The Quiet World_ Saving Alaska's Wilderness Kingdom, 1879-1960 - Douglas Brinkley [111]
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