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NOTES
1
Confusingly, the conventions for indicating the directions of currents contradict those for indicating the direction of winds. An easterly wind blows from east to west; an easterly current flows west to east.
2
Later, I looked up the passage in
The Day of the Locust
in which the phrase “sargasso of the imagination” appears. As he contemplates the jumbled stage sets on that Hollywood backlot, Nathanael West's protagonist is remindedâjust as I'd been reminded of
The Day of the Locust
when listening to Ebbesmeyer
â
of something he'd once read, an adventure novel for boys called
In the Sargasso Sea
by a certain Thomas Allibone Janvier. Curious what West's protagonist had in mind, I procured a copy of
In the Sargasso Sea
. Published in 1898, the novel recounts the fantastical adventures of a twenty-three-year-old mechanical engineer named Roger Stetworth who at the outset of his journeyâas he freely admits with the benefit of hindsightâwas “very young and very much of a fool.” While crossing the Gulf Stream aboard a slave ship called the
Golden Hind
, Stetworth strikes up a conversation with a kindly mate, the only kindly mate aboard, and this kindly mate tells him the legend of the Sargasso Sea, comparing the flotsam stranded there to “a sort of floating island . . . as big as the area of the United States.” The second mate's description, Stetworth says, “took a queer deep hold upon me, and especially set me to wondering what strange old waifs and strays of the ocean might not be found in the thick of that tangle if only there were some way of pushing into it and reaching the hidden depths that no man ever yet had seen.” Thereafter ensues a series of improbably disastrous and fortuitous plot twists that willâsurprise!âdeliver Stetworth into those hidden depths, where he discovers what he variously describes as a “strange floating continent,” “a hideous sea-labyrinth,” “a graveyard” of dead ships, “a hideous wilderness,” “a great marine museum.”
3
Or, better yet, something like,
There be many shapes of mystery,
And many things God makes to be,
Past hope or fear.
And the end men looked for
Cometh not,
And a path is there where no man sought.
So hath it fallen here.
(Lines by Euripides, chosen by Evan Connell as the epigraph for
Notes from a Bottle Found on the Beach at Carmel
.) The message inside the Orbisons' bottle reads as follows: “SOS. I'm on a small Pacific island in the South Pacific. Paul.” Saint Paul, perhaps?
4
Sitting in the Orbisons' living room, I remember something I'd read in Miles Harvey's
The Island of Lost Maps: A True Story of Cartographic Crime
. Harvey asks the psychologist Werner Muensterberger, author of
Collecting: An Unruly Passion
, to explain the mind of the obsessive collector, and in reply Muensterberger tells him about a man who stopped hunting big game and started buying African art. In the psychologist's opinion, both trophy hunting and art collecting could be traced to the primal animism of hunters and gatherers. “There is reason to believe that the true source of the habit is the emotional state leading to a more or less perpetual attempt to surround oneself with magically potent objects,” Muensterberger writes in his book. I can't help wondering if the buying habits of Americans don't derive from that emotional state that Muensterberger describes. Perhaps we are hunter-gatherers of the mall. Perhaps our perpetual dissatisfaction derives from the ease of the hunt and the never-ending supply of magically potent objects that beckon us, only to lose their potency once possessed, because enchantment has an evanescent half-life. Perhaps this explains the ten thousand varieties of rubber duck.
5
In fact the name of the town is a contraction of
shee atika
, Tlingit for “the ocean side of Shee Island.” What exactly
shee
means, no one seems to know.
6
On the first floor of his condo in a kind of rec room was a great ziggurat of cardboard boxes that he hadn't bothered to unpack, and upstairs in the carpeted living/dining room were a few Christmas decorations he hadn't bothered to put awayâtwo stuffed snowmen on a windowsill, a bowl of sparkly balls on a counter, a string of unlit Christmas lights entangled in an ivy plant, the leafy vines of which tumbled from ceiling to floor down a macramé hanger. Neither had Pallister bothered to remove Jane's message from the answering machine. He still hoped to win her back.
As it happened, Jane was there in the kitchen that night, but only briefly, to bake a batch of homemade cookies. They were for her three sons, who'd been out at Gore Point for the past two weeks. In their absence, I felt a bit like a surrogate, like an exchange student adopted by a host family of strangers, a dysfunctional host family of strangers. It would be the next day before Pallister confided in me about Jane's desertion. But like many people brought up in unhappy families, I felt I possessed a kind of sixth sense for marital discord. It didn't take long for me to detect in that kitchen, beneath the homey smell of melting marshmallows and morsels, the old familiar signalsâthe unrequited glance, the small talk freighted with simmering subtextual resentments that threatened to boil over any second into a quarrel. Pallister plucked an oatmeal cookie from a baking sheet. Jane flashed him a glare, which he ignored.
7
“We came to this new land, a boy and a man, entirely on a dreamer's search,” Kent writes; “having had a vision of a Northern Paradise, we came to find it. With less faith it might have seemed to us a hopeless thing exploring the unknown for what you've only dreamed was there. Doubt never crossed our minds. To sail uncharted waters and follow virgin shoresâwhat a life for men!” Kent wasn't the first to dream that dream of a Northern Paradise, nor was he the last. What distinguishes him from other dreamers is the way in which he tried, and in some ways succeeded, to reconcile painting and adventuring with fatherhood.
Rowing across Resurrection Bay on a “calm, blue summer's day” just like this one, the Rockwell Kents had chanced upon an old man in a dory, to whom they explained their wish of finding some forgotten cabin in which to spend a year. “ âCome with me,' the old man cried heartily, âcome and I show you the place to live.' ” He led them to Fox Island, named for the fox ranch that the old man had set up there, and offered them an old cabin rent-free.
It's hard to imagine a father repeating Kent's experiment todayâpulling his son out of school and dragging him off to spend a sub-zero winter, a continent away from his mother, on a remote island without medical facilities or telephone lines or playmates other than magpies and porcupines. The paintings and drawings and woodcuts Kent completed there made his reputation and rescued his family from financial ruin. As for the son, fifty years later, now a balding, six-foot-four biologist, Rockwell the Younger would tell his father that the “year we spent together on Fox Island was the happiest of all my life,” or so his father reports in his preface to the 1970 edition of
Wilderness
.
In their one-room cabin, they shared everything. They slept in the same bed. They cleared trees together, cut firewood together, cooked together, iceskated together, “holding hands like sweethearts.” They even drew and painted together. For entertainment, Kent brought along a small library of books, and at bedtime, by lamplight, he would read to his son from
Robinson Crusoe
or
Treasure Island
or the fairy tales of Hans Christian Andersen.
A Journal of Quiet Adventure
, Kent's book is aptly subtitled. It contains moments of genuine danger, but little of the testosterone-addled man-versus-wild drama one usually encounters in louder adventure narratives, and when those moments of danger do arise, young Rockwell responds to them in poignantly childish ways. One day, rowing back from Seward, where they'd gone for supplies, father and son are ambushed by a storm. “Father,” young Rockwell pipes up as the elder Kent is laboring furiously at the oars, “when I wake up in the morning sometimes I pretend my toes are asleep, and I make my big toe sit up first because he's the father toe.”
8
A landscape similar to the one Kent encountered upon arriving at Fox Island. Fox Island: “Twin lofty mountain masses flanked the entrance and from the back of these the land dipped downwards like a hammock swung between them, its lowest point behind the center of the crescent. A clean and smooth, dark-pebbled beach went all around the bay, the tide line marked with driftwood. . . . Above the beach a band of brilliant green and then the deep, black spaces of the forest.”