The Mystery of Everett Ruess Read online

  The Mystery of Everett Ruess

  W. L. Rusho

  Foreword by the Ruess Family

  Introduction by John Nichols

  With a memorial sonnet by Edward Abbey

  The Mystery of Everett Ruess

  Digital Edition v1.0

  Photographs and illustrations © as noted throughout

  Photographs on pages 18, 79, 85, and 138 @ Marriott Library

  Front cover photo: © The Dorothea Lange Collection, Oakland Museum of California, City of Oakland. Gift of Paul S. Taylor.

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced by any means whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except brief portions quoted for purpose of review.

  Gibbs Smith, Publisher

  PO Box 667

  Layton, UT 84041

  Orders: 1.800.835.4993

  www.gibbs-smith.com

  ISBN: 978-1-4236-1712-9

  The Mystery of Everett Ruess

  Table of Contents

  Foreword

  Preface

  Introduction

  Chapter 1: The Beauty and the Tragedy of Everett Ruess

  Chapter 2: The Letters 1930

  Chapter 3: The Letters 1931

  Chapter 4: The Letters 1932

  Chapter 5: The Letters 1933

  Chapter 6: The Letters 1934

  Chapter 7: Missing—Utah: Clues and Frustrations

  Chapter 8: Missing—Speculations in Navajoland

  Chapter 9: Missing—Wherever He May Be

  Chapter 10: Missing—To the End of the Horizon

  Afterword: Beyond Horizons

  Foreword

  Our father Waldo was four and a half when his brother Everett was born. They had an older sister, Christella, who had died in infancy. Much like Everett, Waldo had a strong sense of adventure, leaving his New Jersey home alone at the young age of thirteen to do summer work on a ranch in Montana and crossing the Atlantic several times at eighteen as a steward on the SS Leviathan. Everett was only thirteen when Waldo sailed.

  The two brothers loved each other, despite their age difference and frequent absences. When Everett left for Arizona and Utah in 1934, it was Waldo who drove him. Waldo was the last family member to see Everett alive. Waldo himself promptly left on his own adventure on December 17, 1934, heading for China. He was the last family member to learn of Everett’s disappearance and unable to assist in the subsequent searches.

  Between 1935 and 1958, Waldo traveled the world, visiting over one hundred countries and living in ten, including China, Japan, Algiers, Russia, Iceland, El Salvador, Mexico, and finally Spain, where in 1957 he met and married his Andalucian wife and began his family. He returned home to Los Angeles, later moving to Santa Barbara, and raised the four of us siblings, Everett’s nieces and nephews.

  Everett was a constant presence in our family. His art hung on the walls. His blocks were always present and a source of marvel. His native relics were collected in frames and on the patio. A piece of sandstone read, in Everett’s words, “What time is it? Time to live.”

  Our father never forgot Everett. He regaled us with stories of Everett’s adventures and loves. He told us of his passion for nature and his quest for beauty, about the places he traveled and the people he met. Copies of On Desert Trails with Everett Ruess were all around the house, demanding to be enjoyed.

  The family never gave up hope of finding Everett. It was not until 1963 that Stella, Waldo and Everett’s mother, finally resigned herself to filing Everett’s death certificate, almost thirty years after his disappearance. In 1964, Waldo went on a final pilgrimage to Utah to make one last search for Everett before Lake Powell—our father called it “Lake Foul”—was created by the flooding of Glen Canyon. And so Waldo went to Utah, but to no avail. Stella passed away while he was in the desert searching, never learning the outcome.

  Our father continued to teach us to seek a life of adventure and beauty in whatever we did, whether it were science, writing, photography, or parenthood. He never focused on the sadness of Everett’s disappearance but preached that Everett had lived life to its fullest, doing what he loved most, and that we should do the same. Being a romantic at heart, Waldo always hoped Everett had married a Navajo “princess” and lived happily ever after, although he could not reconcile it with his conviction that Everett would never have abandoned his family.

  In the early 1980s, the original version of this book was published, and a new generation was introduced to Everett. Suddenly, Everett was no longer merely our uncle but became something of a folk hero, the “Patron Saint of the Wilderness,” by one account. People from all over came to be interested in and inspired by Everett. More books, a docudrama, TV shows, a play, songs, coffee cups, T-shirts. Throughout it all, our father remained unchanged; he believed in Everett, his little brother, and not the hype.

  Our father died at the age of ninety-eight. Some of us believe he held on in part because he still hoped Everett would be found. Just a few months after his passing, the Comb Ridge skeleton was found—perhaps Waldo’s spirit had helped find him! A range of emotions went through our family: It is Everett! Closure at last. Too bad our father did not live long enough to know Everett’s fate. I cannot believe you do not believe it is Everett. Perhaps we should double check. It is not Everett. His remains will not join his brother, sister, mother, father, and numerous other family members in the Pacific. The mystery endures. Perhaps Everett does not want to be found.

  It is interesting to note that Everett was fundamentally different from many who go off into the wild and do not return. While Everett sought the lonely trail, he was also a passionate and dedicated correspondent. He wrote long and beautiful letters to his family members and friends, often including his poetry. He shared his life, emotions, questions, and beliefs. He painted watercolors, sketched, and made blockprints, most of which he sent or brought home to his family. He did not hike alone in the wilderness simply to explore or escape; he did it to reflect on his place in the world and to share his discoveries with others. This book is possible not only because of Everett’s gifts of reflection and expression, but because of his natural desire to share his profound revelations with those willing to receive those gifts.

  For us, Everett will always be the missing uncle, much more than just a young artist, poet, and wanderer. But for all of you, may he and our father serve as guides; whatever trail you follow, follow it with beauty, passion, conviction, and a willingness to share. It is time to live!

  Happy Journeys,

  Brian Knight Ruess

  Michèle D. Ruess

  Kevin C. Ruess

  Christella Ruess Campbell

  Preface

  Everett Ruess’s story is a half-century old and time has almost obscured it. It is usually a campfire legend or an item of Canyon Country trivia. A person relating the account can almost always count on his listeners never having heard Everett’s name. The book On Desert Trails with Everett Ruess, first published in 1940, included some of his letters and a few poems, but it was long out of print and had rarely been seen. Coincidentally, Gibbs Smith, president and publisher of his own publishing company, and I had both separately read On Desert Trails. With some detective work, editor Buckley Jeppson located Everett’s brother, Waldo, in Santa Barbara, California. Waldo, the only remaining member of the Ruess family, not only had most of the known letters, photographs, and paintings of Everett in his possession, but he also agreed to make them available for publication. The next two years were full of hard work and discovery. Every one of the hundreds of items either authored by, or written about, Everett Ruess had to he read. All documents were sorted and classified according to their dates, importance, and i
nterest.

  Then I entered the picture. I had spent considerable time visiting, writing about, and photographing the northern Arizona/southern Utah area where Everett did his vagabonding in the early 1930s, so I welcomed the opportunity. My knowledge of Everett himself was, however, still sketchy when the three of us drove to Escalante, Utah, in September of 1982 to make inquiries. Surprisingly, many people in the village still remembered Everett from his two-week stay there in November of 1934. We then drove southward into the spectacular canyon and cliff country near Hole-in-the-Rock. After a night in a range cabin tucked between towering domes of red sandstone, we rode horseback into the depths of Davis Gulch, where Everett’s last camp and his inscriptions were found.

  There were other trips to other cities in Utah, Arizona, and Mexico to interview witnesses like Clayborn Lockett, Tad Nichols, and Randolph “Pat” Jenks, who had all known Everett. I spent a great deal of time discussing Everett and the country in which he disappeared with Ken Sleight, noted river and Canyon Country guide, who had investigated Ruess over a period of many years. I took notes, recorded conversations, photographs, and listened to the lore of the canyon country.

  Thus the book grew in scope, depth, and significance. I cannot state that nothing more remains to be learned about Everett. [Chapter 11 updates subsequent research as of 2010, the year of this reissue.] Some of his friends from his early years in Los Angeles are undoubtedly still alive, as are people he met in San Francisco in 1933–34. Many of them have not yet been located. Maybe the publication of this book will cause some to come forward with new information that sheds further light. Perhaps Ruess’s missing writings, such as his 1934 journals, will surface because of the publication of this book. The publisher and the Ruess family would appreciate the extra information and the study can go on.

  Everett Ruess was a highly complex young man with multiple consuming motivations we can only begin to understand. We have hints in his correspondence that he was poorly understood even in his lifetime. That he may have concealed part of his nature even to his close friends and relatives is a possibility subject only to educated guesses. Fortunately, his letters and other writings are so replete with descriptive, introspective detail that from them alone Everett’s basic personality and character begin to emerge. To have been able to add color and dimension to this image of the young man who could write so well has itself been a fascinating mission of discovery.

  W. L. Rusho

  Salt Lake City

  April 1983

  Introduction

  John Nichols

  By the time Everett Ruess disappeared, he had fashioned a magnificent obsession that probably killed him.

  His determination to plod alone through the southwestern wilderness was so fierce and arrogant that at times he seemed to be utterly consumed. Eventually, it is probable he lost all understanding of natural scale or human endurance. And along the way that ordinary awareness of danger we human beings carry must also have dissolved from his consciousness.

  It is not that the man took leave of his senses, but rather that he was totally enflamed by a wonderful awareness of them. The documentation of his pursuit of enlightenment, as contained in his letters and journals, is the valuable gift of Everett. And it is not necessarily a tragedy that in the end the deserts and canyonlands of Arizona, Utah, and New Mexico proved larger, and more powerful, than his solitary existence could incorporate.

  Repeatedly, as this erudite, sometimes penniless romantic wandered behind his burros through impressive and almost uncharted regions during the 1930s, he protested in letters to the outside world: “I have seen almost more beauty than I can bear.”

  And, repeatedly, he acknowledged, as have so many others, that places like Keet Seel and Kayenta, Escalante and Monument Valley, Navajo Mountain and Skeleton Mesa had “such utter and overpowering beauty as nearly kills a sensitive person by its piercing glory.”

  At the beginning of his multiple treks into the desert, Ruess had no real idea of exactly what he hoped to accomplish. Toward the end of his recorded wanderings a few years later, that lack of focus no longer mattered. Outsiders probably had no difficulty viewing this out-of-kilter sojourner as a self-indulgent and extravagant oddling overcome by awkward and self-conscious sensibilities. Often his prose–—and his actions—seem, variously, childish, purple, ludicrous, pretentious, and precious. And yet to Ruess, his life must have come to seem incredibly whole as he wandered over the land, his only purpose to experience weather, distant buttes, rivers . . . and the mysterious halos that float across desert horizons like the inner fires of unbridled imaginations.

  So the landscape, and his simple, painful act of traversing its cruel and beautiful skin, forged in Ruess an extraordinary passion. Ultimately, it was his life that was his greatest work of art, and we experience it though his letters. At times his writing seems pompous; often it is truly beautiful. Thinking about this eccentric loner confronting the Southwest, one is reminded of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s moving words toward the end of The Great Gatsby, that famous eulogy for early explorers when first they arrived at the green uncharted realm of America—humanity, for the last time in history, face to face with a geography, a continent, an “aesthetic contemplation” commensurate with its capacity for wonder.

  Today, for the most part, we have lost the capacity for wonder which so moved Fitzgerald, and which drove Everett Ruess toward the fascinating doom he yearned to embrace. It is also quite clear that if we do not soon rediscover how to stand in awe of this planet we are so greedily dismantling, human history will soon be over. Hence, a most basic problem currently facing civilization is: How can we relearn to love our natural world, whose magnificence, in this day and age, is superseded only by its no longer mystifying fragility?

  Albert Einstein once wrote, “The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science.” The more he meandered around the Southwest, the more Everett Ruess must have understood something approximating that axiom. It guided his life for a while. He controlled it momentarily. Then ultimately the quest for that mystery took over, became his destiny, and finished him off—no doubt in exaltation.

  “I am always being overwhelmed,” he once bragged. “I require it to sustain life.” At times, the impact of the natural world was “so fat beyond my powers to convey that it almost made me despair.”

  After a trip into the California mountains about a year before vanishing into the southern Utah wilderness, he wrote:

  Much of the time I feel so exuberant I can hardly contain myself. The colors are so glorious, the forests so magnificent, the mountains so splendid, and the streams so utterly, wildly, tumultuously, effervescently joyful that to me, at least, the world is a riot of sensual delight.

  It would be easy to make fun of Ruess, conjecturing that in the end he must have literally exploded, his slight body incapable of containing all the melodramatic sensations he tirelessly ladled into it. But I picture him simply expiring on the edge of a sandstone cliff, in the shadow of some high circling buzzard, convinced that he could never again return to civilization.

  These words he penned a few months before his disappearance: “I am roaring drunk with the lust of life and adventure and unbearable beauty.” And, overcome with a “restlessness and wild longing,” he steadfastly journeyed ever deeper into the wilderness, and into his bizarre and solitary fervor. The danger of those dry and hostile territories claiming him was not a worry: “Finality does not appall me, and I seem always to enjoy things more intensely because of the certainty that they will not last.” He admitted that a reason for becoming so unrestrained was that “Always I sense the brink of things.”

  Although he became an increasingly anti-social being, it tortured Ruess to know that he might not make other people understand the passions building in himself. “I cannot bear to contain these rending flames, and I am helpless to let them out. So I wonder how I can go on living and b
eing casual as one must.”

  Finally, his mergence with the landscape bred “...a reckless self-confidence” that enabled him to face the wilderness with an utter disregard for his personal safety. And in his last letter to reach the world, he admitted: “I have known too much of the depths of life already, and I would prefer anything to an anticlimax.”

  Whereupon, still shy of his twenty-first birthday, this tormented and eloquent pilgrim was engulfed and erased by the territory whose mysteries had absolutely conquered his entire being.

  The message every poet and vagabond seeker like Ruess leaves behind is simple: Life on this earth is very precious and very beautiful.

  We must learn to heed the pure and delicate voices of those who cherish it.

  John Nichols

  Taos, New Mexico

  February 1983

  Chapter 1: The Beauty and the Tragedy of Everett Ruess

  In the mid-Depression year of 1934, Everett Ruess disappeared. His last known camp was in the Escalante River region of southern Utah, a place of bare rock, vertical cliffs, plunging canyons, and soaring mesas. Ironically, water has carved the land during rare but violent cloudbursts, but water itself is scarce. It is a land where earth tones are daily enflamed by the rising sun, change constantly as shadows creep about, diminish, and lengthen throughout the hours, ever contrasting with patterns of colored light. It is Canyon Country at its finest. As a young artist, Everett Ruess was irresistibly drawn to the Escalante River, not so much to paint and draw as to experience and to draw upon that experience to write, to articulate impressions and reactions, as he had done so often in northern Arizona and California. Everett disappeared before any of his written descriptions, in the form of letters, could be sent from the Escalante. His 1934 diary was never found.