what chance would they even have of seeing a small boat coming their way. Snow, rain, sun and mild temperatures. A few days ago Rockie brought home some alder twigs already in bud. When the weather’s good, they cut wood to stay ahead. When the weather’s bad they cut wood to stay well ahead.

Light snowstorms on Feb. 4^th and 5^th. We’re getting so much added light this time of year that the earth is warming up. We can still get a lot of snow, but it doesn’t stay long. Rockie loves the snow – but he’s growing so fast that he now has to wear his father’s clothes. He spends most of the day outside wearing Kent’s pants and mittens, pretending he’s a seal swimming in the snow. They build a snow house together – seven feet in diameter. Kent knows Rockie will want to sleep in it.

ABOVE -- The snow house Kent and Rockie built at Fox Island. I'm not sure whether this photo comes from the Archives of American Art collection or from a Kent family photo album.

 Henry David Thoreau’s Walden: or Life in the Woods, had significant influence on Kent as part of the whole simple-life back to the land culture of the time. In Wilderness, just like Thoreau, Kent calculates his spending: Out of $114.82 worth of food, he has $19.10 left. For the 150 days they’ve been on Fox Island they’ve consumed 64 cents of food per day, or 32 cents each, or an average of 10 cents a meal. Part of this exercise is his experiment in simplicity – but as we’ll see later in his letters -- he makes sure both Kathleen and his mother know how frugal he is and how cheaply he can live in Alaska, even with the high prices.. He still wants Kathleen to join him. It will save them money if she comes, he claims. She can rent the New York apartment. If she doesn’t come, he knows he won’t be able to endure the loneliness. If she does come, he will accept Dr.Theodore B. Wagner’s offer of $2000 as patronage to keep in him in Alaska, probably through the summer. But he won’t accept it unless Kathleen joins him.

Clipping from the November 14, 1936 Brooklyn Daily Eagle.

Kent outlines the plan for his wife's trip to Alaska: Kathleen will take one of the girls with her because the child can travel free. Another girl can go to the Berkshires to stay with Kathleen’s parents. The third can stay with Kent’s mother. Even through early March, as we’ll see, Kent continues to urge Kathleen to join him in Alaska. Kent won’t accept that he’s leaving Alaska mostly because he can’t stand the loneliness and isolation. In his letters he gradually constructs the narrative that he can’t trust Kathleen to be faithful. She’s so despondent, so lonely for a man that if he doesn’t return she may actually succumb to temptation. He’s ambivalent about his friend George Chappell’s help with Kathleen as we’ll see in future letters.

On Feb. 6^th the sun finally comes out. “What a joyous sight after months of shadow!” Kent writes. On Feb. 7^th that with the warmer weather he and Rockie rise early and take naked snow baths. “Ha!” Kent writer. ‘That’s a real morning bath…We step out doors and plunge full length into the deep snow, scour our bodies with it, and rush back into the sheltering house and the red-hot stove. In truth, Kent admits, it’s Rockie’s idea and he is too ashamed not to follow. In play now Rockie has morphed from a seal to a walrus swimming in the snow, even though there are no walruses in this part of Alaska. “Cooked the filthy fox mess yesterday,” Kent writes, “washed clothes to-day, sawed wood…” He suffers through his miserable animal chores because he knows how much Olson loves the creatures, especially the goats. Kent owes much to the old Swede and has great respect for him. Olson is symbolic to Kent of man’s freedom to live life as he wishes, of unbounded autonomy and absolute independence from a corrupt yet powerful cultures that attempt to crush man’s spirit at every turn.

On Saturday Feb. 8^th Kent sets up his “Mad Hermit” drawings and admires them. “They look mighty fine to me,” he writes. “Myself with whiskers and hair!” In introducing the series, Kent subtly reveals that his adventure of the spirit on Fox Island went both ways. “It was an experience so memorably happy for us both,” he writes – but adds “that I need the reminder…that there were hours when the elder of the two became so poignantly aware of his adult solitude as to indulge himself in picturing a hermit’s life…” He doesn’t go into detail, but I’ve shown in the letters, Kent does experience a kind of “madness” and exile n his periods of isolation. On Feb. 17th he writers to Kathleen: "I’m all alone here with you – no not you but that part of you that you send me. One unkindly, unloving letter is forever a source of pain to me for it is always here with me. If you have quarreled with me in it I cannot escape {the}quarrel. Day after day it returns to me. And often – as last time – the last letter is an unfortunate one and against all reason perhaps I see that as your final word. And then I despair. I repeat that you cannot well realize the utter hopelessness of my situation here under the spell of unhappiness. There is no relief and I approach insanity."

ABOVE -- Two distinct visions of "solitude" from Kent's "Mad Hermit" series -- Ecstacy vs. Prison Bars.

On Feb. 8^th – with snowshoes -- he and Rockie hike up the mountain along the eastern ridge of Fox Island. “The snow lay in the woods there heavy and deep,” he writes. “No breath of wind had touched it. Alder bent down under the snow’s weight formed odd shapes and small chambers. “Coming down it was great sport,” Kent writes. We could slide down even in our sticky snowshoes.” Back at the cabin Rockie stripped off is soaked clothing and “spent the afternoon naked, playing wild animal about the cabin.” No mention of Olson these days. No use in fretting, because it’s beyond their control.

“Yesterday morning I bathed in a snowstorm,” Kent writes on Feb. 10^th, but “this morning it was too terribly, howlingly blusterous to run out into it.” The blizzard diminishes and it’s mild and calm. Snow banked up along the cabin keep it warm and cozy. “Last night fine snow filtered in upon our faces as we slept but not enough to be uncomfortable,” Kent writes. Under his father’s tutorage, Rockie works diligently on his multiplication tables. “He’s a real student,” Kent writes, “and is always seriously occupied with something in his hours indoors.”

 Feb. 11th evening, Kent and Rocky notice a black spot that seemed to be moving toward them. Will it enter their cove? “Nearer they come and nearer,” Kent wrote, “men’s voices, the little cabin light, and the vessel gliding toward us.” The vessel drops anchor.

         “Olson,” Kent shouts. “Is that you?”

BELOW -- I's not easy getting out to Fox Island in the winter, even today. The Kenai Fjords Tours facility is shut down and their dock has been removed. You need to arrive at a high on a small boat -- anchor off shore and take a skiff to shore, or edge your bow up against the beach and jump off. If been out there a few times in winter courtesy of Kenai Fjords Tours, when they head there to check on the facility. Here's a photo I took during the winter of 2005. This scene Kent would have viewed looking out his small west facing window -- or, if he exited his north-facing door, turned left and walked toward the shore. Capra photo.