Rockwell Kent

“ One night, one midnight out on the black waters of a Newfoundland harbor, the million stars above, and on the wretched vessel’s deck the hoard of half-drunk, soul-starved men saying their passionate farewells,—on the dull plain of their life a flash of lightning revealing an abyss;—this night on the still, dark cove of Resurrection Bay, rimmed with wild mountains and the wilderness, strong men about you, mad, loosened speech and winged, prophetic vision,—God! but sane daylight seeing seems to touch but the white, hard surface of where life is hidden. ”

“ 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.” ”

“ WINTER Endlessly, day after day, the journal goes on recording a dreary monotony of rain and cloud. Who has ever dwelt so entirely alone that the most living things in all the universe about are wind and rain and snow? Where the elements dominate and control your life, where at getting up and bedtime and many an hour of night and day between you question helplessly, as a poor slave his master, the will of the mighty forces of the sky? ”

“ It is a kind of living mirror that gives back as its own all and only all that the imagination of a man brings to it. It is that which we believe it to be. So here we have stood, we two, and if we have not shuddered at the emptiness of the abyss and fled from its loneliness, it is because of the wealth of our own souls that filled the void with imagery, warmed it, and gave it speech and understanding. This vast, wild land we have made a child’s world and a man’s.
I know nothing in all life more beautiful than the perfect belief of Rockwell in his Paradise here. ”

“ The romance of an adventure hangs upon slender threads. A banana peeling on a mountain top tames the wilderness. Much of the glory of this Alaska is in the knowledge I have that the next bay—which I may never choose to enter—is uninhabited, that beyond those mountains across the water is a vast region that no man has ever trodden, a terrible ice-bound wilderness. ”

“ Rockwell and I have just now, eight o’clock, returned from down the beach where we went to look for lights from Seward. But we could distinguish nothing meant for us. The moon has risen and illuminates the mountain tops—but we and all our cove are still in the deep shadow of the night. It is most dramatic; the spruces about us deepen the shadow to black while above them the stone faces of the mountain glisten and the sky has the brightness of a kind of day. Olson brought us goat chops for dinner. ”

“ The snow sticks to the mountain tops even to the steepest, barest peaks painting them all a spotless, dazzling white. It’s a marvelous sight. Rockwell and I journeyed around the point to-day and saw the sun again. To-night in the brilliant moonlight [Pg 161] I snowshoed around the cove. There never was so beautiful a land as this! Now at midnight the moon is overhead. Our clearing seems as bright as day,—and the shadows are so dark! From the little window the lamplight shines out through the fringe of icicles along the eaves, and they glisten like diamonds. ”

“ The wind is still in the North, the days are wonderfully beautiful, and the nights no less. This very night Rockwell and I skated for the third time, Ah, but it was glorious on the lake, the moon high above us in a cloudless sky, the snow and ice on the mountain sides glistening and the spruces black. We skated together hand in hand like sweethearts; going far to one end of the lake in the teeth of the wind and returning before it like full-rigged ships. And Rockwell whose second skate to-day this was improves every minute. ”

“ 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” ”

“ The night is beautiful beyond thought. All the bay is flooded with moonlight and in that pale glow the snowy mountains appear whiter than snow itself. The full moon is almost straight above us, and shining through the tree tops into our clearing makes the old stumps quite lovely with its quiet light. And the forest around is as black as the abyss. Although it is nearly ten o’clock Rockwell is still awake. ”

“ The food is good and plentiful, the night is long, only the Christmas candles are short-lived and we extinguish them to save them for another time. Finally as the night deepens Olson leaves us amid mutual expressions of delight in each other’s friendship, and Rockwell and I tumble into bed.
The next day and the next it is mild, resting—the weather seems to be—at this peaceful holiday season. We cut no wood and do little work. We write long letters, both of us, and consume at meal-time the food left over from Christmas. ”

“ 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! ”

“ Truly he lives the part he plays when it is one of his beloved wild creatures. Then he tears up and down the beach mounted like a four-year-old kid on a stick horse, yelling as loud as he can, going to the water’s edge, and racing the swell as it mounts the slope. And presently I capture him for his end of the saw. At that he no longer knows fatigue,—he’s as good as a man. He really never tires and the work goes on with a fine, jolly good-will that makes of the hardest chore one of the day’s pleasures. Rockwell is lonely at times ”

“ It rains and storms. But to-day we repaired the engine and we’re ready to start for Seward when it clears. Above every other thought now is the sad realization that our days on this beloved island are nearing an end. What is it that endears it so to a man near forty and a little boy of nine? We have such widely different outlooks upon life. It may be that Alaska stands midway between us, and that I, turning backward from the crowded world that I have known and learned to fear, meet Rockwell in his forward march from nothing—to this. ”

“ All through the morning and deep into the afternoon I read the mail. Unwashed dishes stood about, for meals we but ate what was at hand. (Here follows in the journal a list two pages long of presents, of books—what a shelf of them!—woolen clothes and sheepskin slippers, music for the flute, plum-pudding, candy, chocolate, cigarettes,—and ever so much more.) And that being about seven times as much as we’ve ever had before is all. Ah, in the wilderness you love your friends and they too think of you. ”

“ The sky is brooding ominously, heavy, dull, and raw. Winter seems to be closing in upon us. We’re driven to work as if in fear. Hurry, hurry! Saw the great drums of spruce, roll them over the ground and stack them high. Calk tight with hemp the cabin’s windward eaves so that no breath of wind can enter there and freeze the food inside upon the shelf. Set up the far-famed air-tight stove where it will keep you warm,—warm feet in bed and a warm back while painting. ”

“ 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. ”

“ I must sometime honor the northwest wind in a great picture as the embodiment of clean, strong, exuberant life, the joy of every young thing, bearing energy on its wings and the will to triumph. How I remember at Monhegan on such a day, when it seemed that every living thing must emerge from its house or its hole or its nest to breathe the clean air and exult in it ”

“ What a book to illustrate! The translator of it says that Zarathustra is such a being as Nietzsche would have liked himself to be,—in other words his ideal man. It seems to me that the ideal of a man is the real man. You are that which in your soul you choose to be; your most beautiful and cherished vision is yourself. What are the true, normal conditions of life for any man but just those perfect conditions with which he would ideally surround himself. A man is not a sum of discordant tendencies—but rather a being perfect for one special place; and this is Olson’s creed. ”

“ To suppose that Art can go beyond the finest specimens of Art that are now in the world is not knowing what Art is; it is being blind to the gifts of the Spirit.” Here in the supreme simplicity of life amid these mountains the spirit laughs at man’s concern with the form of Art, with new expression because the old is outworn! It is man’s own poverty of vision yielding him nothing, so that to save himself he must trick out in new garb the old, old commonplaces, or exalt to be material for art the hitherto discarded trivialities of the mind. ”

“ At times a mist has hung in a band halfway up the mountain’s height across the bay. It is a remarkable sight. To-night is as warm as any night in spring or autumn. It thaws continually and even the ice that once covered the ground beneath the snow is fast disappearing. The year goes out without a steamer having been seen to come with the Christmas mail. ”

“ But to them fiction in the guise of truth is wrong, and fairy romance, unconvincing in its details, is ridiculous. Action they like, the deed—not thoughts about it. Doubtless the simple saga form is best of all,—life as it happens, neither right nor wrong, words that they can understand, things they can comprehend, interesting facts or thrilling fancy. Such simple things delight the child that half of “Robinson Crusoe” and three quarters of the smug family from Switzerland are forgiven for the sweet kernel of pure adventure that is there. ”

“ Every log and rotten stump, the gnarled trees, with or without “butter,” every mound and path, the rocks, the streams, each is a being in itself; and with those most living goats, and the brilliant magpies, the pretty, little, dingy sparrows, the glorious and virtuous porcupines, the black, black crows, the great and noble eagle, the rare spider and the rarer fly, and the wonderful, strong, sleek otters that leap in sport through the snow and coast down-hill, they make a world of romance that has thrilled one little boy to the very bottom of his soul. ”

“ No man shall ever know.
A porcupine is captured wandering near our house. We build for him a cozy home—he doesn’t like it much but still he should. We care for him day after day, he twines himself, about our hearts. Then at last one day when we’d pastured him in freedom out in the new fallen snow, trusting his tracks to lead us to him, the goats cut in and spoiled the trail and he was lost to us.
Olson has gone to Seward: days of waiting, days of waiting! How many times do we travel down the cove to the point from whence Caine’s Head is seen, going in hope, returning gloomily. ”