The Quiet World_ Saving Alaska's Wilderness Kingdom, 1879-1960 - Douglas Brinkley [114]
Kent’s bizarre Mad Hermit series—included at the end of Wilderness—celebrated the age of voyages. His Alaskan sun was a Cyclopean eye. The legend of the Viking Leif Eriksson—possibly the first European to land in North America, almost 500 years before Christopher Columbus—was suggested in many of his lyrical paintings of the 1920s and 1930s. It was as if Scandinavia came into his every brushstroke; his painter’s fascination with light was piqued by the ever-shifting scenes created by the northern lights.
Never before had such a gifted poet-philosopher-painter contemplated Alaska’s subzero climate, long winter nights, and rainy landscapes with such imaginative flair. The broad glare of winter afternoons had a bracing effect on him. Life opened up every morning in the most amazing ways, and he was there to document the pageantry. “Cold?” he once said: “We had come to love it. The snow lay deep. The sun at noon now rose above the mountain, flooding our clearing with its golden light. The north wind raged and swept up clouds of vapor from the steaming sea.” Who knew that getting drenched could be fun? Kent’s attitude anticipated the back-to-nature movement of the 1960s: Scott and Helen Nearing; The Whole Earth Catalog; organic gardeners; and the rejection of plastic, chemicals, and prepackaged food.
While he was on Fox Island, Kent would sometimes write a newspaper column either for amusement or for a little extra money. He could, it must be said, be abrasive and self-righteous at times. Locals discovered that he was a man of great humor but also was very difficult. No matter what the discussion topic or issue was, he refused to be a shrinking violet; he preferred a stance of competitive firmness. Sometimes he literally threw paint at a canvas and then ran around naked in the snow. But he was not insane (although bipolar disorder is a possibility). A brouhaha occurred in Seward when Kent’s son Rocky was asked by a teacher which of several flags shown in a book was his favorite. While the other children went with Old Glory, Rocky chose the German flag because it had an eagle at its center. The angry schoolteacher thought Rocky was being treasonous and expressing support for the kaiser. The Great War had ended, but anti-German sentiment was still strong. Kent nobly defended his son’s honor to the teacher; he also challenged people in Seward to fisticuffs. Upon leaving Alaska, Kent wrote a frank, open letter in the Seward Gateway, denouncing local busybodies but also proclaiming that Alaska was “the only land that I have ever known to which I wanted to return.”23 The lines and colors and illuminations of Resurrection Bay, he said, spoke to him like a hymnal. “As graduates in wisdom,” he wrote, paraphrasing Muir, “we return from the university of the wilderness.”
What Kent philosophically promoted in Wilderness was the power of solitude and ahimsa. It didn’t matter that a “heartless ocean” eliciting a “terror of emptiness” surrounded Fox Island. Neither the five-foot chops in the ocean nor a steady “miserable drizzling rain”—about 300 inches annually—could deflate him. For Kent had a rare gift of optimism wherever he traveled, even in Alaska’s “luminous abyss,” as long as his paint kit was at hand. Kent convinced himself that the desolation of Fox Island, where winds raced in swirls, was a bracing cure for the neurotic anxiety associated with the modern condition. Solitude was better than all the pharmaceuticals in the world.
“The Northern wilderness is terrible,” Kent said in a letter to an esteemed art critic, Dr. Christian Brinton, written for publication. “There is discomfort, even misery, in being cold. The gloom of the long and lonely winter nights is appalling