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[Illustration: ROCKWELL
ALASKA MCMXVIII]
WILDERNESS
A Journal of Quiet Adventure in Alaska
by
ROCKWELL KENT
With Drawings by the author and an Introduction by Dorothy Canfield
G. P. Putnam's Sons
New York and London
The Knickerbocker Press
1920
Copyright, 1920, by Rockwell Kent
Plates Engraved under the Supervision of William G. Watt
The Knickerbocker Press, New York
_To
old L. M. Olson and
young Rockwell Kent
of Fox Island
this journal is
respectfully dedicated_
The author acknowledges the courtesy of the owners of his
drawings in permitting their reproduction in this book:
MRS. ERNEST I. WHITE
ROBERT NICHOLS
STEPHEN C. CLARK
MRS. PAYNE THOMPSON
MRS. JOSEPH FLANNERY
MRS. J. S. MORGAN, JR.
DR. ARNOLD KLEBS
HENRY S. CHURCHILL
MRS. PERCY W. DARBYSHIRE
MRS. MEREDITH HARE
PAUL MANSHIP
MRS. VALENTINE WINTERS
HENRY NEWMAN
HUNT DIEDERICH
PURCELL JONES
M. KNOEDLER AND COMPANY
ALBERT STERNER
MARIE STERNER
INTRODUCTION
Had jesting Pilate asked "What is Art?" he would have waited quite as
many centuries for an answer as he has for the answer to his question
about Truth. For art to the artist, and art to the rest of us, are two
very different things. Art to the artist is quite simply Life, his
life, of which he has an amplitude and intensity unknown to us. What
he does for us is to thrill us awake to the amplitude and intensity of
all life, our own included. And this is a miracle for which we can
never be thankful enough.
This, at least, is what Rockwell Kent's Alaska drawings and Alaska
journal do for me; they take me away from that tired absorption in
things of little import which makes up most of our human life and make
me see, not an unreal world of romantic illusion, that fool's pleasure
given by the second-rate artist, but the real wonder-world in which I
live and have always lived. They make me see suddenly that there is a
vast deal more in the world than embittering and anxious
preoccupations, that much of it is fine, much is comforting, much
awe-inspiring, much profoundly tragic, and all of it makes up a whole
so vast that no living organism need feel cramped.
No other of the qualities of the journal and drawings goes home to me
more than the unforced authenticity of the impression set down by this
strong and ardent artist. Emerson's grandeur is infinitely more
convincing to me because of his homeliness, and I feel a perverse
Yankee suspicion of those who deal in sublimities only. The man who
can extract the whole quaint savor out of that magical, prosaic,
humorous moment of human life, the first stretching yawn of the early
morning, that man can make me believe that I too see the north wind
running mightily athwart the sky. And the artist who can put into the
simplest drawing of a man and a little boy eating together at a rough
table in a rough cabin, all the dear solidity of family and home life,
with its quiet triumph against overpowering Nature, that artist can
make me bow my head before the sincerity of his impressive "Night."
The homeliness of the diary, its courageously unaffected naturalness,
how it carries one out of fussy complications to a long breath of
relief in the fewness and permanence of things that count! And the
humor of it ... sometimes deliciously unintentional like the picture
of the artist finishing a fine drawing, setting the beans to soak,
bathing in the bread pan, and going to bed to read a chapter of Blake,
sometimes intentional and shrewd like "a banana-peel on a mountain-top
tames that wilderness," or "colds, like bad temper and loss of faith,
are a malady of the city crowd"; sometimes outright and hearty like a
child's joke, as in the amusingly faithful portrait of the
pot-bellied, self-important personality of the air-tight stove!
There are only three human characters in this quiet, intense record,
all of them significant and vital. First of them is the artist
himself, who in these notes, written originally for the eyes of his
intimates only, speaks out with a free unselfconsciousness as rare in
our modern world as the virgin solitude of the island where he lived.
Here is the artist at work, creating, as Henry James said he could not
be shown; the artist, that is, a man violently alive, full-blooded and
fine, fierce and pure, arrogant and tender, with an elate, boastful,
well-founded certainty of his strength, rejoicing in his work, in his
son, in his friend, in the whole visible world, and most of all in
himself and his own vigorous possibilities for good, evil, and
creative work.
The other two human characters in this adventuring quest after great
and simple things are acquisitions to be thankful for, also; the
touchingly tender-hearted, knight-like, beautiful, funny little boy;
and lovable, dignified old Olson ... a fiction writer wonders in
despair why old Olson so vividly, brilliantly lives in these unstudied
pages, solid, breathing, warm, as miraculously different from all
other human beings as any creature of flesh and blood who draws the
mysterious breath of life beside you in the same room.
Fox Island lives too; we walk about it, treading solidly, loving
"every log and rotten stump, gnarled tree, every mound and path, the
rocks and brooks, each a being in itself," just as little Rockwell
does; and we climb with the "two younger ones up the sheer,
snow-covered ridge till across the great jagged teeth of
Fenris-the-Wolf, we see the glory of the open sea." We "look up at
Olson, swaying gigantic on the deck above us, as we bump the side in
our little boat" and we go down into the warm cabin full of the fumes
of cooking and good-fellowship, and drink with the old skipper and the
old Swede till we too see deep "under the white hard surface of where
life is hidden."
All this firm earth gives authority and penetration to the shining
beauty which pervades the book and the drawings, carries us along to
share it, not merely to look at it; to feel it, not merely to admire
it.
The notes here published were written, I believe, day by day for the
author's wife and children, and are here published almost as they were
set down, as commentary to the drawings. Well, let us be thankful that
we were let into the family circle and along with them can spend six
months in the midst of strength and beauty and tenderness and fun and
majesty, close to simple things, great because they are real. The
author may be sure that we leave them with the same backward-looking
wistfulness he feels, and with the same gratitude for having known
them.
Dorothy Canfield.
PREFACE
Most of this book was written on Fox Island in Alaska, a journal added
to from day to day. It was not meant for publication but merely that
we who were living there that year might have always an unfailing
memory of a wonderfully happy time. There's a ring of truth to all
freshly written records of experience that, whatever their
shortcomings, makes them at least inviolable. Besides the journal, a
few letters to friends have been drawn upon. All are given unchanged
but for the flux of a new paragraph or chapter here and there to form
a kind of narrative, the only possible literary accompaniment to the
drawings of that period herein published. The whole is a picture of
quiet adventure in the wilderness, above all an adventure of the
spirit.
What one would look for in a story of the wild Northwest is lacking in
these pages. To have been further from a settled town might have
brought not more but less excitement. The wonder of the wilderness was
its tranquillity. It seemed that there both men and the wild beasts
pursued their own paths freely and, as if conscious of the wide
freedom of their world, molested one another not at all. It was the
bitter philosophy of the old trapper who was our companion that of all
animals Man was the most terrible; for if the beasts fought and
killed for some good cause Man slew for none.
Deliberately I have begun this happy story far out in Resurrection
Bay;--and again dropped its peaceful thread on the forlorn threshold
of the town. We found Fox Island on Sunday, August twenty-fifth, 1918,
and left there finally on the seventeenth of the following March.
R. K.
Arlington, Vermont,
December, 1919.
CONTENTS
Page
Introduction vii
Preface xi
Chapter
I.--Discovery 1
II.--Arrival 10
III.--Chores 41
IV.--Winter 67
V.--Waiting 84
VI.--Excursion 102
VII.--Home 109
VIII.--Christmas 134
IX.--New Year 150
X.--Olson 182
XI.--Twilight 200
ILLUSTRATIONS
Facing Page
"Zarathustra Himself Led the Ugliest Man by the Hand, in Order
to Show Him His Night-World and the Great Round Moon and the
Silvery Waterfalls Nigh Unto His Cave" 2
Unknown Waters 6
Home Building 12
Fire Wood 16
The Sleeper 20
The Windlass 24
The Snow Queen 28
Fox Island, Resurrection Bay, Kenai Peninsula, Alaska 32
Rain Torrents 36
Day 42
Night 46
Wilderness 50
One of Rockwell's Drawings 54
Sunrise 56
Adventure 60
On the Height 68
The Day's Work 72
Meal Time 76
Day's End 80
The Cabin Window 90
"Go to Bed" 94
Driftwood 98
The Whittler 104
"Get Up!" 110
Man 114
Woman 118
Foreboding 124
Lone Man 128
Cain 136
Superman 140
The North Wind 146
Another of Rockwell's Drawings 152
Weltschmerz 154
Victory 158
Zarathustra and His Playmates 164
Frozen Fall 168
The Hermit 172
Ecstasy 176
Pelagic Reverie 184
Prison Bars 188
Running Water 192
Immanence 196
The Vision 202
The Imperishable 206
The Star-Lighter 210
CHAPTER I
DISCOVERY
We must have been rowing for an hour across that seeming mile-wide
stretch of water.
The air is so clear in the North that one new to it is lost in the
crowding of great heights and spaces. Distant peaks had risen over the
lower mountains of the shore astern. Steep spruce-clad slopes
confronted us. All around was the wilderness, a no-man's-land of
mountains or of cragged islands, and southward the wide, the
limitless, Pacific Ocean.
A calm, blue summer's day,--and on we rowed upon our search. Somewhere
there must stand awaiting us, as we had pictured it, a little
forgotten cabin, one that some prospector or fisherman had built; the
cabin, the grove, the sheltered beach, the spring or stream of fresh,
cold water,--we could have drawn it even to the view that it must
overlook, the sea, and mountains, and the glorious West. We came to
this new land, a boy and a man, entirely on a dreamer's search; having
had vision of a Northern Paradise, we came to find it.
With less faith it might have seemed to us a hopeless thing exploring
the unknown for what you've only dreamed was there. Doubt never
crossed our minds. To sail uncharted waters and follow virgin
shores--what a life for men! As the new coast unfolds itself the
imagination leaps into full vision of the human drama that there is
immanent. The grandeur of the ocean cliff is terrible with threat of
shipwreck. To that high ledge the wave may lift you; there, where that
storm-dwarfed spruce has found a hold for half a century, you perhaps
could cling. A hundred times a day you think of death or of escaping
it by might and courage. Then at the first softening of the coast
toward a cove or inlet you imagine all the mild beauties of a safe
harbor, the quiet water and the beach to land upon, the house-site, a
homestead of your own, cleared land, and pastures that look seaward.
Now having crossed the bay thick wooded coast confronted us, and we
worked eastward toward a wide-mouthed inlet of that shore. But all at
once there appeared as if from nowhere a little, motor-driven dory
coming toward us. We hailed and drew together to converse. It was an
old man alone. We told him frankly what we were and what we sought.
"Come with me," he cried heartily, "come and I show you the place to
live." And he pointed oceanward where, straight in the path of the sun
stood the huge, dark, mountain mass of an island. Then, seizing upon
our line, he towed us with him to the south.
The gentle breeze came up. With prow high in the air we spanked the
wavelets, and the glistening spray flew over us. On we went straight
at the dazzling sun and we laughed to think that we were being carried
we knew not where. And all the while the strange old man spoke never a
word nor turned his head, driving us on as if he feared we might
demand to be unloosed. At last his island towered above us. It was
truly sheer-sided and immense, and for all we could discover
harborless; till in a moment rounding the great headland of its
northern end the crescent arms of the harbor were about us,--and we
were there!
[Illustration: "ZARATHUSTRA HIMSELF LED THE UGLIEST MAN BY THE HAND,
IN ORDER TO SHOW HIM HIS NIGHT-WORLD AND THE GREAT ROUND MOON AND THE
SILVERY WATERFALLS NIGH UNTO HIS CAVE"]
What a scene! Twin lofty mountain masses flanked the entrance and from
the back of these the land dipped downwards like a hammock swung
between them, its lowest point behind the center of the crescent. A
clean and smooth, dark-pebbled beach went all around the bay, the tide
line marked with driftwood, gleaming, bleached bones of trees,
fantastic roots and worn and shredded trunks. Above the beach a band
of brilliant green and then the deep, black spaces of the forest. So
huge was the scale of all of this that for some time we looked in vain
for any habitation, at last incredulously seeing what we had taken to
be bowlders assume the form of cabins.
The dories grounded and we leapt ashore, and followed up the beach
onto the level ground seeing and wondering, with beating hearts, and
crying all the time to ourselves: "It isn't possible, it isn't real!"
There was a green grass lawn beneath our feet extending on one side
under an orchard of neatly pruned alders to the mountain's base, and
on the other into the forest or along the shore. In the midst of the
clearing stood the old man's cabin. He led us into it. One little
room, neat and comfortable; two windows south and west with the warm
sun streaming through them; a stove, a table by the window with dishes
piled neatly on it; some shelves of food and one of books and papers;
a bunk with gaily striped blankets; boots, guns, tools, tobacco-boxes;
a ladder to the store-room in the loft. And the old man himself: a
Swede, short, round and sturdy, head bald as though with a priestly
tonsure, high cheek bones and broad face, full lips, a sensitive small
chin,--and his little eyes sparkled with good humor.
"Look, this is all mine," he was saying; "you can live here with
me--with me and Nanny,"--for by this time not only had the milk goat
Nanny entered but a whole family of foolish-faced Angoras, father,
mother, and child, nosing among us or overturning what they could in
search of food. He took us to the fox corral a few yards from the
house. There were the blues in its far corner eying us askance. We saw
the old goat cabin built of logs and were told of a newer one, an
unused one down the shore and deeper in the woods.
"But come," he said with pride, "I show you my location notice. I have
done it all in the proper way and I will get my title from Washington
soon. I have staked fifty acres. It is all described in the notice I
have posted; and I would like to see anybody get that away from me."
By now we had reached the great spruce tree to whose trunk he had
affixed a sort of roofed tablet or shrine to house the precious
document. But, ah look! the tablet was bare! only that from a small
nail in it hung a torn shred of paper.
"Billy, Nanny!" roared the old man in irritation and mock rage; and he
shook his fist at the foolish looking culprits who regarded us this
time, wisely, from a distance. "And now come to the lake!"
We went down an avenue through the tall spruce trees. The sun flecked
our path and fired here and there a flame-colored mushroom that blazed
in the forest gloom. Right and left we saw deep vistas, and straight
ahead a broad and sunlit space, a valley between hills; there lay the
lake. It was a real lake, broad and clean, of many acres in extent,
and the whole mountain side lay mirrored in it with the purple zenith
sky at our feet. Not a breath disturbed the surface, not a ripple
broke along the pebbly beach; it was dead silent here but for maybe
the far off sound of surf, and without motion but that high aloft two
eagles soared with steady wing searching the mountain tops. Ah,
supreme moment! These are the times in life--when nothing happens--but
in quietness the soul expands.
Time pressed and we turned back. "Show us that other cabin, we must
go."
The old man took us by a short cut to the cabin he had spoken of. It
stood in a darkly shadowed clearing, a log cabin of ample size with
a small doorway that you stooped to enter. Inside was dark but for a
little opening to the west. There were the stalls for goats, coops for
some Belgian hares he had once kept, a tin whirligig for squirrels
hanging in the gable peak, and under foot a shaky floor covered with
filth.
[Illustration: UNKNOWN WATERS]
But I knew what that cabin might become. I saw it once and said, "This
is the place we'll live." And then returning to our boat we shook
hands on this great, quick finding of the thing we'd sought and, since
we could not stay then as he begged us to, promised a speedy return
with all our household goods. "Olson's my name," he said, "I need you
here. We'll make a go of it."
The south wind had risen and the white caps flew. We crossed the bay
pulling lustily for very joy. Reaching the other shore we saw, too
late, crossing the bay in search of us the small white sail of the
party that had brought us part way from the town. So we turned and
followed them until at last we met to their relief and the great
satisfaction of our tired arms.