Finding Everett Ruess Read online

  And then Everett Ruess vanished from the face of the earth.

  At the time of his disappearance, Ruess was unknown in the larger world. Seventy-seven years later, he is the object of an intense and romantic cult that has no parallel in the long annals of the American Southwest.

  Beginning in March 1935, a series of search parties scoured the wilderness, looking for clues to the wanderer’s whereabouts—or, as seemed increasingly likely, to his demise. The first of those parties quickly discovered what has been regarded ever since as Everett’s last known campsite, in Davis Gulch, a far-eastern tributary of the Escalante River. But the odd assemblage of objects those searchers found on the ground remains tantalizing and ambiguous today. In the end, none of the parties came close to solving the mystery of the young man’s disappearance. And in the absence of a definitive answer, all kinds of theories about what happened to Everett after November 1934 were thrust onto the stage—theories that are still fiercely debated by Ruess devotees today.

  The cult of Everett Ruess owes much to the mystery of his vanishing. Yet in the long run, it is the writings, paintings, and engravings the young man produced before his twenty-first birthday that anchor and validate his lasting fame—the very fame he longed so passionately to achieve. Whether or not Everett Ruess, had he lived, might have become a major writer or artist is another question that his partisans debate endlessly. But in a sense, it is beside the point. The Ruess cult ultimately springs from the young man’s ecstatic vision of the wilderness, tied to an insatiable wanderlust that drove him to one solitary challenge and ordeal after another, as he traversed the deserts and canyons of what in the 1930s was the wildest landscape in the United States. Although other writers and artists profoundly influenced Everett—he was a voracious reader and a habitué of art galleries and museums—the vision that transfixed him was uniquely of his own making.

  Not every aficionado of the Southwest subscribes to the Ruess mystique. Skeptics and realists tend to hold his effusions at arm’s length, as the fevered strivings of a precocious but self-conscious idealist. Yet for the thousands of lovers of the outdoors who hold up Everett as a poet-saint, his utterings have an aphoristic glory. Quotations from his letters and diaries are recited today with all the reverence accorded to Henry David Thoreau’s apothegms or Mark Twain’s bons mots. Everett’s blockprint engravings have been stenciled onto T-shirts, printed on the covers of blank notebooks, and embossed onto refrigerator magnets. The world of his devotees has expanded beyond the borders of the Southwest, even beyond the boundaries of the United States. Today, Everett counts among his acolytes men and women as far away as Russia and Japan, few of whom have ever visited the canyons and mesas where the young adventurer walked and rode with his burros into the mystical wild that cost him his life.

  * * *

  Grief-stricken at the loss of their son, Everett’s parents, Christopher and Stella, determined to keep alive his memory. Since childhood, the boy had written letters to his parents and to his brother, Waldo, every time they were apart for as short a stretch as a day or two. During the years of his vagabondage, from 1930 to 1934, those letters steadily deepened in thought and feeling. His family kept every page, and later collected many of the letters Everett had written to his best friends back home.

  Those letters are no mere newsy bulletins: instead, Everett strove for oracular declarations to capture the transport that wilderness brought him. “Once more I am roaring drunk with the lust of life and adventure and unbearable beauty,” he wrote to one friend his own age. And to another, “I am overwhelmed by the appalling strangeness and intricacy of the curiously tangled knot of life.”

  At his jauntiest, Everett struck a Nietzschean pose: “Alone I shoulder the sky and hurl my defiance and shout the song of the conqueror to the four winds, earth, sea, sun, moon, and stars.” Yet those vaulting flights were counterbalanced by passages that dwelt on hardship and agony, tinged with a premonition of doom: “Bitter pain is in store for me, but I shall bear it.… Death may await me; with vitality, impetuosity and confidence I will combat it.”

  As a poet, Everett also aimed at the oracular, writing about himself often in the past or perfect tense, as if his life were already over. Thus, in “Wilderness Song”:

  Say that I starved; that I was lost and weary;

  That I was burned and blinded by the desert sun;

  Footsore, thirsty, sick with strange diseases;

  Lonely and wet and cold … but that I kept my dream!

  As well as encouraging Everett to write poems and essays, Christopher and Stella had taught both their sons to keep diaries from an early age. Diary-writing was, in fact, such a family compulsion that all four members routinely transcribed passages from their daily entries to share in their letters to one another.

  An artist herself, as well as a patroness of the arts, Stella had taught Everett how to paint with watercolors and how to carve the linoleum blocks that he used to make black-and-white prints. Especially in his blockprints, well before the age of twenty Everett had achieved a certain mastery. He reduced the ruin called Square Tower House at Mesa Verde to an almost abstract design of oblong roomblocks, black squares for windows, and horizontal streaks intimating the arching sandstone alcove that guarded the prehistoric village. He rendered a California seacoast as a single storm-tossed cypress floating over an adamantine granite boulder.

  For years after 1935, Christopher and Stella tried to interest publishers in a small volume collecting Everett’s poems, passages from his essays and letters and diaries, and specimens of his artwork. Their efforts bore fruit in 1940, when a small California press brought out a slender miscellany titled On Desert Trails with Everett Ruess. Though the book sold only modestly, it attracted the attention of Wallace Stegner, who devoted a chapter to Ruess in his 1942 book, Mormon Country. Stegner held Everett’s soaring idealism, his intense quest for beauty for its own sake, at arm’s length. But he concluded memorably, “If we laugh at Everett Ruess we shall have to laugh at John Muir, because there was little difference between them except age.”

  Slowly over the decades the Ruess cult gathered momentum. But it was not until 1983, when W. L. (Bud) Rusho published Everett Ruess: A Vagabond for Beauty, that a rich anthology of Everett’s writings gained a wider audience than that of friends and family. Though not a true biography, Vagabond laid out the essential facts of the adventurer’s short life, and pondered at some length the mystery of his disappearance.

  Rusho’s book in turn caught the eye of Jon Krakauer, who saw in Ruess a striking parallel to Chris McCandless, the equally passionate loner who died in the wilderness north of Denali in Alaska in a prolonged effort to live off the land. In his 1996 bestseller, Into the Wild, Krakauer devoted eleven pages to Ruess. Tens of thousands of readers who had never before heard of Everett intertwined their fascination with Chris McCandless with the puzzle of the romantic wanderer who had vanished in Utah back in 1934. The Ruess cult soared to a new level.

  Then, in 2008, an entirely new twist to the seventy-four-year-old mystery came like a zigzag of lightning cleaving a blue sky. It sprang from the most unlikely of sources: an eerie tale guarded secretly for decades by a Navajo man, who eventually handed it down to his granddaughter, who in turn told it to her brother, who went out to search in the Utah wilderness.…

  The controversy spawned by this strange discovery smolders on. Thanks to the intensity of feeling that it stirred up, the Ruess cult has gained a new dimension, in which fervent admiration clashes with partisan polemic, and the believers in one theory of how he met his end raise their rhetorical rifles to fire at the opponents who cling to another.

  In the words of more than one graffito scrawled in trailhead registers in recent years:

  Everett lives!

  PART ONE

  The Desire to Live

  ONE

  “I Have Given the Wind My Pledge”

  EVERETT RUESS* WAS BORN on March 28, 1914, in Oakland, California. For his mother,
Stella, his arrival was a mixed blessing.

  The family was an intensely intellectual and bohemian one. Everett’s father, Christopher, had graduated summa cum laude from Harvard, then attended the Harvard Divinity School. In Oakland he served as a Unitarian minister, though later, to support his family, he would take a series of secular jobs.

  Stella was a dancer, an aesthete, and an accomplished artist. Her father, William Henry Knight, had been a Civil War veteran from New York State who migrated to California, where he gained prominence in publishing, music, and science, serving twice as president of the Southern California Academy of Sciences. He also wrote editorials for the Los Angeles Times.

  Under Stella’s guidance, the close-knit family produced a constant stream of art and poetry, even while Waldo and Everett were still very young. At regular intervals, Stella home-published collections of this work, under the rubric Ruess Quartette. These miscellanies bore the imprint of the family seal, a sundial inscribed with the motto “Glorify the Hour”—an injunction Everett would live by during his wandering years.

  Christopher and Stella had married on April 2, 1905. They would share forty-nine years together before Christopher’s death in 1954, a half-century filled with undimmed love and mutual respect.

  The great tragedy of the couple’s life before the disappearance of Everett was the death at the age of six weeks of their firstborn, Christella, in 1908. The girl’s name, of course, was an amalgamation of her parents’. In her journal, Stella later wrote, “Christella was as beautiful as a rosebud, with long dark hair and I thought she was perfect. But after two weeks Dr. Shuey told me that she could not live, her spine was not right.”

  Spina bifida, from which Christella suffered, is a birth defect in which the fetus’s spine forms incorrectly. Some of the vertebrae that normally enclose the spinal cord do not close correctly, leaving a hole through which the cord may protrude. Today the defect can usually be surgically repaired, but in 1908 it was often fatal.

  On April 2, 1909, on their fourth wedding anniversary, Christopher and Stella scattered Christella’s ashes over San Francisco Bay from a ferry, just as it passed opposite the Golden Gate. Thus was launched a family tradition that would still hold sway a century later.

  At the time, Stella was four months pregnant with her second child. Since spina bifida is in part genetic, the parents knew there was a higher than average chance that their second child would also have the defect. But on September 5, 1909, Waldo was born, a completely healthy infant. He was named for Ralph Waldo Emerson, a poet and philosopher whom Christopher held (as Everett later would) in high esteem.

  Four years later, Stella got pregnant again. Still mourning Christella, she wished fervently for a girl. She had, in fact, already named her unborn daughter.

  On April 2, 1914, Stella wrote in her anniversary record:

  Dear Kathleen—Little Dream-daughter—

  You were invited here for our Wedding Anniversary, but did not come. But you sent a substitute—a dear brother to make one more of the family to watch for you later.… His name, Everett, will endow him with the attributes of kindness and the helping hand for which Edward Everett Hale was noted, the beloved preacher whom Christopher knew in Boston.

  Edward Everett Hale, who died in 1909, is best known today for his scarifying patriotic allegory, “The Man Without a Country.”

  It was the family’s compulsively literary bent that led the parents to encourage Waldo and Everett to keep regular diaries from an early age on, as well as to copy long passages from those diaries into the letters they wrote to their parents whenever they were separated from them, no matter how briefly. Some observers of the Ruess ménage have seen Christopher and Stella as overly involved with their sons’ private lives, to the point of intrusiveness. According to this view, Everett’s vagabondage was motivated in large part by a need to flee the family’s stifling intimacy. In his early twenties, Waldo moved to China, where he took a job as secretary for a religious mission. Other jobs followed, as he stayed in China for several years. In the voluminous correspondence between father and son during this period, Waldo occasionally bridles at his father’s neediness and insistence on giving advice about everything from marriage to career.

  But in the surviving letters from Everett to his parents, there is scarcely a hint of annoyance at Christopher and Stella’s involvement in his life. In a few instances he explicitly seeks out their guidance, notably in a by-now-famous letter from December 1933, in which Everett wrote out a list of eighteen deep philosophical questions that he posed to his father. They include “Are pain and pleasure equally desirable and necessary?” and “Can one make great sacrifices without submerging oneself?” Taken as a whole, this exchange between Everett and Christopher (who answered each question in heartfelt detail) amounts to a parental catechism in how to lead a moral life.

  In 1928, Stella wrote a brief synopsis of Everett’s life to the age of fourteen, detailing the frequent moves around the country the family had to make as Christopher changed jobs. This lovingly indulgent sketch begins with a mock first-person epistle that Stella pretended Everett had written to his grandmother on his third birthday. Designed to be cute and charming, this semi-nonsensical soliloquy nonetheless gives a vivid glimpse of Everett as a child, with an emphasis on his precocious curiosity.

  Dear Grandma—

  Today I am three years old, and 38–1/2 inches tall, and 32 pounds heavy. Papa often says he wishes he had a phonograph record of my prattle, so Mother decided to write down some of my remarks today, just to smile over when I’m big.…

  I had a ride on Pegasus, too. That’s my velocipede. I couldn’t play with my Astronomy Game, because we lost it one day. Mama says I knew about 25 names like Leo and Lepus, Cassiopeia, Hercules, Persus [sic], Virgo, Aries, Cygnus and Delphinus. She thought it was funny when I named her Indian clubs Pollux and Castor, but it’s because they were twin brothers.

  Fourteen years later, Everett would name one of his burros Pegasus.

  Prattle, indeed, must have been the three-year-old’s forte, if Stella’s rendering of it does it justice:

  While I was eating lunch, I asked—“How do you spell sandwich? How do you spell boxes? How do you spell one box? How do you spell tocolate? How do you spell hankshadiff? How do you spell tree? How do you spell milk? How do you spell spoon? How do you spell egg? How do you spell sky?” … One day Waldo said, “Everett is a b-a-d b-o-y,” but I said, “No, I’m a good b-o-y!” Mama counted up about 1200 words that I use. That is 200 more than Waldo knew, but you see he didn’t have a big brother to teach him.

  Stella’s affectionate impersonation of her hyperactive three-year-old contains a strange scene that suggests that the urge to take off and wander was already part of Everett’s nature:

  [Mama] put me in bed after lunch with some books because she thought I wouldn’t be sleepy after my long nap yesterday, but I surprised her. Jerry was tied to the corner post, and I just got quiet and forgot the books—books to the right of me, books under me and books on top of me. Jerry is my left foot. When Mama says, “You must go to sleep today,” she ties Jerry and Jupiter too, but she tells them to kick very hard first so they’ll be tired. When she thinks I’m not very sleepy but she wants to be sure where I am, and that I’m not playing in a mud puddle, she ties only Jerry. When I must go to sleep, she tells Sparkle and Twinkle to pull down the curtains. Those are my eyes, of course.

  Such confinement was not limited to bedtime. After six paragraphs of “prattle,” Stella returns Everett to the third person, but reports:

  The small “Duck Bab” was always finding every wet and muddy spot in the neighborhood. Several times he ran away so that I came to rope him to the porch. Once he went a mile, over the bridge and the railroad tracks. I telephoned the police station and found he had been reported.

  An entry in Stella’s journal further confirms the bondage: “Waldo did some lessons every morning, and every afternoon we went swimming in the Creek. Everett
was tied to a tree for Safety First.”

  In Everett’s baby book, his mother recorded no fewer than thirty-three “pet names” by which the boy was called by his parents and their close friends. They include Little Contentment, Honeybunch, and Babykin Bye-o, but also Whirligig, Tumble-bug, Bounceritis, and Lord of Misrule.

  In September 1918, the family moved all the way across the country, to Brookline, Massachusetts. Christopher felt the obligation to support not only his family of four, but his ailing parents, and so he had given up the impecunious profession of pastor to take a job with the Chautauqua Industrial Art Desk Company. The device the firm manufactured was indeed a desk, but it was festooned with all sorts of doodads, from a color wheel to piano keys to “telegraphic codes,” required to carry out, in the company’s ambitious claim, “a plan to promote the culture of work and play among children in the home.”

  In Brookline, Everett started school. Stella later wrote, “During his fifth year summer Everett was so eager to learn that I taught him to add and subtract with sea-beans on the floor, and he filled a copybook with little problems up to ten, including multiplication & division.”

  Despite the gap of more than four years in their ages, Waldo and Everett were inseparable chums. Yet they were boys of significantly different temperaments. It is not surprising that when Stella attempted to capture her sons’ characters, she did so in verse. About Waldo, she wrote,

  The spirit of adventure leads you far.

  We joy to know that Loyalty,

  And Purity, and Courtesy

  Your true and ever faithful comrades are.

  And about Everett,

  The God of Poesy has smiled