The first of March! If only the dull weather would clear up I could get more done these last days here. Fifteen brand-new canvases hang from my ridge pole waiting for pictures to adorn them. To-day is the only day that work out-of-doors has been quite out of the question. It snows hard. Last Thursday morning Rockwell and I began to take our morning baths in the bay—the snow having become too hard. And now at just seven-fifteen—on cloudy mornings, clothed in sneakers we scamper down the shore and plunge into the waves. Brrrrrrrr! it’s cold, but mighty good. Olson, after predicting for some time a dire end to our morning performances, has at last evinced enough curiosity to drag himself out of bed and come over to see. But he has not yet been early enough to catch us.
The days are lengthening rapidly. It is now after six o’clock in the evening and our lamp’s not lighted!
Last time in Seward Olson bought a lot of odds and ends of molding for picture frames. And now, with my help, all the little things that we have given him are gorgeously framed. On the little picture of himself that I painted he has what he calls a “comoflag” frame; it’s made of different moldings on the four sides. Well, Olson is mighty proud of his pictures. He’s really very fond of us. People in Seward say he talks of us continually. And there it is thought quite remarkable how I have managed with the “crazy” old man. I guess the craziness explains it. I picture with horror having as a constant companion here one of the fine, stalwart, shrewd, honest, wholesome-to-sterility Americans that our country likes to be so proud of.
I told Olson of Kathleen’s amusement over the brusque ending of his letter, “Answer this if you feel like it—and if you don’t it’s all the same to me.”
“Well,” he said, “that’s the way it is here in Alaska; if anyone don’t like the way a man does he can go to Hell!”
I’ve heard an amusing story about Olson and his goats at a little Seward exposition at which they were shown. They put his two goats into narrow packing boxes that their dirt might not fall onto the floor of the building. Olson arrived and seeing the plight of his pets flew into a rage. He lifted them out, hurled the packing boxes out of the door into the street, and denounced the fair-committee for their abuse of animals. And although the whole place tumbled about the old man’s ears, he won, and saw his goats given an honorable amount of freedom in a special enclosure—curtained off, “admission to see the goats ten cents,”—which notice Olson promptly disregarded, letting everyone in—and a big crowd at that—free.
Monday, March third.
Inauguration day passed here without event. In this ideal community of Fox Island we’re so little concerned with law-the only law that bears on us at all we delight in breaking—that one wonders how far no government can be carried. One goes back to first principles in such speculation, endows man again with inalienable rights or at least inalienable desires, and then has simply to wonder how much of the love of order there is in the natural man. The fact that a large proportion of mankind can live and die without any definite knowledge of the laws of the community and without ever running counter to the forces of law is sign enough that most of the law code is but a writing down of what the average man naturally wants to do or keep from doing. There’s a sharp difference between such “common” law and the exceptional law that strikes at the personal liberty of a man, laws concerning morals, temperance, or that conscript unwilling men for war. In all law there is tyranny, in these laws tyranny shows its hand. The man who wants true freedom must escape from the whole thing. If only such souls could gravitate to a common center and build the new community with inherent law and order as its sole guide!—well, we have returned to the problem. A state that was truly interested in progress would dedicate a portion of its territory to such an experiment. But no state is interested in anything but the gain of one class, which means the oppression of the rest. How farcical sound these days “Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” “No government without the consent of the governed,” and other old-fashioned principles. But they have still to be reckoned with till the last Bolshevik has been converted into a prosperous tradesman and the last idealist is dead. And now for Fox Island.
The weather is dull and gray—only last evening an hour before sundown the clouds suddenly vanished out of the heavens and the sun shone as warm and beautiful as on the fairest summer day. Then I sat out-of-doors and painted while the snow and ice melted and dripped all about. The mornings are cold, doubly cold it seems when in the half-light of dawn and perhaps a driving snow squall we run naked down the long stretch of beach and plunge into the bay. I work ceaselessly. Time flies like mad and the day of our departure is close.