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

by Douglas Brinkley

  During the summer of 1956, six Barefooters—known as the Fountain of the World contingent—left Canoga Park, California, for Homer, Alaska. They had been practicing the “beat” life years before the term was used. Word spread throughout the Kenai Peninsula that beatniks (a term coined in late 1957) were arriving en masse, hitchhiking along Highway 1 but looking too bizarre to get rides. (Alaskan lumbermen prided themselves on their own libertarian values. But what could they make of long-haired people in biblical garb walking barefoot in the snow without guns?) Krishna Venta had a vision of colonizing the Kachemak Bay area as Brigham Young had once settled Mormons around the Great Salt Lake of Utah. The Barefooters would protect the natural world of Kachemak Bay not as a possession but as a responsibility. All religions would be embraced; they weren’t dogmatic about reincarnation as the way, although the Indian religious traditions of Hinduism, Jainism, and Sikhism, and particularly the transmigration of the soul, seemed to be their prevailing ethos. Feet, however, were their fetish. They held ceremonies in which they marveled at the evolution of the foot’s anatomy: its thirty-three joints, twenty-six bones, and twenty muscles.

  Acquiring three homesteads in the Fox River valley, about a half-hour drive from Homer, the Barefooters established a commune in 1956—when Ginsberg was in Point Barrow on the Pendleton. They named their land Venta. Although the Barefooters didn’t make elegant handcrafted chairs, there was something of the Shakers in them. What Krishna was trying to teach was avoidance of avidya (one’s true self), since the self led to ignorance and militarism. The Barefooters were more freakish than Ginsberg was in the late 1960s, when he wanted to levitate the Pentagon.

  Krishna Venta (originally Francis Herman Pencovic, born in San Francisco on March 29, 1911) was a very popular leader. By the mid-1950s he had tens of thousands of followers. Venta had messianic blue eyes and a tangled beard like Charles Manson’s, and his favorite subject was himself. He stated matter-of-factly in April 1948: “I may as well say it: I am Christ. I am the new Messiah.” Angry that newspapers kept calling him Francis Pencovic instead of Krishna Venta, he had his name legally changed in 1951. When asked why he was the new Christ, Krishna Venta claimed that he had led a convoy of rocket ships from the burning planet of Neophrates to save Earth; even L. Ron Hubbard, whose first scientology writings appeared in 1951, thought he was weird.

  Dormitories were built at Venta, along the Kachemak Bay mudflat on the far outskirts of Homer. The Barefooters became children of the Kenai Peninsula tides. Outside their front doors, glacial erratics dotted the flats. Driftwood and detritus hourly washed up on their beach. Mushrooms grew along the horsetail-fringed shore—not psychedelic ones, for the Barefooters were opposed to using drugs. Moose browsed around their acreage eating dwarf birch and willows. But being a Barefooter during the winter months was of course dangerous and nonsensical. “It wasn’t even the Alaska icy roads that stopped the Barefooters from going barefoot,” recalled a former state senator, Clem Tillion. “As long as they kept walking, when on the ice, they were fine. If they stopped, the heat from their feet melted the ice, and they stuck to the ice, so they didn’t just stand when they were barefoot. It was actually the sparks from welding in their shop that brought about the decision to clothe their feet.”18 Alaska’s weather had, alas, forced the Barefooters to wear thick leather boots.

  Krishna Venta’s principal surrogate in Homer was Brother Asaiah (originally Claude Bates, raised fatherless in Pilot Mountain, North Carolina). Shuttling between Ventura County and the Kenai Peninsula, keeping the Homer contingent well supplied for the hard winter months, Brother Asaiah was treasured by all the Barefooters. “He became our beloved Brother Asaiah,” Martha Ellen Anderson recalled. “His consciousness propels our lives in directions we often know not where but the path is not unknown. He expressed his truth, international, intercultural, and universal, in the last frontier on this earth, in our little town at the end of the road, Homer, Alaska, our cosmic hamlet by the sea.”19

  For all their peaceable words, however, the Barefooters had a darker side. On December 10, 1958, Krishna Venta was murdered in Chatsworth, California, by two disgruntled followers. Claiming that he was embezzling funds and seducing their wives, they strapped on twenty sticks of dynamite and blew up themselves, Krishna Venta, and seven other Barefooters. The explosion also burned more than 200 acres in California. A shock wave touched youth communities such as Santa Monica and Venice Beach: How could such destruction emanate from the seemingly benign Barefooters? Hadn’t members volunteered in soup kitchens, wildlife reserves, organic farms, and orphanages? The victims of the explosion had included a seven-year-old girl and a baby; how could this be explained? Brother Asaiah was left holding the torch for Krishna Venta’s followers, trying to make sense of what had happened. Alaskan newspapers naturally reported the tragedy, pointing out that the cult had a presence in Homer. Shaken, Brother Asaiah nevertheless came north, preceded by a taciturn message: “Heading to Homer.”

  Driving up the Richardson Highway to the Wrangell Mountains, then heading west to Anchorage, Brother Asaiah may have felt optimistic. Krishna Venta had been his spiritual teacher—and he would continue to convey Venta’s philosophy of love in Homer. After a few days in Anchorage, Brother Asaiah headed into the Chugach Mountains along Highway 1. After a night of camping, he headed down the western side of the Kenai Peninsula and saw Redoubt Volcano looming across Cook Inlet like a watchtower. He pulled into Homer and bought a trailer-like home from a local realtor on Lucky Shot Street. To make ends meet, he got a janitorial job. So suspicious were his manner and his hair (he had a ponytail) that the police regularly asked for his identification. But after a while, the community of Homer got used to Brother Asaiah’s eccentricities. Slowly but surely the inhabitants adopted him as one of their own.

  Warmhearted, deeply mystical, convinced that the world needed to be rid of nuclear weapons, Brother Asaiah became the spiritual leader of nonconformist Homer. He probably did more than anybody else to inject the word cosmic into the American parlance of the late 1950s. “When the Barefooters arrived, there were a lot of John Birchers living in Homer,” Martha Ellen Anderson recalled. “They wouldn’t so much as talk to Brother Asaiah. The Birchers were about the conquering spirit of Alaskan lands. The Barefooters were living a whole-earth philosophy. But their kids all got to know one another. Eventually the Barefooters were accepted. What everybody in town had in common was this strange draw to how the land met the sea in Homer.”20

  Brother Asaiah brought an old-time homesteader ethic to Homer. As a community leader he encouraged Barefooters to grow their own food, construct spruce-log buildings, and cook communal meals. He promoted social services in Homer when there weren’t any. Owing in large part to Brother Asaiah’s leadership, Homer offered social services such as Alcoholics Anonymous, a women’s clinic, an abuse shelter, meals on wheels, and an elder hostel. The Barefooters also donated land to the city of 10,000 to make the WKFL Public Park. A hospital was built, and the Family Theatre opened. Long before Whole Foods got started in Austin, Texas, the Barefooters, led by Brother Asaiah, promoted organic foods. Brother Asaiah was like a one-man Great Society, applying the principles of social work to Homer, earning praise even from right-wing townsfolk who were initially skeptical about him. Until his death in March 2000 he was the heart and soul of Homer. “Attempting to capture the essence of Brother Asaiah seems akin to trying to catch a moonbeam in a mason jar,” Governor Jay Hammond of Alaska (in office from 1974 to 1982), explained.21

  Another presence in unconventional Alaska was the sea goddess Sedna. Long a part of Native mythology, popular in shaman art along the Bering Sea coast, Sedna was supposedly a mermaid-like woman who lived in a huge mansion on the seafloor. In some renderings, Sedna had a fishtail and caribou antlers. So strong was Sedna’s appeal that when NASA discovered a new planet in 2003, it was named VB 12 “Sedna.” In one enduring story, Sedna refused to marry a man. Her angry father threw her into the sea, chopping off h
er fingers for good measure. Her fingers turned into sea mammals such as seals and walrus. Sedna stayed on the ocean bottom, deciding, according to her all-powerful whim, whether marine game should be withheld from Eskimo men. Without this food, the men would perish.22

  For liberated women of the 1950s who were moving to Alaska, Sedna’s story involved turning abuse into empowerment. There was a rejection of marriage, a cruel father, societal ostracism, and finally Sedna herself—holding all the power, making men beg for sustenance. Sedna and mermaids became popular during the 1950s among avant-garde artists in Anchorage and the Kenai Peninsula—perhaps not surprisingly, in a state with 33,000 miles of coastline. The strength and persistence of Sedna’s legend spoke to a confident belief that in the male-female exchange, the woman held sway. Interestingly, in the biological sciences, once a male domain, women were becoming the top marine biologists in Alaska, Hawaii, and the Lower Forty-Eight by the 1950s. Also, national wildlife refuges began to be named after women: Elizabeth A. Morton in New York, Rachel Carson in Maine, and Julia Butler Hansen in Washington.

  III

  Jack Kerouac never came to Homer, never met Brother Asaiah, and evidently never learned about the legend of Sedna. But the commune at Homer was in existence a year before On the Road was published and more than two years before the term “rucksack revolution” was coined in The Dharma Bums. Kerouac had predicted the “rucksack revolution” in The Dharma Bums as an imminent, consciousness-changing movement in which city dwellers would light out for places like the windswept Kenai Peninsula seeking personal renewal.23 (The hitchhiking, communal back-to-nature movements that absorbed many baby boomers of the 1960s bore out this prophecy.) In The Dharma Bums, Kerouac wrote about the glory of going barefoot, of feeling connected to the earth without oppressive footwear, of taking “off my shoes” and sitting in a lotus position feeling “glad.”24 Sometimes being primitive like a caveman felt superior to living above a Laundromat in New York or a restaurant in San Francisco. “If Cro-Magnon man was less subject to degenerative diseases and less prone to modern genetic and actual defects such as caries and tuberculosis,” Michael McClure mused in Lighting the Corners, “the artist could idealize him and begin a review of history from that point.”25

  Following the success of The Dharma Bums, feeling footloose and fancy-free, Kerouac wrote his wilderness essay, “The Vanishing American Hobo,” for Holiday Magazine; it was included in his omnibus of drifter essays, Lonesome Traveler, published in 1960 by Grove Press. (The novelist John Dos Passos would also soon write an essay about Alaska’s Glacier Bay for Holiday.) This was Kerouac’s first truly autobiographical work, comprising eight sparkling essays. Kerouac detailed his stints as a brakeman in California and as a fire lookout atop Desolation Peak in the North Cascades. He seemed to have the soul of a bedouin. “There is something strange going on,” Kerouac complained; “you can’t even be alone any more in the primitive wilderness.” To Kerouac the Eisenhower era was a police state and was killing the noble traditions of camping, tramping, and trailblazing in favor of a homogenized monoculture of groupthink. Individuality and authenticity were being stamped out. The international economy was on the rise. If you wanted to sleep out under the Milky Way along a roadside, policemen would demand identification and treat you as a vagrant.26

  By 1959 Kerouac had become a hero of the nonconformists. Groups like the Barefooters were an early version of the hippies who hitchhiked to Alaska throughout the 1960s, searching for revelations in nameless woods. Feeling blessed, they wanted to escape the confines of the Lower Forty-Eight. Kerouac spoke to later young people disenchanted with postwar abundance, thirsting for a deeper truth than air-conditioning and missile technology. The neoconservative critic Norman Podhoretz, in the Partisan Review, dismissed On the Road as anti-American, and as promoting drug use, free sex, and joblessness over the Protestant work ethic.27 What Podhoretz didn’t say was that the “know-nothing” beats, as he called them, were bravely asking questions about an accident at a nuclear power plant in Windscale, England—and about Minamata disease, a neurological syndrome caused by poisonous mercury in waters.

  In The Dharma Bums, the poet Gary Snyder (Japhy Ryder) represented the open road: a lineage that could be traced through American literature from Thoreau to Whitman to Muir. Despite all the commentary about the novel’s overt sexuality (“yabyum”—two men with one woman—adds spice to the story), The Dharma Bums was, in truth, an intersection of Christianity and Buddhism. Kerouac’s overriding message was, “Charity shall cover the multitude of sins.” His mountaintop exhortations represented a great original American artist at his absolute prime; the descriptive writing equals the best of Thomas Wolfe and John Muir. “I’ll tramp with a rucksack,” Kerouac wrote, “and make it the pure way.”28

  Perhaps more than any other novel, The Dharma Bums conveyed the value of wilderness to young audiences in the 1960s. Kerouac’s words pulled readers toward a craving for outdoors experiences, for almost mystical reasons. “Logs and snags came floating down at twenty-five miles an hour,” Kerouac wrote. “I figured if I should try to swim across the narrow river I’d be a half-mile downstream before I kicked to the other shore. It was a river wonderland, the emptiness of the golden eternity, odors of moss and bark and twigs and mud, all ululating mysterious visionstuff before my eyes, tranquil and everlasting nevertheless, the hillhairing trees, the dancing sunlight. As I looked up the clouds assumed, as I assumed, faces of hermits.”29

  Understandably, Kerouac deeply resented any belittling of his romantic yearnings for Walt Whitman, Huck Finn, and Herman Melville. Combining Bob Marshall’s wilderness philosophy with Gary Snyder’s belief in nature as a healer of the soul, Kerouac defended the hobo tradition in a torrent of heartfelt, first-rate prose. Writing from a cabin at Big Sur, where the rugged Santa Lucia mountains dropped straight into the Pacific Ocean and huge waves slapped in rhythmic fury against towering sea rocks, Kerouac lamented the mainstream culture and its need to commodify everything, even its national parks. In Big Sur Kerouac, with a charitable heart, objected to the end of “barefoot kids” with “a string of fish,” warming themselves by wood fires while camping out in secret coves along the Pacific coast. The Barefooters were doing that in Homer, but most American families were now driving station wagons into sacred landscapes like the Painted Desert or Mount McKinley, “sneering” over a “printed blue-lined roadmap” and worried silly about getting “the car washed before the return trip.”30 Or, perhaps, these families headed to Alaska on a cruise ship, listening to music and eating buffets of chemically enriched foods five times a day.

  Lonesome Traveler was filled with impressionistic prose riffs; its central premise was the enduring virtues of hoboing in the wilderness. In the jargon of Broadway theater, Kerouac “believed his own show”: spontaneous prose enriched by Buddhist philosophy, transcendental yearnings, and American outdoors romanticism. When Grove Press published his essays, Sputnik had been launched, Americans were worried about a supposed “missile gap” relative to the Soviet Union, and NASA’s space programs were headline news, so Kerouac’s meditations about the open road seemed antiquated. But the essays took on relevance when the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission drew up plans to test nuclear weapons on the Aleutians. “The Jet Age is crucifying the hobo,” Kerouac wrote, “because how can he hop a freight jet?”31

  Kerouac was concerned that in mature America “camping” was deemed a “healthy sport” for the Boy Scouts but “a crime for nature men who have made it their vocation.” With a rucksack on his back, Kerouac had wandered through America from 1948 to 1956. But he abruptly halted his hitchhiking because of ugly television news stories about the “abominableness of strangers with packs passing through by themselves independently” in frightened suburbia. Beatniks were considered dangerous perverts to be avoided at all costs. To Kerouac, untrammeled places like the North Cascades, the Brooks Range, and the Kenai Peninsula offered the last best hope for disappearing into the wilderness to find o
neself, as Rockwell Kent had done at Fox Island in 1920. In Lonesome Traveler, Kerouac noted the great hoboes in American history, from Ben Franklin to William O. Douglas. Lovingly he declared John Muir a hobo who “went off into the mountains with a pocketful of dried bread, which he soaked in creeks.” To Kerouac the great Teddy Roosevelt was a “political hobo” of the first order. Hadn’t the poet Vachel Lindsay enriched America by his “troubadour” hobo wanderings, giving farmers verses in exchange for homemade pies?

  Kerouac was frustrated that the open road was under assault by a police state mentality. Douglas had complained about railroad cops beating hoboes outside Chicago during the Great Depression; now, Kerouac voiced a similar complaint in Lonesome Traveler about “great sinister tax-paid police cars (1960 models with humorless searchlights)” bearing down on The Wilderness Society types who were only looking for “hills of holy silence and holy privacy.” To Kerouac, the celestial seeker, there was “nothing nobler” than to “put up with a few inconveniences like snakes and dust for the sake of absolute freedom.”32 Kerouac was insisting, in 1960, that vagrancy wasn’t merely legal; it was part of the patriotic Thoreauvian tradition that made America unique. To Kerouac, Johnny Appleseed (whose real name was John Chapman), the Swedenborgian orchidist who dropped seeds of fruit-bearing trees from the Berkshires to the Ohio Valley chanting “the Lord is good to me,” a wanderer who was even kind to skunks, should be celebrated as an American counterpart of Saint Francis of Assisi. Nothing was more liberating to Kerouac than to live in a wilderness where, overnight, you could be reborn, choosing your own new name and identity: Aurora Borealis, Brother Asaiah, Sedna, Japhy Ryder, or Johnny Appleseed.