The Quiet World: Saving Alaska's Wilderness Kingdom, 1879-1960

by Douglas Brinkley

  Kent found the kaleidoscopic radiance of wild Alaska, and even the inconveniences associated with frontier conditions, exhilarating. The color scheme of the Kenai Peninsula landscape was dramatically different from that of Maine or the Adirondacks. In 1918 the most famous painter who had tried to capture Alaskan landscapes on canvas was Albert Bierstadt; his Wreck of the Ancon, Loring Bay, done in 1889, became a symbol of man’s inability to defeat nature. It took Kent all of a minute to realize that Bierstadt’s so-called realist paintings falsified the true outdoor nuances of color, darkness, and shadows in the far north. Surrounded by the primordial landscape, Kent used a broad range of electric blues and bleached whites. The overcast aura of Fox Island also called for the gunmetal grays on his palette. Each place Kent went in Alaska that impressed him inspired its own refined painting. Yet the lifestyles of the hardened, blistering Seward fishermen, trappers, and prospectors, all physically battered by the inhospitable elements, caused Kent to also paint crudely, like a folk artist. “Alaska is a fairyland in the magic beauty of its mountains and water,” Kent wrote. “The Virgin freshness of this wilderness and its utter isolation are a constant source of inspiration. Remote and free from contact with man, our life is simplicity itself.”5

  Finding Kent’s proper place in American art history has proved to be difficult. His paintings of Bear Glacier (today part of Kenai Fjords National Park), sketched from the south end of his beach on Fox Island, stand out as major works of American art. Only one other American painter has ever come close to capturing Alaska’s landscape with the illuminating and haunting halo effect that Kent created. In 1904 Sydney Mortimer Laurence arrived in Alaska from Brooklyn hoping to find gold. Unable to do that, Laurence, an amateur oil painter, decided to earn money by capturing the iridescent glow of Mount McKinley on canvas. Both Muir and Sheldon had done a pretty good job of starting the tourist business in the territory. Diligently, Laurence painted the tallest summit from at least a dozen different angles. His first large painting—Top of the Continent—was exhibited by the Smithsonian Institution’s National Collection of Fine Arts. Some art critics wrote condescendingly that Laurence the marketeer owned Mount McKinley; it was his only subject. They had a point. Laurence opened a photography shop in Anchorage, eager to sell his Visions of Denali to tourists. “I was attracted by the same thing that attracted all the other suckers: gold,” Laurence said. “I didn’t find any appreciable quantity of the yellow metal and then, like a lot of other fellows, I was broke and couldn’t get away. So I resumed my painting. I found enough material to keep me busy the rest of my life, and I have stayed in Alaska ever since.”6

  If Alaskan landscape painting were an Olympic event, then Kent would surely have won the gold medal (with Laurence getting the silver). Whereas Laurence stayed stationary around the McKinley station at Anchorage, Kent was intrepid. Sometimes, in good weather, or even with mixed seas, Kent hopped into his skiff and traveled twelve miles across Resurrection Bay to get a close look at Bear Glacier (if the motor failed, he rowed). Kent’s paintings of that glacier have dazzling blue shades—azure, cobalt, and sapphire—as intense as those van Gogh painted in Arles; you can almost feel the solid ice sprawling over hundreds of miles under the ultramarine sky. Enduring the “seething” squall of the bay, the sea spray “whipped into vapor,” Kent would get within fifty yards of places like Frozen Falls, Caines Head, or Hive Island. Sometimes he painted the same outdoors scene in different seasons: for example, Alaska Winter and later Indian Summer, Alaska. This approach allowed him to show his uncanny ability to use different biting yellows and ice blues with sunshiny radiance.

  What was the secret of Kent’s success as a painter in Alaska? Why was he more proficient than Laurence at painting the rich blue colors? Talent is hard to measure. But going the extra mile uphill for your art or craft isn’t. Kent actually got close to the inside of a glacier crevasse. While lake ice and river ice are clear or white, the glacier crevasse he inspected blazed a blue unknown in Maine or Newfoundland. When light strikes an object, some of the colors of the spectrum are absorbed and others are reflected; it all depends on the matter that makes up the object. Glacier ice, when fairly thick, absorbs red and yellow, reflecting only pure blue light for humans to see. Kent became a connoisseur of that blue tint, which looks electric or like a glowing gas flame.

  The blue glacier wonderland where the Kents stayed was essentially today’s gateway to Kenai Fjords National Park (established on December 2, 1980, during the last days of Jimmy Carter’s presidency). As kayakers know, ice floats deceptively calm near outflowing glaciers and coastal fjords. Here, as nowhere else in Alaska, mountains, ice sheets, rockfall, and ocean are intertwined with dancing rivers. This is the edge of the North Pacific Ocean, with stair-step glaciers clustered together. Anywhere from 400 to 800 miles of snow accumulates annually in the mountain knuckles here. Kent knew this fjord country was outstandingly wild—nature didn’t get any more beautiful. Determined to capture the glory of the landscape, and riveted by the icy outburst of Bear Glacier, Kent set up easels. He captured Bear Glacier, in all its austere elegance, on canvas better than any other photographer or painter. All the fjords and glaciers, surrounded by open water and shoreside mud pools, some hidden in the wave-carved grottoes, became Kent’s secret sanctuary, his escape.7

  II

  Kent was born in Tarrytown, New York, in 1882. When he was only five years old, his well-to-do father died, leaving him a silver flute as a token remembrance. This little musical instrument became a good-luck charm for Kent. (He kept it with him when he went to the far reaches of Arctic Alaska, Newfoundland, Tierra del Fuego, and Greenland.) Early on, Kent became smitten with the solitude of northern seas. On a trip to Oregon, he was particularly taken with the works of the German painter Caspar David Friedrich. A naturally talented graphic artist, Kent took classes in New York with both the impressionist William Merritt Chase and the innovative Robert Henri of the Ashcan school. Kent, it seemed, wanted to paint with the religiosity and spirituality of William Blake, while exploring the world’s places in all their geologic forms.8

  After a well-received show at Knoedler Galleries, primarily of his Atlantic coast paintings, Kent was considered a rising star. George Bellows, the famous painter of Both Members of This Club, a dramatic boxing scene, saw him as a genuine rival, the most intriguing of the up-and-coming modernists. Kent’s colors glowed on the canvas. Because of his representational symbols—heavily influenced by Nietzsche—his works resembled those of the German painter Franz Marc. Early in Kent’s career the wild Adirondacks served as an inspiration for his intense nature studies.9 Eventually Kent moved to Boothbay Harbor, Maine, hoping to soothe his troubled mind, painting the enchanting cliffs and fish houses of Monhegan Island. Even though Kent painted like a man possessed, he managed to read the collected works of Emerson, Thoreau, and Wordsworth for inspiration. While working as a lobsterman, struggling to find a commercial audience for his art, he developed into a Spartan survivalist, a singular craftsman comfortable living in genteel poverty. All Kent needed to be happy was a floor to sleep on, a bedtime vodka, and mediocre food. “If minds can become magnetized, mine was: its compass pointed north,” he wrote. “I set out for the golden North, for Newfoundland, to prospect for a homeland.”10 For a while he lived in Newfoundland, finding comfort walking over the steep hillsides and rock outcroppings that dropped dramatically into the Atlantic Ocean.11

  Kent was also a pugilist, and his arms were muscular from boxing. With dark hazel eyes, his head prematurely balding, his hands fidgeting with whatever object was nearest, he was an intimidating adversary, able to quote Nietzsche verbatim and to eat halibut raw. Practical jokes were an important part of his everyday life, which, to Kent, was a dutiful exercise in carpe diem. Local mariners saw him as a peculiar piece of work, a human clock that ran backward. “Do you want my life, in a nutshell?” Kent once wrote. “It’s this: that I have only one life and I’m going to live it as nearly as possible as I want t
o live it.”12 Sleeping, however, didn’t come easily to the hyperactive Kent, who wrote in It’s Me, O Lord, “Insomnia isn’t nice.”13 Physical exertion outdoors, what Theodore Roosevelt called the strenuous life, appealed mightily to Kent, who felt that it directed his inner compass and uplifted him. His favorite verse of Blake’s was “Great things are done when Men and Mountains meet./This is not done by jostling in the Street.” Kent lived by this creed.14 Going to Alaska wasn’t a random impulse; it was an imperative—the three words stood for everything free, unspoiled, and democratic.

  Life for Kent was always hand-to-mouth, and an ordeal. By the time he was thirty-six years old, he was stone broke, rudderless, and furious at Woodrow Wilson for not keeping America neutral during the European war. Making matters worse, Kent was often estranged from his wife, and he had a string of affairs that proved corrosive to his family. His temper was volatile, his willpower unnerving, his attire indecorous. Deeply self-centered—his friends floated into and out of his life—the fatalist Kent knew that in the end only he would be around for the curtain call. Disappearing to south-central Alaska, living a Thoreauvian life in a little shack on Fox Island, and using the inhospitable remoteness of Resurrection Bay to bond with Rocky made perfect sense to Kent. A bundle of energy, always an escapist, Kent had very little to lose by going to Fox Island. “I crave snow-topped mountains, dreary wastes, and the cruel Northern Sea with its hard horizons at the edge of the world where infinite space begins,” he said of Alaska. “Here skies are clearer and deeper and, for the greater wonders they reveal, a thousand times more eloquent of the eternal mystery than those of softer lands. I love this Northern Nature, and what I love I must possess.”15

  III

  To get to Alaska, the Kents traveled across America by passenger train. From their windows they saw the rolling prairies of the Great Plains that Washington Irving had once written about so memorably. The Kents now understood for the first time Walt Whitman’s rapture in Leaves of Grass, where he had written of “Pioneers! O Pioneers!” and “peaks gigantic” and “high plateaus.” Sometimes the Kents stayed at old, rickety railroad depot inns, lured to their meals by wooden boards out in front advertising specials: fish stew, meat loaf, and beef tenderloin. In Alaska it would be halibut steak, salmon jerky, and a shot of vodka. Father and son felt like tenderfeet entering the storied Colorado Rockies in search of the northern paradise of Alaska and rumbling across Montana. Westerners, the Kents learned, had a language all their own: draws were “dells” and buffalo were “grazing cattle.” Domesticity had created no flower beds in this stark, rugged country. The Kents studied horse towns, outposts, and raw forestlands from their wooden passenger seats until their train finally arrived in Seattle. The temperature was well above fifty degrees Fahrenheit all around Puget Sound. Rusted Russian ships at dockside had long unpronounceable words painted on their sides in Cyrillic script.

  Following a day’s rest in Seattle, the Kents traveled up the Inside Passage to Alaska on the SS Admiral Schley. Their ship felt its way past a stunning succession of fjords, bays, straits, sounds, and promontories. Boisterous in praise of this picturesqueness, the Kents passed from Yakutat Bay (an eighteen-mile area, rich in fish, that extended southwest between Disenchantment Bay and the Gulf of Alaska) to Prince William Sound. For five days the Kents lived at a Swift and Company salmon cannery surrounded by glacier-carved mountains looming over the open ocean. Somehow Kent had procured a “letter of introduction” to stay there. They were in earthquake country (a quake of 8.0 on the Richter scale had happened as recently as 1899). Local folklore held that the explorer Vitus Bering of Russia had visited the bay on his expedition of 1741.

  The Kents shared an upper bunk and ate in the mess hall along with the weather-beaten crab trappers. “What meals they were!” Kent said in his autobiography, It’s Me, O Lord. “And how those hungry fellows wolfed them! A free for all, it was, and no holds barred. Never had either of us tasted better food or seen so much. And it disgusted us to watch our opposite at table—say at breakfast—flood his huge soup-plate full of oatmeal with undiluted evaporated milk, heap on six tablespoons of sugar; follow this with two vast stacks of six-inch flapjacks, with butter and corn syrup to match; then eat four eggs with bacon and drink a quart of coffee; and all the while goddamn the company for starving him.”16

  Kent had originally hoped to begin his spiritual rebirth on the Kenai Peninsula along Kachemak Bay. But a mail clerk, working on the steamer Dora, told Kent about remote islands clustered offshore from the Resurrection Bay port town of Seward. Off they went. Seward was the southern terminus for the Alaska Railroad, which had been built by the U.S. government and always seemed to be behind schedule. It was a larger city in 1918 than Fairbanks, Juneau, Sitka, or Kodiak. All around were villages, fish shacks, open mines, and quarries, but the glorious wilderness remained undiminished. Alaska’s Second Organic Act of 1912—which had officially established Alaska as a territory with an elected legislature—meant that Alaskans no longer had to endure colonial status, although it wouldn’t get true congressional representation until 1959, with statehood.

  The Kents loaded up on provisions such as beans, rice, flour, barley, and other foodstuffs. A deal was made with Thomas Hawkins, a local landowner, to let them live on Fox Island in a lean-to cabin or goat shed that needed refurbishment. For all his machismo, Kent’s diaries are quite honest about his lack of hardiness and lack of stamina. Like any father, he feared for his young son’s welfare. Rain gear was (and still is) mandatory in this part of Alaska. Because Kent had once built a few houses on Monhegan Island, including a small one for himself and another for his mother, he felt confident that he could remodel the hovel on Fox Island in exchange for living there rent-free.

  At last, on September 24, 1918, the Kents packed a tiny dory with their essentials, including a stove and box of wood panels, and prepared to go by motorboat from Seward to Fox Island. Because they were weighed down, the three-mile voyage out to the island wasn’t for the weak-hearted. A dangerous problem, potentially a lethal one, manifested itself. The engine of the Kents’ 3.5-horsepower Evinrude, after 100 yanks, wouldn’t turn over. The dory, weighed down with about 1,000 pounds of cargo (including the Kents’ own body weight), almost capsized. Remaining undaunted, refusing to consider retreat, Kent started rowing toward his destination, using a pail to bail water out. Without modern navigational devices or survival suits, it was an act of foolhardy recklessness.

  Only by the grace of God did they somehow manage to traverse or perhaps navigate Resurrection Bay safely. An intense pressure system always hovered over the Gulf of Alaska in the North Pacific, like a perpetual category 1 hurricane, regularly blanketing the vast area with heavy winds, thick fog, and whipping rain; for a sailor the region was among the most challenging on Earth to navigate. The everlasting, unpredictable waves seemed to carry a Norse wallop (as the salt wind seemed to carry an Oriental scent) and had, over the decades, gulped down and sunk British dreadnoughts and Russian vessels. “Over the water the wind blew in furious squalls,” Kent wrote, “raising a surge of white caps and a dangerous chop.”17 The Kents finally moored along the northwest harbor of Fox Island, glad to be alive and able to chuckle at their own foolishness.

  After settling into the cabin that evening, father and son hugged each other. They had a new lease on life. The fierce easterly winds that had been howling down from above at fifty to sixty knots dissipated into small sighing gusts. The next day the Kents roamed the woods and thickets of Fox Island and watched river otters friskily playing along the El Dorado Narrows. Although Kent had little money—he wore the same wrinkled work shirt almost daily, and couldn’t afford even the blue plate special at the Seward Grill or the Sexton Hotel—he was an able carpenter, caulker, and workbench tinkerer. Like any survivalist, he knew how to live off the bounty of the sea and land. He practiced ahimsa—the Hindu and Buddhist belief that all living creatures deserve respect.18 On Fox Island, he converted Hawkins’s goat shed int
o a livable rustic cabin. He took a farmer’s approach to the clock. There were Angora goats to milk and chicken eggs to collect. Kent’s groundskeeper, who came with the house, was a seventy-one-year-old Swede, Lars Matt Olson, a retired trapper and sea dog with a pocked face and rope-burned arms indicating endurance. Olson became an adopted uncle to the Kents. It was Olson who told them stories about earless seals, tidewater glaciers, sledding black bears, and how to scratch a kid goat. His minimalist philosophy of life boiled down to: “Very little matters, and little matters a lot.”

  For extra money Kent painted a portrait of Hawkins’s absent daughter, Virginia. (The itinerant John James Audubon had earned his keep likewise in Louisiana during the 1820s.) Hawkins also donated lumber and hardware to the remodeling of the goat shed. Occasionally Kent would row into town for drinks. Wandering around the mud streets of Seward, reading Goethe and Schopenhauer aloud, playing his battered flute for tips, rowing out to Bear Glacier at a speed of one knot, Kent was like an offbeat Adirondacks hermit in exile. Townspeople had high hopes that Kent, a well-connected New York artist, would promote the virtues of Seward over Anchorage: the two towns were vying to be the tourist hub of Alaska. The painter Henry Culmer had recently done a fine job of painting the interior region for the Alaska Steamship Company, and people in Seward thought that Kent might follow Culmer’s example. Kent, however, let the city fathers down in this regard. The people of Seward were too focused on self-promotion, too phlegmatic, and too eager for tourism to interest him or to stoke his artistic imagination.