by Donovan Hohn
7 “We came to this new land, a boy and a man, entirely on a dreamer’s search,” Kent writes; “having had a 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!” Kent wasn’t the first to dream that dream of a Northern Paradise, nor was he the last. What distinguishes him from other dreamers is the way in which he tried, and in some ways succeeded, to reconcile painting and adventuring with fatherhood.Rowing across Resurrection Bay on a “calm, blue summer’s day” just like this one, the Rockwell Kents had chanced upon an old man in a dory, to whom they explained their wish of finding some forgotten cabin in which to spend a year. “ ‘Come with me,’ the old man cried heartily, ‘come and I show you the place to live.’ ” He led them to Fox Island, named for the fox ranch that the old man had set up there, and offered them an old cabin rent-free.
It’s hard to imagine a father repeating Kent’s experiment today—pulling his son out of school and dragging him off to spend a sub-zero winter, a continent away from his mother, on a remote island without medical facilities or telephone lines or playmates other than magpies and porcupines. The paintings and drawings and woodcuts Kent completed there made his reputation and rescued his family from financial ruin. As for the son, fifty years later, now a balding, six-foot-four biologist, Rockwell the Younger would tell his father that the “year we spent together on Fox Island was the happiest of all my life,” or so his father reports in his preface to the 1970 edition of Wilderness.
In their one-room cabin, they shared everything. They slept in the same bed. They cleared trees together, cut firewood together, cooked together, iceskated together, “holding hands like sweethearts.” They even drew and painted together. For entertainment, Kent brought along a small library of books, and at bedtime, by lamplight, he would read to his son from Robinson Crusoe or Treasure Island or the fairy tales of Hans Christian Andersen. A Journal of Quiet Adventure, Kent’s book is aptly subtitled. It contains moments of genuine danger, but little of the testosterone-addled man-versus-wild drama one usually encounters in louder adventure narratives, and when those moments of danger do arise, young Rockwell responds to them in poignantly childish ways. One day, rowing back from Seward, where they’d gone for supplies, father and son are ambushed by a storm. “Father,” young Rockwell pipes up as the elder Kent is laboring furiously at the oars, “when I wake up in the morning sometimes I pretend my toes are asleep, and I make my big toe sit up first because he’s the father toe.”
8 A landscape similar to the one Kent encountered upon arriving at Fox Island. Fox Island: “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. . . . Above the beach a band of brilliant green and then the deep, black spaces of the forest.”
9 The woodcuts and drawings and paintings that Rockwell Kent produced during his Alaskan retreat are far more moving to me than the landscapes that inspired them. What makes them moving isn’t the landscapes, per se, but the human figures whose inner lives the landscapes serve to dramatize. Some of Kent’s images realistically depict the daily life of father and son—father and son sawing a log; father and son sharing a meal; father and son surveying the world from the summit of a mountain; father greeting the sunrise with outspread arms; son riding a driftwood stick down a pebble beach, pretending to be Sir Lancelot.But then nature, bearer of truth, begins to intrude: “Is it to be believed that we are here alone, this boy and I, far north out on an island wilderness, seagirt on a terrific coast!” Kent exclaims as fall is turning to winter. “It’s as we pictured it and wanted it a year and more ago—yes, dreams come true.” A month later, as the sunless Alaskan winter sets in, so does disenchantment. The dream shades into nightmare. Kent looks “to the sun’s going with a kind of dread.” Having come to Fox Island seeking artistic inspiration, what he often feels, contemplating a day’s just-finished work, is “repugnance.” Even when the work goes well, the triumph is fleeting. “Over to-day’s painting I’m filled with pride,” he wrote on October 14; “it will be equaled by to-morrow’s despair over the very same pictures.” The capricious muse isn’t his only demon. With time he grows desperately lonely: “I have terrible moments, hours, days of homesick despondency . . . for my family. There are times when if I could I’d have fled from here in any raging storm.”
This homesickness might come across as a touchingly sentimental bit of familial devotion; might, but only if one knows nothing of Kent’s biography. Out on Fox Island, he may have been a model—or even a magical—father to Rockwell III, if not to the three children he’d left behind in upstate New York. But he was no family man. It seems that Kent’s wife, Kathleen, whom he would later divorce, only permitted her nine-year-old to tag along with her husband on his latest extravagant saunter because she feared that if she didn’t, he’d instead bring his German mistress, Gretchen, who had, says one biographer, helped comfort Kent through previous “suicidal depressions”—depressions he’d fled to Fox Island hoping to escape. He swore to Kathleen that he’d broken off the affair, but on Fox Island he and Gretchen continued to correspond. At the same time, Kent had nightmares that Kathleen was cheating on him. From these nightmares, he’d wake in a jealous rage. Kathleen didn’t accompany him to Fox Island herself because of a previous misadventure in Newfoundland, during which all their children had caught a nearly fatal case of whooping cough.
One gets the impression that without the company of his son, Kent’s lonely thoughts that winter on Fox Island might once again have turned suicidal. And one also gets the impression that without animal playmates, the younger Kent might have gone bonkers too.
Just as little Rockwell delights in the local flora and fauna, the elder Rockwell delights in his son, who increasingly becomes the journal’s main subject. “He is beautiful after his bath,” Kent writes at one point. At another: “We have a good time washing dishes, racing—the washer, myself—to beat the dryer. Rockwell falls down onto the floor in the midst of the race in a fit of laughter.” What Kent discovers on Fox Island isn’t mainly the transporting beauty of Alaska but the poignant beauty of his son.
10 Compared with Kent’s moody, intimate account of his long dark winter of the soul, John Muir’s Travels in Alaska, the genre’s seminal work, is almost unreadably monotonous. Wandering among glaciers and mountains, Muir proceeds from one ecstatic rhapsody to another, scattering abstract adjectives like wildflower petals as he goes. Notes the historian Roderick Frazier Nash in the “Alaska” chapter of Wilderness and the American Mind, for Muir, “everything was ‘glorious’ or ‘sublime’ or ‘grand ’ or ‘glowing.’ ” The human figures, Muir himself included, recede into the background, outshone by the blinding glory of the landscapes.In his defense, it helps to remember that at the time of his Alaskan travels, before the Klondike gold rush of 1898, most Americans still considered Secretary Seward’s territorial purchase a folly. Alaska was a wilderness in the old, pejorative sense of the word—the sort of wilderness that writers used to describe as “howling”; an inhospitable wasteland of worthless ice the furry resources of which the Russians had already depleted; in short, a damn’d unhappy part of the world. Muir helped the American public reimagine Alaska, and with it the meanings of wilderness, meanings with which the word “Alaska” has since become synonymous, at least in the minds of outdoorsmen and ecotourists. In Muir’s time and ours, wilderness was civilization’s antonym, but thanks to Muir and other Romantic pantheists, the connotations of the antonyms have blurred or even, in some minds—Raynor’s and Pallister’s, for instance—reversed. Now civilization is often the wasteland, and wilderness the source of all that is beautiful and redemptive and good.
> In certain misanthropic moods, I feel the same. Mostly, though, I feel an irresolvable ambivalence, torn between my fondness for hominids, who are splendid and hilarious as well as idiotic, and my wish that we could populate the world without ruining it.
11 Allow me to attempt to ignite similar intimations in yours. Exterior:From the wooded bank of a sparkling stream, the camera frames an Indian paddling a canoe, a canoe almost identical to the miniature one that, in Paddle-to-the-Sea, goes on that long journey to the Great Salt Water. Its bow and stern curl into matching crescents like the toes of elfin shoes. Its hull appears to be made of moose skin, lashed to the wooden frame perhaps with venison thongs, and the Indian paddling it appears to be made of Indian. He isn’t.
Now the camera leaps into the canoe’s bow. On the sound track, a timpanist plays a martial tattoo meant to evoke a war dance. Close-up of Indian looking stoical in his buckskin getup as he paddles once to starboard, once to port, fringe dangling Daniel Boone-like from his sleeves. A big feather protrudes from his wig, the long black braids of which make him look almost schoolgirlish. The timpani give way to snares. Cellists play an ersatz Cherokee theme.
The forest stream broadens, and so does the symbolism. The Indian’s canoe, once again viewed from the wooded shore, is a bicorn silhouette amid dazzling sparkles. As in Paddle-to-the-Sea, stream has led to harbor—a Californian harbor, judging from the branches of the trees in the foreground, which if I’m not mistaken are those of a Monterey cypress. For just a moment, we enter the Indian’s point of view. Indian-cam. In the water, he spies a foreboding sign: a floating scrap of newspaper, which with an oar-stroke to starboard Espera “Iron Eyes Cody” De Corti sends swirling. To make the meaning of this portent clear the sound track turns chromatic and modernist. An ugly crescendo of brass as the camera pans back, revealing—the horror, the horror—a port: cranes, freighter, tugboat, and on a hillside in the background, those squat silos resembling giant tin cans that one often sees in the vicinity of ports.
Now the theme, orchestra in full swell, sounds like something from a Hollywood western, a bit like the theme to the TV show Big Valley, as if the Indian were paddling into battle. Shot of refineries, smoke billowing sinisterly around them. At last the Indian hauls out on a trashy little beach. The music goes quiet and elegiac, and, as the Indian strides in a kind of stupor of stoicism to the shoulder of a highway, a somber voice-over begins: “Some people have a deep, abiding respect for the natural beauty that was once this country”—paper bag of what appears to be orange peels and french fries, flung from window of passing car, explodes across Indian’s moccasins—“and some people don’t.” Iron Eyes Cody looks into the camera, which zooms in on the big shiny tear rolling down his cosmetically tanned Sicilian cheek. Tagline: “People start pollution. People can stop it.”
12 In hindsight, looking back from the summer of 2010, those 200,000 gallons, dwarfed by the millions gushing into the Gulf of Mexico, would seem like a portent, and the Deepwater Horizon disaster less an aberration than the culmination of one oil company’s negligence.
13 By way of illustration, an anecdote: If you’ve ever seen a photograph of a bald eagle, the odds are good it was taken in Homer. The odds are good, in fact, that it was taken just a few hundred yards from the end of the Homer Spit, across the road from Brad Faulkner’s house. There, between a muddy little campground and a row of three-story waterfront condominiums erected not long ago by a real estate developer, is a little shack decorated with deer antlers. A fence encircles the shack’s tiny yard, and protruding above the fence is a dead tree. If you look closely you will see talon scrapings on the branches of the dead tree. You will also see a great deal of eagle guano.Until she died not long ago, the woman who lived in the shack, Jean Keene, was locally known as the Eagle Lady. Keene moved to the Homer Spit in 1977 and found a job at a nearby fish-processing plant. Soon thereafter she began bringing home scraps of fish to feed to the local population of bald eagles. Her flock steadily grew, and so did the flock of photographers. The eagles came for the free fish. The photographers came for the free eagles. By the time Keene died, between two hundred and three hundred bald eagles had become regular customers. The number of photographers is harder to determine, but by one estimate, 80 percent of the photographs of bald eagles sold every year—to illustrate newspapers and magazines and advertisements and the Colbert Report , but also souvenir place mats and calendars and postcards—were taken beside that campground overlooking Kachemak Bay, whose silvery waters, snowcapped mountains rising up behind them, make for a spectacular backdrop.
In such photographs, you’ll see bald eagles in close-up, yellow beak turned in profile, so that the famous eagle eye gazes out at you. You’ll see eagles in flight, their black wings outspread angelically, yellow talons outthrust. You’ll see action shots of an eagle swooping down onto the silver water in an explosion of spray, a silver fish visible in its yellow claws. What you won’t see, except in news stories about her, is the Eagle Lady or her shack. You might see the bespattered branches of her dead tree, but if so the photo will be cropped, leading the viewer to imagine an old-growth forest. You won’t see the campers and their colorful tents, or the hand-painted school bus inhabited by latter-day merry pranksters, or the aluminum fishing boat up on cinder blocks in Brad Faulkner’s yard, or the muddy cars and trucks in the campground parking lot, or the waterfront condominiums. Or the flock of bald eagles scrambling after fish scraps like pigeons after crumbs.
14 By then I’d received from Pallister the following e-mail:Hi Donovan,
You won’t believe this . . . Opus was involved in a motorcycle accident. Yesterday, a lady across the street lost control of a new Harley Sportster her husband was teaching her to ride. She slammed into the back of Opus. She nearly severed her leg in a couple of places when it got caught between the bike and the end of the boat trailer frame. She also crushed a wrist and bruised her face. Her husband came over last night and said she would recover, that the docs had bolted and plated her back together. She will suffer a long recovery. Opus took a pretty good lick, tore a large hole in the transom, broke off the hydraulic cylinder for the trim tab, bent the bottom of the outdrive, tore off a trailer light and wrapped the trailer fender around the tire. I can fix most of it pretty quickly, but it will still take a couple of days.
We can’t get a helicopter to Gore Point until August 19-20. The guys decided unanimously to stay out there and continue cleaning adjacent bays until the helicopter comes whether they get paid for that or not. They’ve all caught Ted’s mission fever. They found another beach on the southwest corner of Port Dick they refer to as Mini Gore Point. It was blasted with debris, but the area isn’t nearly as big as the isthmus. They have finished cleaning all of Port Dick and now are moving into Tonsina Bay.
You made a good decision on Montague . . . the weather socked in and will remain that way for awhile.
Take care.
Chris
In the following days, other unforeseen events would occur. Way out on Resurrection Bay, the Johnita I, John Cowdery’s other yacht, burst into flames. Fishermen came to Cowdery’s rescue. Cowdery attributed the fire to faulty wiring, but now a pesky reporter from the Anchorage Daily News was sniffing around for evidence of arson and insurance fraud. She wouldn’t find it, but she would, eventually, find incriminating evidence of graft—not enough to get Cowdery indicted. Later, though, on unrelated corruption charges, he’d serve three years in prison. During the course of her investigations, the reporter called Pallister with questions about the Johnita II and his partnership with Cowdery. The Anchorage Daily News would run a story that in passing mentioned GoAK’s attempt to win funding from the state legislature—how Cowdery had helped secure the allocation, how Pallister had hired two lobbyists. “I told [the lobbyists] right out of the get-go, ‘Listen, John Cowdery and I are partners in a boat. Keep him the hell out of this,’ ” the article would quote Pallister as saying. “ ‘I don’t want any linkage with John Cowdery
or Veco or anything else.’ ”
To me—without a shred of evidence, let it be clear—Pallister would insinuate his own suspicions. He was convinced he knew who’d put this Daily News muckraker on his trail: Bob Shavelson. “Next year I might fold up shop,” Pallister would tell me. “I didn’t get into this to go through this crap—have people digging through my personal business, telling lies about me. I got into this to clean up beaches, you know?”
15 The toxicity of PCBs is well established, and their story has become a famous chapter in the annals of environmentalism.PCBs were first synthesized in 1881 and first brought to market as a nonflammable insulator in electrical transformers, a safer alternative to mineral oils, in 1929. In the U.S., until they were banned in 1979, their primary producer was the Monsanto Corporation, whose sorcerers of the lab, by playing variations on the theme of chlorine and carbon, eventually found myriad other commercial applications for this family of compounds. They polymerized it and sold it as an insulator for copper wiring. They added it to varnishes and paints. By the 1970s, PCBs were ubiquitous, despite mounting empirical evidence of their toxicity. In response to that evidence, Monsanto and its competitors deployed the tactics pioneered to great success by the tobacco companies: they produced studies that minimized the risks and confused the public. In the industrialized nations of the West, commercial production of the substances had all but ceased by 1989, but to this day in the environment PCBs remain ubiquitous, seeping out of landfills and superfund sites and electrical transformers, persisting in sediments and drifting on the surface of the sea.
What’s so bad about PCBs? Until the mid-eighties, according to the industry, nothing. Fears flamed by academic and government scientists were overblown, Monsanto and its competitors claimed. Finally, in 1987, they surrendered. In a study funded by the EPA, independent scientists evaluated the literature and deemed the evidence for the “carcinogenicity of PCBs” to be “over whelming,” and a peer-reviewed, industry-funded study found that “every commercial PCB mixture tested caused cancer.” For oceanographers the data were more troubling still: “It is very important to note,” the EPA notes, “that the composition of PCB mixtures changes following their release into the environment. The types of PCBs that tend to bioaccumulate in fish and other animals and bind to sediments happen to be the most carcinogenic.”
