In August 1918, then-unknown artist Rockwell Kent and his nine-year-old son, also Rockwell, row out into Resurrection Bay, Alaska, "entirely on a dreamer's search.” Kent has no plan. He just believes they’ll find "a little forgotten cabin, one that some prospector or fisherman had built."

Out where the bay opens onto the North Pacific, they're befriended by the sole resident of Fox Island, an old man who offers them a goat cabin deep in the woods. Kent and the boy return to Seward for flour, beans, cocoa, and tools. Back at the cabin, they scrape manure from the floor, chop windows through the log walls, stuff the chinks with moss. They cut down trees to let rare sunshine fall on the cabin, buck and split wood for the stove, shape stretchers for Kent's canvases. They hike and read and paint and draw. The boy plays, tracking porcupines and racing waves, while the father designs the woodblock prints that will illustrate his 1920 memoir, Wilderness: A Journal of Quiet Adventure in Alaska.

There's no drama in Wilderness, unless you count the relentlessly stormy Alaskan weather, sightings of otters and killer whales, the death of a pet magpie. Kent leaves drama back in Seward, along with electricity, newspapers, and a world war. Wilderness is an adventure in self-trust, in contemplative labor, in earned joys, inevitable frustrations and the practice of patience.

And yes, an adventure in isolation, undeniably appropriate to this long, long moment. I read Wilderness when we first locked down, and I'm reading it again as omicron ebbs.

In pandemic terms, Kent is the perfect podmate: an unabashed idealist, a practical optimist, an unpretentious artist as handy with ax, hammer, and skillet as he is with pencil and paintbrush. Netflix binges are hard to justify while Kent paints by dim lamplight in a cabin warmed by wood he felled.

And a pandemic reader can’t help but shiver at the Kents’ December 1918 supply run into Seward. “One of our friends met us with a shout. ‘Well, you’ve had good sense to stay away so long.’ Influenza […] had raged in Seward, there having been over 350 cases; and smallpox had made a start. But the deaths had been few and it was now well in hand.”

When Kent and his son leave Fox Island after seven months' stay, his illustrated journal will help him become one of the United States' best-known, most original and essential graphic artists. (Perhaps, like me, you can't think of Moby Dick without seeing Kent's ecstatic, furious, and serene wood engravings for the 1930 edition.) Over a long life, Kent wrote several journey books, but his reputation as an artist eclipsed his prose. Wilderness reminds us of his Melvillean gift for seeing transcendence in small things. A day of chores on Fox Island reads like a night spent gazing up at the Northern Lights.

William Craig teaches writing at Dartmouth and founded the Meetinghouse Readings in Canaan. The author of Yankee Come Home: On The Road from Guantanamo to San Juan Hill*, he was a longtime writer and editor for the* Valley News and the creator of Upper Valley Image*. His fiction, criticism and journalism have appeared most recently in* Gulf Coast and The Boston Globe*.*

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