The Quiet World_ Saving Alaska's Wilderness Kingdom, 1879-1960 - Douglas Brinkley [117]
The Norse side of Kent continued to ring forth. Believing that folk sagas were a window into cultures, he famously illustrated books about Paul Bunyan and Gisli of Iceland. Major magazines—such as Frank Crowninshield’s Vanity Fair, Henry Raymond’s Harper’s Monthly, and Richard Watson Gilder’s Century—commissioned his vivid black-and-white works. Even Kent’s doodles were coveted in New York literary circles. One afternoon Kent was talking with Bennett Cerf, a founder of Random House. On the spot, he drew the colophon that Random House still uses. When Modern Library was created, Kent designed its logo, an elegant torchbearer. Eventually, no publisher felt adequate without a logo designed by Rockwell Kent. When Harold Guinzburg started Viking Press, for example, Kent produced its image, a ship.31 “He was, indeed, so indefatigably busy at desk and drawing board,” the Smithsonian Institution’s Archives of American Art Journal noted, “that in the 1920s and early 30s his work was virtually inescapable.”32
But it was Wilderness—the prose of a lonely seeker combined with bold illustrations—that has survived as a classic of travel literature. There was something noble about Kent at Fox Island, painting by day, drawing by oil lamp at night. By the 1960s, some readers considered Wilderness a second Walden. It is hard to describe the religiosity Kent had found in the wilderness at Resurrection Bay. The town of Seward honored him by painting a mural of his nautical map of Resurrection Bay—the frontispiece to Wilderness. Doug Capra, a ranger at Kenai Fjords National Park, hopes to someday rebuild Kent’s cabin, which remains private property. Painters regularly make pilgrimages to the area to have their try at Bear Glacier. To Kent, the far north sky was “God’s abode,” with “truth and beauty emanating as the light from Heaven.”33
For fifteen years after the publication of Wilderness, Kent, always full of pent-up passion, looked for an excuse to go back to Alaska. That opportunity finally presented itself in early 1935. The U.S. Treasury Department had commissioned him to paint two enamel murals for a post office in Washington, D.C. The idea was to demonstrate, in an impressive way, the far-flung services of U.S. airmail. Kent was to show Eskimos from Nome, Alaska, sending letters to a family in Puerto Rico, 5,350 miles away. So, suddenly, thanks to this commission, Kent found himself in Nome, in a frigid wind, looking for Arctic families to sketch under the graying sky. “Alaska in 1935 belonged, as much as a colonial country can, to ‘the people who inhabited it’: the miners and prospectors, the big merchants and little shopkeepers, the artisans and upper laborers; all white,” Kent wrote. “It was no longer, as to a great extent was Greenland, the country of the aborigines. And although the Eskimo, to judge by what I saw of them in Nome and at my farthest north, Tin City, near Cape Prince of Wales, appeared to enjoy a greater material prosperity than the Greenlanders, their citizenship—politically, socially, and economically—was second or third class.”34
Kent painted his mural, which he infused with the left-leaning political disposition of Diego Rivera. The explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson, a consultant to Pan American Airlines, gave Kent some tips about the difficulties of aviation around Arctic Alaska, where long gravel spits and permafrost tundra were used as landing strips. The landscape was flat and mundane, and Nome did not even have a single attractive, tree-lined square. In Nome, Kent befriended George Ahgupuk, a talented Eskimo painter, who taught him about dogsledding. (Kent did Ahgupuk the great favor of arranging for him to have a gallery show in New York.) “I got every kind