Moby-Duck (62 page)

But then nature, bearer of truth, begins to intrude: “Is it to be believed that we are here alone, this boy and I, far north out on an island wilderness, seagirt on a terrific coast!” Kent exclaims as fall is turning to winter. “It's as we pictured it and wanted it a year and more ago—yes, dreams come true.” A month later, as the sunless Alaskan winter sets in, so does disenchantment. The dream shades into nightmare. Kent looks “to the sun's going with a kind of dread.” Having come to Fox Island seeking artistic inspiration, what he often feels, contemplating a day's just-finished work, is “repugnance.” Even when the work goes well, the triumph is fleeting. “Over to-day's painting I'm filled with pride,” he wrote on October 14; “it will be equaled by to-morrow's despair over the very same pictures.” The capricious muse isn't his only demon. With time he grows desperately lonely: “I have terrible moments, hours, days of homesick despondency . . . for my family. There are times when if I could I'd have fled from here in any raging storm.”

This homesickness might come across as a touchingly sentimental bit of familial devotion; might, but only if one knows nothing of Kent's biography. Out on Fox Island, he may have been a model—or even a magical—father to Rockwell III, if not to the three children he'd left behind in upstate New York. But he was no family man. It seems that Kent's wife, Kathleen, whom he would later divorce, only permitted her nine-year-old to tag along with her husband on his latest extravagant saunter because she feared that if she didn't, he'd instead bring his German mistress, Gretchen, who had, says one biographer, helped comfort Kent through previous “suicidal depressions”—depressions he'd fled to Fox Island hoping to escape. He swore to Kathleen that he'd broken off the affair, but on Fox Island he and Gretchen continued to correspond. At the same time, Kent had nightmares that Kathleen was cheating on him. From these nightmares, he'd wake in a jealous rage. Kathleen didn't accompany him to Fox Island herself because of a previous misadventure in Newfoundland, during which all their children had caught a nearly fatal case of whooping cough.

One gets the impression that without the company of his son, Kent's lonely thoughts that winter on Fox Island might once again have turned suicidal. And one also gets the impression that without animal playmates, the younger Kent might have gone bonkers too.

Just as little Rockwell delights in the local flora and fauna, the elder Rockwell delights in his son, who increasingly becomes the journal's main subject. “He is beautiful after his bath,” Kent writes at one point. At another: “We have a good time washing dishes, racing—the washer, myself—to beat the dryer. Rockwell falls down onto the floor in the midst of the race in a fit of laughter.” What Kent discovers on Fox Island isn't mainly the transporting beauty of Alaska but the poignant beauty of his son.

In his defense, it helps to remember that at the time of his Alaskan travels, before the Klondike gold rush of 1898, most Americans still considered Secretary Seward's territorial purchase a folly. Alaska was a wilderness in the old, pejorative sense of the word—the sort of wilderness that writers used to describe as “howling”; an inhospitable wasteland of worthless ice the furry resources of which the Russians had already depleted; in short, a damn'd unhappy part of the world. Muir helped the American public reimagine Alaska, and with it the meanings of wilderness, meanings with which the word “Alaska” has since become synonymous, at least in the minds of outdoorsmen and ecotourists. In Muir's time and ours,
wilderness
was
civilization
's antonym, but thanks to Muir and other Romantic pantheists, the connotations of the antonyms have blurred or even, in some minds—Raynor's and Pallister's, for instance—reversed. Now civilization is often the wasteland, and wilderness the source of all that is beautiful and redemptive and good.

In certain misanthropic moods, I feel the same. Mostly, though, I feel an irresolvable ambivalence, torn between my fondness for hominids, who are splendid and hilarious as well as idiotic, and my wish that we could populate the world without ruining it.

From the wooded bank of a sparkling stream, the camera frames an Indian paddling a canoe, a canoe almost identical to the miniature one that, in
Paddle-to-the-Sea
, goes on that long journey to the Great Salt Water. Its bow and stern curl into matching crescents like the toes of elfin shoes. Its hull appears to be made of moose skin, lashed to the wooden frame perhaps with venison thongs, and the Indian paddling it appears to be made of Indian. He isn't.

Now the camera leaps into the canoe's bow. On the sound track, a timpanist plays a martial tattoo meant to evoke a war dance. Close-up of Indian looking stoical in his buckskin getup as he paddles once to starboard, once to port, fringe dangling Daniel Boone-like from his sleeves. A big feather protrudes from his wig, the long black braids of which make him look almost schoolgirlish. The timpani give way to snares. Cellists play an ersatz Cherokee theme.

The forest stream broadens, and so does the symbolism. The Indian's canoe, once again viewed from the wooded shore, is a bicorn silhouette amid dazzling sparkles. As in
Paddle-to-the-Sea,
stream has led to harbor—a Californian harbor, judging from the branches of the trees in the foreground, which if I'm not mistaken are those of a Monterey cypress. For just a moment, we enter the Indian's point of view. Indian-cam. In the water, he spies a foreboding sign: a floating scrap of newspaper, which with an oar-stroke to starboard Espera “Iron Eyes Cody” De Corti sends swirling. To make the meaning of this portent clear the sound track turns chromatic and modernist. An ugly crescendo of brass as the camera pans back, revealing—
the horror, the horror
—a port: cranes, freighter, tugboat, and on a hillside in the background, those squat silos resembling giant tin cans that one often sees in the vicinity of ports.

Now the theme, orchestra in full swell, sounds like something from a Hollywood western, a bit like the theme to the TV show
Big Valley
, as if the Indian were paddling into battle. Shot of refineries, smoke billowing sinisterly around them. At last the Indian hauls out on a trashy little beach. The music goes quiet and elegiac, and, as the Indian strides in a kind of stupor of stoicism to the shoulder of a highway, a somber voice-over begins: “Some people have a deep, abiding respect for the natural beauty that was once this country”—paper bag of what appears to be orange peels and french fries, flung from window of passing car, explodes across Indian's moccasins—“and some people don't.” Iron Eyes Cody looks into the camera, which zooms in on the big shiny tear rolling down his cosmetically tanned Sicilian cheek. Tagline: “People start pollution. People can stop it.”

Until she died not long ago, the woman who lived in the shack, Jean Keene, was locally known as the Eagle Lady. Keene moved to the Homer Spit in 1977 and found a job at a nearby fish-processing plant. Soon thereafter she began bringing home scraps of fish to feed to the local population of bald eagles. Her flock steadily grew, and so did the flock of photographers. The eagles came for the free fish. The photographers came for the free eagles. By the time Keene died, between two hundred and three hundred bald eagles had become regular customers. The number of photographers is harder to determine, but by one estimate, 80 percent of the photographs of bald eagles sold every year—to illustrate newspapers and magazines and advertisements and the
Colbert Report
, but also souvenir place mats and calendars and postcards—were taken beside that campground overlooking Kachemak Bay, whose silvery waters, snowcapped mountains rising up behind them, make for a spectacular backdrop.

In such photographs, you'll see bald eagles in close-up, yellow beak turned in profile, so that the famous eagle eye gazes out at you. You'll see eagles in flight, their black wings outspread angelically, yellow talons outthrust. You'll see action shots of an eagle swooping down onto the silver water in an explosion of spray, a silver fish visible in its yellow claws. What you won't see, except in news stories about her, is the Eagle Lady or her shack. You might see the bespattered branches of her dead tree, but if so the photo will be cropped, leading the viewer to imagine an old-growth forest. You won't see the campers and their colorful tents, or the hand-painted school bus inhabited by latter-day merry pranksters, or the aluminum fishing boat up on cinder blocks in Brad Faulkner's yard, or the muddy cars and trucks in the campground parking lot, or the waterfront condominiums. Or the flock of bald eagles scrambling after fish scraps like pigeons after crumbs.

In the following days, other unforeseen events would occur. Way out on Resurrection Bay, the
Johnita I
, John Cowdery's other yacht, burst into flames. Fishermen came to Cowdery's rescue. Cowdery attributed the fire to faulty wiring, but now a pesky reporter from the
Anchorage Daily News
was sniffing around for evidence of arson and insurance fraud. She wouldn't find it, but she would, eventually, find incriminating evidence of graft—not enough to get Cowdery indicted. Later, though, on unrelated corruption charges, he'd serve three years in prison. During the course of her investigations, the reporter called Pallister with questions about the
Johnita II
and his partnership with Cowdery. The
Anchorage Daily News
would run a story that in passing mentioned GoAK's attempt to win funding from the state legislature—how Cowdery had helped secure the allocation, how Pallister had hired two lobbyists. “I told [the lobbyists] right out of the get-go, ‘Listen, John Cowdery and I are partners in a boat. Keep him the hell out of this,' ” the article would quote Pallister as saying. “ ‘I don't want any linkage with John Cowdery or Veco or anything else.' ”

To me—without a shred of evidence, let it be clear—Pallister would insinuate his own suspicions. He was convinced he knew who'd put this
Daily News
muckraker on his trail: Bob Shavelson. “Next year I might fold up shop,” Pallister would tell me. “I didn't get into this to go through this crap—have people digging through my personal business, telling lies about me. I got into this to clean up beaches, you know?”