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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 into 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,