MARCH 6-10, 1919 PLUS "PETS AND PARADISE"

ROCKWELL KENT WILDERNESS CENTENNIAL JOURNAL

100 YEARS LATER

by Doug Capra © 2018-19

March 6-10, 1919 plus

“Pets and Paradise”

ABOVE – A photo taken in early March 2019 by Jim Pfeiffenberger titled “Fjord Morning.” Kent admired and painted the alpine glow on the mountains across the bay to the west as the sun rose above the mountains behind his Fox Island cabin.

At sunrise on Thursday, March 6^th, Kent and Rockie bathe naked in the bay during a low tide. It was so low that Kent ran “dry shod” all around the north headland of the bay – a trip Olson thought couldn’t be done. Returning, they take Olson’s boat, Rockie rowing, to the point Kent visited. He brings with him his entire painting outfit. Rockie thrusts the dory's bow onto the beach. “Rockwell in jumping ashore timed it badly, slipped, and fell full length into the surf on the ground swell, the dory almost riding over him. I roared with laughter – to his great fury.,” Kent writes. (That experience is not uncommon for many. A few times it’s happened to me as I stepped out of a skiff or inflatable onto the beach. With one foot in the water and one in the skiff, you’re hit from behind by a swell that shoves you into the surf. It’s both soaking and embarrassing.) Rockie leaves and rows around the cove for two hours while his father paints. They return to the cabin by noon and have lunch. In the afternoon Rockie rows his father around the south end of the cove, drops him off -- “all but the water sports,” Kent writes -- and rows around again while Kent painted. “Painting under pressure is now difficult for Kent, but the scenery is inspiring. On March 6^th he writes in his Wilderness journal, “At sundown it cleared giving us the most splendid and beautiful sunset, the sun sinking behind the purple, snowy mountains and throwing its rays upward into a seething red-hot mass of clouds.” He has spent several hours that day painting outside.

ABOVE -- Frozen Falls, Alaska 1919. Kent moves pieces of scenery around for composition. Bear Glacier is in the distance (looking southwest), but the waterfall could be one from either the southern headland, Sunny, or Humpy Cove. The mountains alongside Bear Glacier are not realistic to that particular view.

Friday, March 7^th begins overcast with a little snow, but Kent notes that “it ended in a glory.” By late morning when it cleared, Olson takes them in his dory to explore the El Dorado Narrows on the west side of the island. They probably head out of their cove around the northern headland, then east to get to the narrows. As you head south up the El Dorado Narrows past the Fox Island Spit, you can begin to get some sizable swells in from the open North Pacific – even on a clear, sunny day. Kent and Rockie skirted the reefs, “riding through perilous straits right up to where the eddying water seethed at some jagged chasm’s mouth. That’s fine adventuring!” Kent recorded, “flirting with danger, safe enough but close – so close to death.” 

ABOVE -- This is what Kent and Rockie saw when then climbed the saddle behind the lake. We're looking north east. You can see the Fox Island spit and Hat Island. If you leave Kent's cove and head south, then turn east around the headland, you'l sail along the north side of the spit. As you enter the narrow gap heading south, you're in the El Dorado Narrows.

Coming around the southern headland of Fox Island with Hive Island to their left, they take their dory far out into the bay, let it drift, and lay down “basking in the warmth of a summer sun, rocked gently on a blue summer sea.” As late afternoon approaches and the weather gets warmer, they convince Olson to land on Sunny Cove beach. In the woods, Olson shows them the “moldering ruins of an old feed house of the foxes, gruesome with the staring bones of devoured carcasses.”

Olson arrived in Seward in 1915 and eventually partnered with Thomas Hawkins of Brown and Hawkins Store to raise fox and goats on the islands. Others had gone before. The Russians may have experimented with fox farming on the island in the 1790’s when they built a shipyard where the town of Seward sits today. One of their early charts of Resurrection Bay names the islands, and the name for Fox Island contains the root of the word for “fox.” But the ruins the Kents found probably date back to the 1890’s when Alfred Lowell, a member of the family to settle the area about 1884, raised foxed there. He placed feeding stations all around the island. The fox learned to go to those to eat which made it easier for the farmer to gather them for harvesting when the time came.

ABOVE -- Sunglare, Alaska 1919. The view is from his cabin site on Fox Island. Kent, Rockie and Olson are hauling a dory up the beach. 

Olson waits ashore while Kent and Rockie scramble up the southeast headland, digging their feet into the snow and pulling themselves up by exposed alder branches or whatever else they can grab. “There at the top two or three hundred feet above the bay,” Kent writes “we overlooked the farthest seaward mountains of Cape Resurrection, then Barwell Island and the open sea.” These last weeks and days in Alaska with extra light and improving weather, now give Kent a chance to really see the larger context of his little cabin. He has mixed feelings. He is enthralled at the beauty. He misses his wife and family and is anxious to get home. He has deep fear that if he doesn’t Kathleen will slip into temptation and find another man. Kent still desperately wants her to join him in Alaska. His friends in Seward have agreed to house her and the children while he does more exploring. He’s disappointed, angry and disgusted that he has to leave just at the time the days are getting longer, the weather is improving and the people of Seward are showing interest in his work. Now, as he stands with his son at the top of Fox Island’s southern-most peak, Kent finally sees what he will miss. “Ah, to see again that far horizon!” he writes. “Wander where you will over all the world, from every valley seeing forever new hills calling you to climb them from every mountain top farther peaks enticing you. Always the distant land looks fairest, till you are made at last a restless wanderer never reaching home – never – until you stand one day on the last peak on the boarder of the interminable sea, stopped by the finality of that.” Before and below them is a sheer cliff. They gaze in wonder at the green ocean and white breakers against the rocks. “The jagged mountains across shone white against the black clouds, -- what peaks! huge and sharp like the teeth of the Fenris-Wolf.

On Feb. 13^th, Kent had written as honest and open a letter as I’ve read of his. Kathleen had written him of her frustration at not achieving her dreams. She is  almost 30-years-old; loving her children but feeling tied down; exploring New York’s musical and dramatic culture and wondering what her life might have been had she pursued a musical career instead of marriage. Kent responds to her grief: “I would stay longer, would stay all summer with Dr. Wagner’s help but I can’t leave you alone any longer and as things are can’t endure the loneliness myself. If you would come I’d stay – gladly. I’ll write to you later about that – but I realize that probably even if you could you would not. Mother dear, your tragedy is the tragedy of all deep souls, of all who see life not as merely the little narrow path they tread but a limitless plain. You have raised your eyes, you have seen how pitiful small is the little track you follow and that is heartbreaking. But that it must be so is the sternest condition of life. We begin at one spot a journey to beyond the horizon. All that country of life is wonderful and fair and yet in only one little spot can we tread at a time and as we go on we who look back see that what we have lost out, shadows the little we have experienced.”

It's not only that he can’t trust Kathleen to be faithful. Kent can’t stand the loneliness, and it shames him. Beneath these words above he adds a sketch and embeds within it: “Here we are born – and somewhere beyond here we die – and all the rest is lost.”

After the sketch he writes: “I know that you have suffered much – but I know too that for that you shall know some day a deeper happiness. It’s hard to realize what we have. How can you know what your life would have been without marriage and children and without these children.  And have these children without me. If I’ve made you suffer at least you love what is of me in them. And could you have had that and been otherwise yourself? Now, sweetheart, isn’t my love more than all the world to you. Oh, you have said so Kathleen. And isn’t that love for you because you have been the woman you are. I cling to you not because of our children, our marriage, or the past, but for you. If you and Hildegarde were reversed, she my wife and you a dancer my decision never would be unchanged. Mother darling don’t be bitter. Value me, count me as worth your sacrifice for me and count the self that you have been and will be for me as an achievement in itself that will make your life richer.”

Kent is 36-years-old. He begins to feel his youth passing. His ego and selfishness haven’t disappeared, but he has tempered them. We almost alwasys see his insecurities in the letters. He’s attempting to be honest with Kathleen, explain who he is – what he sees as his nature. He’s willing to change, he believes, but he warns his wife that his heart and soul will be destroyed if he tries to be who he isn’t. Again -- I need to remind the reader to beware of what we already know about where Kent's life will be in a few years: By the end of 1920, Kent's fame and success will arrive. He is unaware of this on Feb. 13, 1919 as he writes to Kathleen:“Sweetheart, I have my hours of bitterness. Do you not know that my nature is complex. That with all my (harshness) I too could love society and forever gay and jolly times, and sport, my horse, tennis, the gay seashore, dancing, the attentions of women. I am not an outcast, not one who cannot mingle with people and be liked and admired and loved.  I’m still young and strong. I have brains and charm and confidence and sex attraction. I mourn the passing of these – but I have had to choose. I mourn the flight of years, the hair gone from my head and the gray hairs on my temples. Would you have me forsake the choice I have made and be your companion in a life of play? By God, I will. Kathleen, if you choose that I go another way with you, that I abandon my ideals, earn a fat living for myself by prostitution, I will do that. But you must see then the light of my whole nature go out in failure. Be the best you can be or you become nothing. This is still that choice for you. There are the two others, leave me and go the way yourself. You’ll find a man to love you. You’ll see him morning, noon and night. You’ll see to the bottom of his soul. Ah, then, Mother, if you do not face the bitterness of life, then you have never loved me and I have never known you. If there’s any man whose love you’d rather have than mine and you have weighed well your choice and know the height and depth of his soul, then you are wrong to stay with me. Go – and I’ll survive it – or not. The third is to take me as worth more and for all life the sacrifices that you make for me – as being, if not all happiness for you, at least the greatest that in your one lifetime you can know. Mother darling – I think you have chosen. Don’t embitter your life with regrets. Trust me, enter my path because after all it is the best. And be true to it, believe in it. Throw your heart into it as you have never done. Oh don’t paralyze me with your unhappiness. I cannot, cannot endure it.”

  Now, on March 9^th while exploring the peaks at Fox Island’s southern headland, Kent probably has many thoughts: awe and wonder; happiness and  joy; disappointment, resentment and shame. It is to be a quick trip up the mountain, for Olson waits below on the beach in his dory. “The descent was real sport,” Kent writes. “We just sat down and slid clear to the bottom, going at toboggan pace. Poor Olson, who watched us from below, was aghast.” From the Sunny Cove beach Kent has a scenic view of Bear Glacier. “We long to go across to Bear Glacier that…a broad, inclined plane, spotless white, with the tallest mountains rising steeply from its boarders. But it was too late and we returned home.” Kent will never get up close to Bear Glacier. 

ABOVE -- Bear Glacier, Alaska 1919. This looks like the view Kent had from Sunny Cove, although he couldn't see that much glacier nor are the white - peaked mountains realistic to the actual scene.

Kent will soon be going home and he is anxious to join Kathleen and the children. The inspiring beauty of Alaska’s sublime wildness is what Kent needs – at least from a distance – to produce the art he envisions in his mind. But this is not the place to live, at least forever – even though Rockie in his innocent youth feels differently. Kent desires a tame and romantic rural retreat – far enough from the masses, yet safe from the power of the true wild. He has written a detailed letter to Kathleen describing his perfect vision of their new home (I’ll publish parts of that letter soon). As far as the success of this Alaska venture – what will be will be. If little or nothing comes of it – as happened with the Newfoundland journey – at least he’ll be away from the city with Kathleen and the children. 

It snows hard the next day – Monday, March 8^th – a good time to work inside the cabin, packing, painting and drawing. They day before Kent and Rockie get a taste of Resurrection Bay in fine weather. They hope for the same on Tuesday, March 9^th, but it’s too cold and with a fierce north wind. They are cheated out of a day on the bay, so they decide to pack some supplies and climb to the saddleback behind their lake. “It was glorious in the woods,” Kent writes. “New fallen snow lay upon the tree branches; the sun touched only the tallest tops, the wind wrestled them now and then and made it snow again below.” Once atop they build a fire beneath a tree’s arched roots and cooked a can of beans. Kent paints and Rockie gathers wood to keep the fire going. To the menu of beans they add bread and peanut butter with some Christmas-gift chocolate. Later that day Kent paints again along the lake. The next day, March 10^th – they’re busy packing. Olson had planned to go to Seward but the north wind prevented his departure. “It is surely true that we are going!” Kent writes. Although spring is in the air, it feels like fall to Kent and his son. “We scent it and feel it,” Kent observes. “I believe that it’s the end of a real summer in our lives that we that we taste the sadness of.”

About this time, Kent began to wonder how he can repay Olson for all his help and inspiration. How can he bring to Seward’s attention the wonders of life on Fox Island as well as the wisdom and kindness of the old Swede? He decides to write an article for the Seward Gateway that is published on March 21^st. He titles it “Pets and Paradise.”  I located two pages of the manuscript in his letters at the Archives of American Art (the third and final page is missing). Below you’ll find the first page of the hand-written article followed by a copy of the printed version in the Seward Journal